The Republican People’s Party (CHP) is the first political party in Turkey, founded a hundred years ago by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The CHP won 37 percent of the votes in the weekend local elections across Turkey, while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won 36 percent. With this, the center-left opposition party finished in the lead in 36 of its 81 provinces.
“The second largest party in the Turkish parliament, but always in opposition, is a constant challenger to Erdogan and his party. In the three largest settlements, Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, the former mayors of the People’s Party of the Republic remained, and they came to power in several other important settlements as well, said Zoltán Egeresi on InfoRádio.
An employee of the National University of Public Service said that there is a constant debate about the role of religion in Turkey, while the center-left party based on Kemalist traditions sees the representation of secularism as important, while Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted party gives much more space to the Muslim religion in everyday life. The expert believes that many protest votes were cast in the election, and many people stayed at home due to the current economic situation.
In last year’s presidential election in Turkey, the six-party opposition alliance was unable to win, and their joint presidential candidate did not receive the most votes, so this cooperation ended in the fall, and the parties ran separately in the local elections.
“There were those who expected that the mayor of Istanbul would fall in the event of such a divided opposition, since the conservative voting community is typically strong there. We see that this was not the case, from which we can draw the conclusion that the voters across the country used a strategic vote, especially in the western part of the country, and stood behind the strongest opposition candidate,” explained Zoltán Egeresi.
The expert considers it likely that Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a politician of the Republican People’s Party, who won in Istanbul with a ten percent margin, will be Erdogan’s challenger in the 2008 presidential election. He added that the current president still has a lot of time until then, but he must restore the state of the Turkish economy, as the voters will feel the impact of the current inflation of around 70 percent.
