Let’s now turn from Iran to the Middle East’s other large non-Arab country, Turkey, which held nationwide municipal elections on Sunday. As in the U.S., local elections can be a barometer of the national mood, and it’s worth recalling that the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, put himself on the political map by serving as mayor of Istanbul. The Sunday vote resulted in a “historic” loss for Erdogan’s Justice and Development party (AKP), writes Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak:
With 37.4 percent of the vote, Turkey’s founding party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) won a nationwide election for the first time in 47 years. With this historic achievement the party of Turkish secularism not only smashed its 25-percent glass ceiling but at the same time secured its domination of the country’s major cities—the capital Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir. Moreover, for the first time ever the CHP even managed to penetrate the conservative central Anatolia region and gained control of conservative strongholds such as Kırşehir and Kırıkkale.
One of the most important consequences of these elections was the rise of the Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu as the ultimate opposition figure to challenge the AKP in the May 2028 general elections. The young İmamoğlu (fifty-two) managed to defeat Erdoğan’s candidates both in the 2019 and 2024 elections. In other words, he proved to the opposition that Erdoğan is not invincible.
In conclusion, the 2024 local elections indicate that the AKP’s hegemonic role in Turkish politics may be drawing to an end.
Yanarocak observes that in addition to the success of the secular parties, AKP also lost votes to rival Islamist parties, which lambasted Erdogan for doing nothing to end trade with Israel. Nonetheless, the results could be good news for relations between Jerusalem and Ankara, which Erdogan has done much to undermine.
Read more on Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security: https://jiss.org.il/en/yanarocak-towards-the-end-of-akps-hegemony-in-turkey/