DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — In the coming election in Istanbul, the Kurds will “stand by the victim against the usurper,” the new mayor of Diyarbakir, Adnan Selcuk Mizrakli, says.

“We will not allow thieves like [Binali] Yildirim to succeed,” Mizrakli told Al-Monitor in an interview in the city’s cultural center, referring to the candidate of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Mizrakli had been asked which way he would like his Kurdish brethren in Istanbul to vote now that the Supreme Electoral Council has invalidated the March 31 election in Turkey’s biggest city and called a new poll for June 23.

The electoral council said a new vote was required because many of the polling-station supervisors had not been civil servants, as required by law. But it gave no evidence that this transgression, a common occurrence in elections, had altered the results.

The rerun is widely seen as a move made under pressure from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the AKP. Yildirim, a former prime minister, had lost May 31 to the opposition’s Ekrem Imamoglu by a mere 13,000 votes. During its long rule of Istanbul, the AKP has built a network of close relationships with city council contractors who contribute generously to the party’s coffers.