"During the country’s last local elections in 2019, AKP forced through a run-off after losing the Istanbul mayoral race to opposition party (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, only to embarrassingly lose by an even wider margin..."
It has been nine months since Erdogan stood in the conservative Üsküdar neighborhood of Istanbul to declare victory in Turkey’s first ever presidential run-off election. He was seemingly on a high – standing on top of a bus in front of adoring crowds – from having weathered record-breaking inflation and collapsing living standards, entering a twentieth year in power and the country’s one-hundredth year as a republic with his ruling party (AKP) further entrenched. However, future local elections would be the true test of resilience – Erdogan lost Istanbul by more than 3.5 points.
The memory of a different historic run-off looms large. During the country’s last local elections in 2019, AKP forced through a run-off after losing the Istanbul mayoral race to opposition party (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, only to embarrassingly lose by an even wider margin. A number of other municipalities flipped to the opposition, too. Citizens will once again vote for mayors, district mayors, council members, and muhtar (the most local level of administration introduced by Ottoman sultan Mahmud II in 1829) on March 31st.
Circumstances could not be more different from 2019, or even from last year. Erdogan, having been credibly challenged by the opposition, quickly replaced the Central Bank governor and reversed unorthodox economic policy to bring down inflation. Central bank interest rates have risen from 8.5 to 50 percent since May, but the Turkish Lira is near record lows. At the time of the Presidential run-off election, one U.S. Dollar exchanged for 19.99 TL. Today, it would exchange for 32 TL. Costs of housing and utilities increased faster in February than the previous month, when the now-former Central Bank Governor admitted even her family couldn’t find an affordable home in Istanbul. She allegedly moved in with her parents.
Cities and villages damaged from the 2023 earthquakes remain largely unlivable. Over 600,000 homes were destroyed or damaged in the disaster, with Erdogan promising to build 300,000 new units within a year. More than a year later, the party opened 7,500 units – or 2.5 percent of the goal – and promised to reach 40,000 in the coming months. Unmet promises may have consequences in Istanbul, physically untouched by the 2023 disaster but where seismologists have been predicting a near-catastrophic earthquake along the North Anatolian Fault for years. Earthquake engineer Cuneyt Tuzun claims 100,000 buildings in Istanbul alone would be at risk of total destruction.
If the winds of public opinion have intensified against Erdogan and AKP, they may also whistle through the fragmented sail of the opposition. İmamoğlu, and others like Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş, were elected through an unlikely coalition of their secular social democratic party (CHP), a secular right-wing nationalist party (İYİ), and Kurdish-minority dominated leftist HDP. This year, no such coalition exists. Candidates like İmamoğlu and Yavaş are instead running on accomplishments which, they say, have been made in-spite of a disagreeable AKP-dominated national government. Imamoglu has touted the rapid construction of a number of new metro lines and a new chain of ultra-affordable publicly-owned restaurants, popular in the AKP strongholds such as the Fatih neighborhood. Yavas recently inaugurated improved water quality in an Ankara neighborhood, while alleging that the ruling AKP party withholds access to national funds for opposition-led cities. Academic research suggests previous re-organization of Turkish municipal governance has made such favoritism more feasible. At a recent event, an AKP provincial chairman said: “Without the support of the government, service cannot come. Do not trust those who say they will provide services outside of power.”
Opposition messages remain relatively contained to the national container, while Erdogan has increasingly leveraged his bully pulpit to stoke transnational grievances among his nationalist supporters. Turkey finally accepted Swedish accession into NATO, only after the country amended its constitution to strengthen anti-terror laws, particularly against Kurdish militant group PKK. The country is readying to open its first nuclear energy plant, built and operated by a Russian company, and is working on building a hub for Russian natural gas. Turkey is also one of the fastest growing arms exporters in the world – largely from a drone company led by Erdogan’s son-in-law and his brother.
The opposition has, in some cases, been highlighting the hypocrisy of AKP’s foreign policy – with the ruling party holding massive rallies in support of Palestine while allegedly increasing exports to Israel. Members of a pro-Palestine youth group were detained at an AKP election rally this past weekend after unfurling a banner demanding leadership “stop trade with Israel.”
There is also the accelerated shift to autocracy. Both İmamoğlu and Yavas have had legal challenges risking their ability to run in elections, and CHP organized a march after the country’s top appeals court challenged a decision by the constitutional court . The constitutional court ruled imprisoned politician Can Atalay, of the socialist party (TIP), should be released. Atalay has not been released.
The opposition has attempted to connect messages of corruption with their own campaign promises. Erdogan’s massive Canal Istanbul project would turn the mega-city into an island, move residents from their homes, and bypass the Montreaux Convention, an early 20th century international agreement which limits warship transiting through the Bosphorus Strait. It has been reported that Erdogan’s son-in-law owns land along the canal route, which means he could publicly benefit from the real estate project. İmamoğlu argues any funds for the project should instead be used for earthquake resilience projects. Protests have erupted against AKP mayoral candidate Murat Kurum, considering he could align with his party leader on the project.
While fragmentation among the elite opposition is a critical risk, anecdotal reporting suggests republican-minded citizens may remain allied against AKP. İmamoğlu recently refused to call the Kurdish-minority leftist party ‘terrorists,’ and he surely hopes the stakes of this election are widely understood – from secular voters to his right and Kurdish-minority voters to his left.
What exactly are the stakes? As Alp Yenen and Erik-Jan Zurcher write in their introduction to a new collection of one hundred important documents in Turkish history, despite a democratically-elected authoritarian government increasingly consolidating power through control of media and repression of dissident voices, “a vibrant civil society continues to exist and publicly challenge state doctrine in its various forms. The state is no longer an ideological hegemony in Turkey, even if it still is a political behemoth.” This was proven in 2019, when twenty five years of Islamist-party control of Istanbul ended. While the former capital city for 1,600 years, and the nation as a whole, is often exceptionalized and romanticized as a bridge between east and west, the lives of 85 million people hang in the balance. If it is a bridge, Europe relies on Turkish stability to keep migrants from crossing it. These elections will not just determine political leadership of Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya, Izmir or other populous cities with ancient histories, but whether or not these leaders – including the President – remain answerable to the voters who put them there, citizens united despite the petty disagreements among elites.
