AGI – More than 61 million Turkish voters have been called to the polls for the local elections expected today across the country. Voting operations in the 81 provinces concluded a short while ago. In some eastern provinces the polls closed an hour earlier, after having opened an hour earlier than in the west of the country, as decided by the Election Authority in consideration of the hours of daylight in a vast country like Turkey. Counting and counting operations will begin immediately.
Today is a crucial date especially for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, determined to reconquer Istanbul, the most populous city in Turkey which his party lost in the 2019 elections. “The time has come to resume work from where it was interrupted , put an end to this period of mud and dirt and put ourselves back at the service of the population as we have done for 30 years. The city has returned to the problems of 1994, these were 5 wasted years”, declared Erdogan in a rally held in Istanbul at the end of the campaign in favor of their candidates. In the last month and a half, Erdogan has spared no energy in an electoral tour in support of the candidates of his own party, AKP. The capital Ankara and the metropolis on the Bosphorus represented the most bitter defeat suffered by the Turkish leader in the last 25 years. This was how long his party’s control had lasted over Istanbul, a city which, with a quarter of the country’s total population, represents the nerve center of Turkish political life. “Whoever governs Istanbul governs Turkey” has been one of the Turkish leader’s favorite mantras for years, but he stopped repeating this phrase after the defeat in 2019, suffered at the hands of the candidate of the Republican Party CHP, Ekrem Imamoglu. And It is precisely the challenge between the CHP and the AKP that keeps today in the balancealso because the polls do not appear to suggest that the candidate chosen by Erdogan has achieved great success. Former Environment Minister Murat Kurum, extremely loyal to the president and one of the most prominent representatives of the party’s second generation, he showed neither charisma nor the ability to win over the public during the election campaign. Born in 1976 in the capital Ankara and father of 3 children, a characteristic appreciated by the Turkish president, he has a degree in construction engineering. Kurum rose through the ranks within the party and served as environment minister from 2018 to June 2023. However, it should be emphasized that Kurum for years was responsible for building renovation programs in Turkey’s two largest cities; programs aimed at replacing old buildings with houses built according to the anti-seismic parameters expected after the 1999 earthquake. In fact, after the earthquake that devastated the south of the country on 6 February 2023, several scientists warned of the concrete and imminent risk of an earthquake with a level higher than 7. Alarms that pushed Erdogan to accelerate building renovation programs and Kurum’s choice must also be understood in this sense. It will be enough to defeat the incumbent mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the man who 5 years ago inflicted on Erdogan the most violent beating of his entire political career? Probably not. It is worth remembering what happened in 2019. After a first round in which Imamoglu won by a few thousand votes, in a city where there are 11.5 million voters, the AKP appealed and we went back to the polls. A decision poorly digested by public opinion, which turned its back on the president’s candidate, the uncharismatic former prime minister Binali Yildirim, and chose Imamoglu, whose victory in the rerun was overwhelming (around 800 thousand votes more than his challenger). Imamoglu, like 5 years ago, is supported by the Iyi Parti nationalists, Kurum by the MHP nationalists. However 5 years ago the votes of the Kurds of the HDP were decisive for Imamoglu’s victory, but this time they have their own candidate.
However, Imamoglu has conducted a convincing campaign, he can count on a compact following and on a charisma that from the stage allows him to establish a direct line with those who listen to him. A two and a half year sentence, considered political by a large part of public opinion, even strengthened his position among a large part of the population, who saw the judges’ decision as a political move. Furthermore, in the last electoral rounds, Erdogan’s party has not achieved the positive results it achieved in the past in Istanbul. In short, the game is being played in the capital Ankara and in the metropolis on the Bosphorus in a country in which the Aegean and Mediterranean coast has always been in the hands of the opposition, which however is unable to counter the excessive power of Erdogan’s party in Central Anatolia and on the coast of the Black Sea. In the balance is the east with a Kurdish majority, where the favorite is the pro-Kurdish party Hdp, undermined however by the AKP, which has seen its support grow enormously among the Kurds over the years. It remains to be seen what will happen in the areas affected by the devastating earthquake of February 6, 2023. Erdogan’s party has an overwhelming majority in many of the 11 provinces hit by the earthquake; a consensus confirmed in the presidential elections last May, which took place three months after the earthquake. However, important centers such as Antakya and Iskenderun are governed by mayors of the opposition party CHP and have come under fire for the management of the earthquake. Administrations which were also subjected to the anathema of Erdogan who invited the population to vote for his party “to facilitate reconstruction and post-earthquake recovery”. Making the race to Istanbul even more interesting is the announcement made by Erdogan a few weeks ago, with which he finally defined his political path. Although in politics anything can happen, according to the current constitution the Turkish leader, now 70, would not be able to run for president in 2028 and Erdogan’s statement leaves room for enormous question marks on the future of a country of 85 million inhabitants, central to the fate of NATO and Europe. If Kurum wins in Istanbul, what we will face will be years in which Erdogan’s AKP will further strengthen its position, its control over economic policy and society and will aim to prepare the ground for a future signed by the AKP. On the contrary, a reconfirmation of Imamoglu as mayor of Istanbul would pave the way for a more pluralistic system, but also for a candidacy for the presidency which at this point would become inevitable. If Imamoglu were to win today in 2028, the presidential race would start from a completely different scenario compared to last year: this time, in fact, the president’s AKP would have to look for a candidate, while Imamoglu would be the natural leader of the opposition. A scenario that would see the current mayor of Istanbul highly favored to lead the country, especially if Erdogan were to really follow through on his words and withdraw from the political scene.
