In an unexpected but significant blow to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's main opposition party clinched major election victories in the cities of Istanbul and Ankara.
The election results of the local polls were a major setback for Erdogan since he had hoped to take back control of the cities soon after clinching a third term as the president.
The Turkish president had carried out a campaign across Istanbul - a city where he had grown up and also once held the position of mayor.
He is in the middle of delicate peace talks, trying to please Russia and the West, and sits on a geopolitical fault line where wars in Ukraine and the Middle East overlap.
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Especially thanks to negotiations with London on fine-tuning post-Brexit mutual relations, he gained the reputation of Mr. Fix It . First Vice-President of the European Commission (EC) Maroš Šefč .