Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a man of arrogance and uncertain mental stability. He is ill-disposed to accepting embarrassing election losses.

Correspondingly, Erdoğan’s AKP party is working with the ultra-nationalist MHP party to challenge the AKP’s March 31 local election defeat in Istanbul. Seeing as Erdoğan is Istanbul’s former mayor and the city is the heart of his political-theological plan to reshape Turkish society, this loss is hard to swallow. It reflects a damaging rebuke to Erdoğan’s personal credibility. Indeed, the AKP’s losing Istanbul is the rough equivalent of a Democratic presidential candidate losing California or a Republican losing Texas.