Jean Marcou, Professor of Law at Sciences Po Grenoble, researcher at CERDAP2 and associate researcher at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul.
This time.., the AKP defeat for theAKP in Turkey's local elections. held in Turkey on March 31, 2024. The ruling electoral setbacks for the ruling party, in June 2015 (legislative) and March 2019 (local elections), sounded more like warnings to a force and its leader and its leader who, despite everything, appeared to be indestructible. However, the results of the latest local elections (municipal and departmental) indicate that, for the first time, the opposition has won a real victory. victory. In fact, not only did the presidential party fail to win back the emblematic cities of Istanbul and Ankara, but is now in a minority the main opposition party, the CHP, at a time when an unprecedented an unprecedented recomposition of the Turkish political landscape.
The failed reconquest of Ankara and Istanbul
More 61 million men and women were called to the polls this Sunday, March 31, for the renewal of municipal and departmental as well as for the election of village(mukhtar), district, arrondissement and metropolitan mayors, districts, arrondissements or metropolitan cities. A unitary centralized state, the Republic of Turkey nevertheless has a system of elected representative bodies, not unlike that of France before the decentralization the 1982 decentralization reform. The only difference is that in this country, where the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants live in urban areas, some thirty thirty or so agglomerations (with populations of over 700,000) have acquired the status of metropolis. metropolitan status, with a mayor and central council, as well as mayors and mayors and borough councils, all directly elected by voters. directly.
Some rumors pointed to the risk of a high abstention rate, due to electoral fatigue (it's been less than a year since the last election), or opposition discouragement discouragement from the opposition (following its defeat in 2023). Nothing of the sort. Although lower than in the previous local elections in 2019 (84.67%), turnout in 2024 remained at a respectable level (78.55%), reflecting a high level of voter mobilization.
Even though 2019, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP had recorded a memorable setback in Ankara and Istanbul, the country's two the country's two biggest cities had become a test case in 2024 for the recently returned to power by their victory in the presidential and legislative presidential and legislative elections in May 2023. The President of the Republic made the reconquest of these the reconquest of these cities one of his main watchwords, and had spared no effort to spared no effort to achieve this, holding meeting after meeting in recent weeks. weeks. His defeat therefore has a bitter taste. The two outgoing mayors, Mansur Yavaş and Ekrem İmamoğlu won by a landslide. the former with 60.43% of the vote, a lead of almost 30 points ahead of challenger Turgut Altınok, and the second with 51.14% of the vote, more than ten points ahead of hisAKP opponent Murat Kurum (39.59%). This performance is all the more revealing given that the two CHPrepresentatives appeared to be in a less favorable position than in 2019, when they had succeeded in to unite the opposition behind them, while this time it was feared that the the candidates put forward by the İYİ party a nd by the Kurds of th e DEM Party, would reduce the the majority base of the two outgoing councillors.
A political turning point resulting from a new partisan configuration
The AKP has thus largely failed in its reconquest. Clearly, Mansur Yavaş and Ekrem İmamoğlu benefited from a useful vote aimed above all at defeating theAKP. Because and Istanbul voters gave them a comfortable majority and did little to disperse their votes to third-party candidates, whose combined scores reached less than 5% in Ankara and barely 7% in Istanbul. In many ways, this "useful vote" phenomenon is one of the keys to understanding this election. Because at national level, the municipal elections show a polarization around two two political forces: on the left, the Kemalist CHP (37.76%) and on the right, the conservative right the post-Islamic conservatives of theAKP (35.48%), while the other other political formations are below 10% (4.98% for the nationalist nationalists MHP, 5.70% for the Kurdish DEM Party, 3.76% for the moderate the moderate nationalists of the İYİ Party a nd, above all, 6.19% for the neo-Islamists of the Yeniden Refah); which is not to say that they count as a negligible quantity. negligible. For the record, in 2019, theAKP stood at 42.55% and even reached over 52% with the votes of its far-right ally, the MHP, with 10.38%, while the CHP reached a ceiling of 29.81% and its 2024 score (37%), but with the votes of its center-right ally right-wing ally, the İYİ Party, which stood at 7.76%.
It is therefore clear that, in 2024, the big losers of the election are, in addition to theAKP (35.48% vs. against 42.55%), the MHP (4.98% against 10.38%), the AKP's back-up party, and the İYİ Party ( 3.76% vs. 7.76%), a CH P support party. In addition, outside the CHP, the are, on the one hand, the Kurds of the DEM Party, who compared increased their overall influence (5.70% vs. compared with 4.52%) and won 3 metropolises (Dıyarbakır, Mardin and Van). Yeniden Refah, the new Refah Partisi founded by Fatih Erbakan, son of the father of Turkish Islamism and Erdoğan's mentor, Necmettin Erbakan. This formation, which had supported the government coalition in the 2023 legislative elections, has now distanced itself from theAKP for these local elections, and made a breakthrough (6.19%), winning the mayoralties of Yozgat and Şanlıurfa. His success is undoubtedly one of the main reasons for theAKP's setback. good scores in the areas of influence of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's party. impressive.
Thus the pole that theAKP had managed to build up since the 2014 presidential elections which gave it just over half of the vote, has cracked, while, within the opposition, the CHP has increased its influence by attracting the useful vote of voters who want to do away with theAKP. Geographically the CHP has a majority in most of the counties of western anatolia. Unprecedented! In terms of overall percentage ahead of the ruling party for the first time, and can look forward to winning win the next general presidential and parliamentary elections. general elections. In this new configuration, the Kurds of the DEM Party and the Islamist Yeniden Refah are already emerging as kingmakers. kingmakers.
The result on March 31 was in fact only half a surprise. For several weeks, polls had been had been pointing to a likely defeat for theAKP, and the day before, at an election rally in Izmir, CHP leader Özgür Özel had announced Özel, had announced "a great victory" for his party. He the scale of the AKP's defeat and the structure of the result, which which opens up new political perspectives, were astonishing.
Reasons for theAKP's failure
There are several There are several reasons for this result. Firstly, the new economic economic policy pursued by theAKP since the May 2023 elections has not convincing results. Inflation rose to 67% in February 2024, despite the central bank's increase in the central bank's key interest rate, which after several several spectacular increases since last year, is now 50%! At a time when Turks are experiencing a significant decline in their standard of living on a daily basis standard of living, the rhetoric of promising the imminent return of single-digit of single-digit inflation at election rallies has come across as preposterous. preposterous.
Secondly, power's grip on lifestyles and freedom of expression, by systematically increasing the presence of religion in the public sphere, spreading a dominant, self-righteous morality and accentuating government control of the media and arbitration bodies (justice, high courts, etc.), has made Turks of all backgrounds and origins, reluctant to accept the "Putinization" of their political life, even more worried. The lasting consequences of the purges that have affected a number of Turkish families over the past decade, the continued detention of prominent figures such as the patron of the arts Osman Kavala and the Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş, and the announcement after the elections of a new constitutional project have only served to maintain this concern, transforming it into anxiety. This weariness with theAKP 's conservatism and authoritarianism undoubtedly reflects a profound evolution in Turkish society. The millennial generation, more urban and less sensitive to the themes that brought theAKP to power, is coming of age. This local election saw a very significant increase in the number of women elected, both to municipal councils and mayoral posts.
Thirdly thirdly, even if foreign policy has always had, in Turkey as elsewhere, influence on election campaigns and on the motivations of voters, Erdoğan's Erdoğan's stance on the Gaza war may not have served him as well as he had hoped. as he had hoped. For, in addition to the emotion aroused among Turkish public opinion by the tragic fate of civilians in the theAKP leader responded with a condemnation dominated by religious rhetoric by religious rhetoric, giving the impression of wanting to use the tragedy the tragedy for his own benefit, and to make it part of the domestic political political polarization. From then on, this rhetoric annoyed secular circles, who were concerned to see that the defense of Gaza was being transformed into support for Hamas, without gaining the support of Islamists. The Yeniden Refah in particular denounced the ambiguity of Erdoğan's condemnation, pointing to the intense trade relations between Turkey and Israel. In this instance, the President of the Republic's virulent stance has also probably increased another concern for Turks, one that, since the military interventions interventions in Syria and Libya, and fears that the country's involvement on the international scene, while the war in Ukraine continues and the stability of the stability in the Middle East is increasingly precarious.
And now...
Unlike his setback in the June 2015 parliamentary elections, which saw him remain silence for several days, Recep Tayyip Tayyip Erdoğan expressed himself on the very evening of these local elections, as he usually does in such cases from the balcony ofAKP headquarters in Ankara, both to express his disappointment both to express his disappointment and to rejoice that "Turkish democracy has proved its maturity once again". His far-right ally, Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the MHP, whose influence was halved compared to the the previous local election in 2019, similarly noted the damage, and that voters had sent a message to the powers that be, and that it was and that economic recovery needed to be tackled seriously. In this respect, Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek was the first executive first member of the executive, outside Erdoğan, to pledge the continuation of to promise the continuation of the structural reforms undertaken to bring inflation and keep public accounts afloat.
Outside governmental spheres, people were also busy drawing lessons from the election. election. Bolstered by its victory, the CHP called for unity, and its elected representatives that they would represent all citizens, whatever their opinions. whatever their opinions. Brilliantly re-elected in Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, said that from now on "Turkey Turkey was going to be a different Turkey" and that the people of Istanbul had had "paved the way for democracy, equality and freedom. freedom." CHP 's back-up force in previous elections, the İYİ Party p aid dearly for refusing to form an alliance with alliance this time. Meral Akşener, its president, felt that the useful vote in favor of the Kemalist party, which led to the collapse of her was the result of Turkey's alarming economic situation. the alarming economic situation in Turkey, while announcing an extraordinary extraordinary congress.
Of course, the the mood was celebratory at Yeniden Refah headquarters. Its leader Fatih Erbakan saw his party's surge as a resurrection of the original Turkish Islamism, comparing the event to the event to his father's founding in the late 1960s of Milli Göruş, the movement that was the matrix of all Turkish Islamist formations before the the advent of theAKP, a party a party he now considers too moderate. The problem now is to know what this new Refah will demand from theAKP in order to its support. Member of the old Refah in the 1990s, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would have done well such a return to his roots, but it's certain that he can hardly escape it in the coming weeks.
As for the the Kurds of the DEM Party, it has to be said that they were electoral winners of the election. Even if their candidates were marginalized by the CHP 's useful vote in the major Western western metropolises, they significantly increased their overall influence in the country compared to the 2019 local elections, as did their number of mayoralties number of town halls (82 in 2024 versus 65 in 2019). But the question is whether they whether they will be allowed to administer the mayoralties they have won, notably the three reconquered metropolises, even though after the 2019 elections, many of the municipalities they had won had been entrusted to administrators administrators appointed by the Ministry of the Interior. The Kurdish party is suspected of complicity with the PKK, and although it has not been been banned, it has been forced to change its name several times in recent elections, while many of its leaders, members of parliament and local are currently in prison or on trial. This is one of the limits of the democracy praised by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in his latest "balcony speech". and it will no doubt be important to observe whether the precarious status status of Kurdish municipalities persists, or whether a more favourable regime in the wake of this election.