ANKARA, Turkey — Two weeks after they voted, Turks are still waiting to know whom the Supreme Electoral Council will declare to be the mayor of Istanbul. Not a day passes without the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) finding a reason to discredit the provisional result, which favors the opposition by a narrow margin. Some days the council orders a recount in a certain district; other days it dismisses the objection.

At the opposite end of Turkey, a different process is occurring. In Diyarbakir and other southeastern provinces, the results are not disputed. Everybody knows who won. But the government is leaning heavily on the electoral council to refuse to give the winners their certificate of electoral victory.

Last week, the electoral council announced it would not recognize the winners in eight electoral districts in the southeast. Instead it would give the certificate to the candidates who polled second in those districts. The council said it was enforcing the law that barred people who had been dismissed from the civil service from holding electoral office. The eight winners were victims of a controversial decree that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued after the attempted coup of 2016. The edict has been used to fire more than 100,000 civil servants.

But the real reason had to do with the political color of the winners. They all belonged to the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), the pro-Kurdish party whom Erdogan accuses of being aligned with the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — a charge the HDP denies. The candidates who polled second in the eight districts all belonged to the AKP.