Turkey elections
On Sunday the Turks will go to the polls for the municipal elections. The most important stake is the mayoralty of Istanbul and Ankara, where the opposition to President Erdogan is currently in power.
Sunday’s Turkish municipal elections are mainly an indicator of the popularity of incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his conservative AKP party. Erdogan mainly wants to regain the mayorship of the capital Ankara and Istanbul. However, the incumbent opposition candidates appear to be holding out there.
After counting about a third of the votes, the largest opposition party CHP was slightly ahead of the AKP nationwide on Sunday with about 39 percent of the votes (about 37 percent), state news agency Anadolu reported, citing unofficial preliminary data. Numbers. In the previous municipal elections, the AKP won 44 percent of the votes.
In Ankara, Mayor Mansur Yavas of the opposition CHP party has already claimed victory. The preliminary results give him a lead of almost 20 percent over his challenger from Erdogan’s AKP. In Istanbul, the ruling mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu (also AKP) indicates that he is “very happy” with the first results. İmamoğlu is considered Erdogan’s biggest domestic political rival. According to the Turkish news agency Anadolu, opposition candidates are also leading in other major cities such as Izmir, Bursa, Antalya and Adana.
A boost for the opposition
For the opposition, which suffered blows in the parliamentary and presidential elections in May last year, retaining the mayorship in the major cities would be a major boost. The largest opposition party, the secular and social democratic CHP, dethroned Erdogan’s AKP in the previous municipal elections in 2019. Especially in Istanbul it will be tense. After the 2023 elections, the alliance of opposition parties that helped incumbent Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu to a narrow victory fell apart.
Tensions surrounding the elections have been felt in Belgium in recent days and manifested themselves in violence in Turkey on Sunday. The atmosphere became very grim, especially in the southeast of the country, where many Kurds live. Fighting between rival political groups in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir left at least one dead and 11 injured, according to Reuters. At least three people are said to have died and at least 27 people were injured across Turkey.
