2024-04-01 20:53:56
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s last electoral obstacle to ensuring control of the country for another five years became his first defeat at the polls. As vote counting progressed in Sunday’s local elections in Turkey, a wave of red spread across much of the country’s 81 provinces. The main opposition party, the social democratic CHP, has not only maintained control of the main cities of Turkey, but has also won the mayorships of 35 provinces, running as the most voted party with 37.8% of the support.
Each vote in Turkey is perceived as a plebiscite on Erdogan’s leadership and, on this occasion, the president has lost for the first time, after winning fifteen consecutive elections. “We began this success together, with this solid journey towards democracy that began five years ago. “Together we represent the understanding of goodness, beauty and unity of people,” declared the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, after the vote count, who renewed his position with a landslide victory with 51.1% of the votes. ten points more than the candidate supported by the Turkish president.
Unknown on the international scene, Imamoglu enjoys growing popularity in Turkey and is believed to be Erdogan’s next opponent in the 2028 presidential elections. Former mayor of a district of Istanbul, Imamoglu managed to break with twenty-five years of government in 2019. AKP in this city, after winning the elections twice, after the authorities challenged the results of the first vote. At that time he had the support of other opposition groups – from nationalist parties to the pro-Kurdish left – who joined forces to snatch the mayor’s office from the ruling party.
However, in this Sunday’s elections, these smaller parties presented their own candidates, the result of divisions in the opposition after their failure in last year’s presidential elections – in which Erdogan was re-elected for a second term. In this lonely election race, Imamoglu also battled a government-controlled media and smear campaigns by AKP leaders.
The mayor has so far survived a judicial process that threatens to disqualify him, a trial that has been interpreted by the opposition as an attempt by the Government to remove him from politics. Imamoglu’s opponent at the polls, former Minister of Urban Planning and Environment, Murat Kurum, failed to attract voters, despite having appeared at most rallies alongside the Turkish president.
The main Turkish cities, in opposition hands
“Dominating the main cities of the country in a context that tends towards authoritarianism, in which the president controls Parliament and the Executive, is a great opportunity for the opposition. It gives them room for maneuver because the mayors make important decisions in the economy, industry and tourism,” Berk Esen, political scientist at Sabanci University in Istanbul, tells elDiario.es. Although the results in Istanbul are the most important of these elections, since the metropolis of sixteen million concentrates 20% of the Turkish population, the victory of the CHP at the polls is as or more important in the rest of the country.
The social democratic party has won in the country’s five big cities such as Ankara, Izmir, Adana and Mersin. Also in the most industrialized cities such as Bursa, Manisa and Denizli or the mining city of Zonguldak. The opposition party has managed to penetrate provinces in the Black Sea and deep Anatolia, which until now were considered conservative fiefdoms that voted for the AKP. “Today the voters decided to change the landscape that existed 22 years ago in Turkey and open the door to a new political climate in our country,” declared CHP leader Özgür Özel, who took over the leadership of the party last Sunday night. few months and renewed the image of the formation.
The strategy of the social democratic party is only one of the factors that has led to victory at the polls: analysts point to the effects of the inflation crisis as the main reason for the drop in support for Erdogan. For more than two years, Turkey has suffered a serious depreciation of its currency and an increase in prices, which did not begin to hit companies until a few months ago, according to economists.
The Islamist president renewed his mandate as head of state and the majority in Parliament thanks to a series of measures to cover up the economic crisis, such as increasing pensions, artificially supporting the Turkish lira, providing free gas for households for a year and the facilitation of credits. Months later, another reality has begun to be felt in the pockets of the Turks. Companies, particularly SMEs, have been forced to lay off part of their workforce, while prices for consumers have not stopped rising and the Government has increased taxes.
This shift toward more austere policies to stabilize the economy has placed an even greater burden on households, which have punished the ruling party at the polls. This punishing vote can also be seen in participation, which dropped to 76% on Sunday, compared to 87% in the previous year’s elections.
Erdogan’s former associates
On the other hand, nationalist and Islamist parties that until now were part of the backbone of the AKP have presented their own candidates, which has caused it to lose important cities in the country. Its former ultranationalist ally, the MHP party, has lost three major mayoralties compared to the 2019 elections, but its decision to present its own candidates in other cities has divided the conservative vote.
Even more dangerous for Erdogan is the New Welfare Party (YRP), with an Islamist tendency that embodies the more conservative protest vote. YRP is led by Fatih Erbakan, son of former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, an influential Islamist ideologue who has shaped Erdogan’s own political ideology. The ultra-conservative party is critical of the AKP government, markedly anti-European Union, defends conservative family values and denies LGBTI rights.
He ran for the first time in last year’s parliamentary elections, in which he won five deputies and supported Erdogan to ensure him a majority in the chamber. In these elections, the YRP decided to present its own candidates and has become the third most voted force in the country, with 6.2% of the votes; has taken two important mayoralties from the AKP in central Anatolia and the southeast of the country, with a campaign critical of the Government’s economic measures and emphasizing the contradictions of its foreign policy.
The YRP has based its electoral strategy on criticizing Erdogan’s position in the Gaza war, accusing the president of being critical of Israel without cutting diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv. That speech has skyrocketed the party’s popularity, much more than that of other splinter formations from the AKP and critics of Erdogan. The Islamist formation will be something to talk about in the future, since the YRP and the AKP are “two fruits of the same tree” that fight for power, as pointed out this Monday in an analysis by journalist Bahadir Özgür.
This scenario could hinder Erdogan’s aspirations to promote a new constitutional reform. Although the details of the proposal are not known, everything indicates that the president will seek a legal change that allows him to remain in power after 2028, the year in which he will exhaust his two terms at the head of the State.
Another electoral result that will leave its impact in the coming months is the victory of the left-wing pro-Kurdish party DEM, which has won two more mayoralties than in the last elections, securing control of a total of ten. The party arrived at the elections weakened by the judicial processes that requested its closure – for which it has changed its name up to three times in the last year and a half – and with thousands of its members in prison.
The Turkish authorities intervened in almost all the mayoralties that the pro-Kurds had won in the 2014 and 2019 elections, alleging that their mayors had links to the Kurdish guerrilla PKK, considered terrorist by Ankara. The DEM party has won in important cities such as Batman, where Gülistan Sönük will become the first female mayor, after wresting City Hall from a conservative Kurdish Islamist party allied with the Government.
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