Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was heading for a clear victory in local elections on Sunday but appeared to have lost races in a number of key municipalities that the party had targeted as winnable in voting marred by violence in some eastern Turkey provinces, according to dpa. With 52.6 per cent of the vote counted, the conservative Islamist AKP of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had recorded 39.5 per cent of the vote, ahead of the main opposition Republican People's Party with 20.2 per cent and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) with 16.7 per cent, according to figures given by the NTV private television station. Five people were killed and one candidate died of a heart attack during fighting at a number of polling booths in eastern and south-eastern Turkey. Around 100 people were injured. All of the violence reported on Sunday was related to voting for village headmen, contests which are not related to political parties. The AKP appeared to have easily retained control of the capital Ankara and was a few percentage points ahead in the country's biggest city Istanbul. But it failed in its attempts to win cities such as Izmir on the Aegean Sea, which went for the CHP, and Diyarbakir, the country's largest Kurdish-populated city where the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) won comfortably. The early results show a fall of around 7 per cent in the AKP vote from the last general election in 2005. Under Turkey's highly centralised political system the elections are seen as a test of national leaders. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been at the forefront of the AKP's election campaign. In the last six weeks of campaigning Erdogan has almost on a daily basis addressed rallies right across the country. Other party leaders have also turned the election into a test of national strength, with news reports giving almost all coverage to the national leaders of parties rather than those actually running.
