In the local elections in Turkey, the largest opposition party CHP said it defended the mayoralty of Istanbul. Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu declared himself the winner of the election in Turkey’s largest city in terms of population and economic power. After counting the ballot papers from 96 percent of the ballot boxes, he was ahead by more than a million votes, the CHP politician explained. İmamoğlu is considered a possible candidate for the 2028 presidential election. The AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had sent former Environment Minister Murat Kurum into the race in Istanbul.
For Erdoğan, the evening, less than a year after the presidential elections in May 2023, was a serious defeat. His AKP is not only failing to win the Istanbul city hall, which İmamoğlu first took away from it five years ago. With İmamoğlu, who is doing even better than back then, Erdoğan has a serious opponent for the first time. Although he only ran in Istanbul in these local elections, he acted as the opposition’s secret top candidate – also because Erdoğan made the Istanbul election campaign his personal affair.
Erdoğan has also toured the entire country in the past few weeks, through each of the 81 provinces. So the elections became a vote on himself, and he also lost nationwide: it looks like his AKP is behind the CHP. This has never happened before. It has not been seen for many decades that the CHP, the party of state founder Atatürk, becomes the strongest force.
Islamist party takes Erdoğan votes from its own camp
The opposition is celebrating a landslide victory in the capital Ankara, as well as in its strongholds on the Mediterranean coast. But even in the Anatolian hinterland, the map on this election evening looks significantly different than in previous elections: Last year, Erdoğan won there, in the countryside – now many conservative cities and provinces are falling either to the opposition or to the “Yenid Refah Parti “, an Islamist party that took votes from its own camp for the president.
Turkey is waking up to a new party landscape. The AKP is behind the opposition CHP, the ultra-right MHP, which is in coalition with Erdoğan, only manages around three percent. Smaller parties that supported the opposition coalition last year hardly exist anymore. And besides the CHP, the only opposition force left is the pro-Kurdish DEM. The only reason it remained at just five percent was because its voters chose CHP candidates for strategic reasons – like Ekrem İmamoğlu.
Turkish politics will now revolve around him and President Erdoğan. Theoretically, Erdoğan could legally remove him from the mayor’s office; there is a political sentence against İmamoğlu for imprisonment and a ban on politics, which has not become legally binding since 2022. However, given the force of İmamoğlu’s victory, this is unlikely.
With material from the Reuters news agency