Everyone agrees that these local elections in Turkey are unlike any of the previous ones. In two days, millions of Turkish voters will vote for their local rulers and municipal councilors across the country. But all eyes are on Istanbul, a huge city of 16 million people where the mayoral race is theoretically being fought between incumbent mayor and main opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu and his ruling coalition rival Murat Kurum.
But in reality, Imamoglu’s opponent is not the weak and colorless Murat Kurum, but the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself. The Turkish president is determined not to lose and wants to consolidate his power after the 2023 elections.
Erdogan wants to retake Istanbul not only for reasons of religious identity, not only because he turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque, but also because in a period of severe economic crisis he will gain control of a city with an annual budget of 6.6 billion dollars, which will could be used for state policies.
But the latest opinion polls show a steady rise of Ekrem Imamoglu. In fact, journalistic sources of Deutsche Welle reported today that in an internal poll of the AKP, Imamoglu leads Kuroum by 5.3 points, after the distribution of undecideds.
An Imamoglu victory now looks more likely than the pollsters, although the same pollsters failed miserably in last year’s election. However, a victory for the current mayor would show him as the only one who defeated Erdogan for the second time and also as the natural leader of the PLK, which in a later phase might cause a problem in the unity of the official opposition party.
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