The 2024 local elections in Turkey were a disaster for President Erdogan and his corrupt, anti-democratic, conservative and Islamist AKP. The big winner is the oppositional, social-democratic, Kemalist CHP with candidates such as Ekrem Imamoglu (*1970) in Istanbul and Mansur Yavaş (*1955) in Ankara, to mention just the economically leading city as well as the capital.
Roughly 61 million Turkish voters were asked to cast their ballot on March 31, 2024 in Turkey’s 81 provinces. 30 metropolitan and 1,363 district municipal mayors as well as 1,282 provincial and some 21,000 municipal councillors were elected.
Despite the lack of fairness, with the state and most other mass media in direct or indirect control of President Erdogan and his cheerleaders, with oppositional candidates excluded from running, some even jailed, voter turnout still reached 76%. The resilience of the Turkish democracy is greater than many expected. President Erdogan acknowledged the overall defeat and vowed to respect the election results.
According to preliminary results (almost 100% of the vote counted), the oppositional CHP became the strongest party nationwide, winning 37.76% of the vote and 35 of the 81 regional municipalities, with President Erdogan’s AKP finishing second with 35.48% and 24 regional municipalities won.
The star of Ekrem Imamoglu rose in the 2019 mayoral election in Istanbul, when he managed to defeat the AKP candidate despite the backing by President Erdogan, who himself had once started his career as mayor of Istanbul and thought himself and his party unbeatable in Turkey’s most important town.
In the 2024 Istanbul mayoral election, the CHP incumbent Ekrem Imamoglu managed to win 51% of the vote, clearly ahead of the pale AKP candidate Murat Kurkum (*1976), who had President Erdogan and AKP ministers campaigning alongside him. Kurkum ended up with only 39.6%.
Since 2016, President Erdogan has imprisoned thousands of HDP members and politicians. Başak Demirtaş (*1977), the wife of the imprisoned, former Kurdish HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş (*1973) had first announced to stand in the Istanbul election but later withdrew, which increased the chances of Ekrem İmamoğlu. Around 3 million out the the 16 million people living in Istanbul are Kurdish, making it the largest Kurdish city in the world.
In the capital Ankara, the CHP candidate and incumbent Mayor Mansur Yavaş even managed to win over 60% of the vote, the AKP candidate Turgut Altınok finishing with only 31%.
AKP stands for Justice and Development Party. In reality, under Erdogan, the AKP has abandoned the rule of law a long time ago. In addition, after initial economic successes, Erdogan has almost single-handedly created (and still fuels) a high-inflation environment which has ruined or impoverished millions of Turks.
In large parts of Turkey, there is no rule of law, no independent justice, no separation of powers. The mass media are largely controlled by President Erdogan, the AKP and people closely associated with them. There is no freedom of speech. Human rights are not respected. Political dissent too often leads to repression, imprisonment and/or exile.
If, in 2023, Ekrem Imamoglu or Mansur Yavas had run as CHP presidential candidate, Erdogan would probably have lost. But because the dull CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was not ready to step aside, in 2023, the autocrat Erdogan managed to steal another election. The next presidential election will only take place in 2028. That is a long way to go. But the 2024 local election has shown once again that the CHP can win.
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Photograph of Ekrem İmamoğlu by Voice of America (public domain), 2018.
Article added on April 1, 2024 at 17:46 German time. Details added at 19:14.
