Turkey local elections: an analysis of the scenario

Translated by Irene Cecchi

The recent local elections caused a little political earthquake in Turkey. The opposition, with the republican popular party (CHP) at the lead, reconfirmed the outgoing mayors in Ankara and Istanbul and added more important cities such as Bursa, previously led by Erdogan’s islamic party AKP.

Let’s analyse some details of this round of elections focusing on what’s ambiguous.

Erdogan’s defeat: between the end of his invincibility and new interrogatives.

The local elections represent an electoral event that can not be compared to the presidential ones but it still can be a symptom of new tendencies and of the population's feelings anyways.

The results must be contextualised under three different frameworks: the electoral turnout, the bad economic trend and the leadership. Regardless of the democratic deficiency of the Country, the participation rate in Turkey is one of the highest in the world, even if in this occasion it dramatically fell from 85% to 77%. This decrease is a symptom of the disaffection of the conservative electorate who decided to punish the President for his inability to get out from the economic crisis, in particular from the inflation that erodes the poorest sections’ purchasing power. In addition, the competition of the New Welfare Party, a right-wing party founded by Faith Erbakan (son of the first Erdogan’s political mentor), contributed to the Turkish Rais’ defeat since it spread even more extremist islamic ideas and it managed to collect the 6% of votes. Faith Erbakan strongly criticises the government corruption and failures in the economic field, he strives for a more strict and moralised society following his father Necmettin’s doctrine known as Millî Görüş.

Even if the opposition reached its goal, now it is in a situation where only the CHP actually won while all the other parties were left with nothing, such as the Kurdish party DEM and the moderate right-kemalist party IYI, whose leader Meral Akşener stepped down afterwards. The attempt of those who dropped out from the MHP, Erdogan’s ultranationalist ally, and tried to steal votes from the President coalition seems to have failed for now.

The CHP wins an election for the first time since the 70s and surpasses the islamic rival for the first time ever, with 37% of votes against the 35% gained by the AKP. The protagonist of this electoral victory is Istanbul's mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, in office since 2019 when he had to deal with an attempt of electoral fraud and repeat the election that he firstly won. After losing the elections in 2023, the CHP finally dropped the former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and chose Özgür Özel to replace him, while relying on Imamoğlu to be the symbol of anti-Erdoganism. Many analysts are wondering if the results of the 2023 elections could have been different in case the CHP had decided to adopt a long-term strategy instead of ceding to its leader’s delusions of grandeur.

After a drain and much less combative campaign, Erdogan accepted the defeat with an unusually humble and lucid tone and admitted having felt that the Country isn’t satisfied with his work, so he promised to fix the problems to get back on track. As the astute and expert political manipulator that he is, he also promised a new wave of attacks against the Kurdish terrorist of PKK, cooperating with kurish-iraquies gangs too. Therefore, the Erdogan era is not over, maybe his sunset hasn’t even started yet but his spell definitely broke: the Sultan can be defeated.

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