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President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling party is trying to wrest control of Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, from Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, in a high-stakes election for the strongman leader and his embattled opponents.
Voting for mayoral and local assembly races across Turkey concluded at 5pm local time (2pm GMT) on Sunday, with results expected late in the evening.
No local election has as much national or international resonance as that of Istanbul, where Erdoğan’s mayoral candidate, Murat Kurum, is seeking to unseat İmamoğlu, the pre-eminent opposition leader and the president’s most credible rival.
Sunday’s municipal elections come after Erdoğan won last May’s presidential election, soundly defeating the Turkish opposition. Erdoğan, who has ruled Turkey for more than two decades, has led a vigorous bid for his party to take control of Istanbul, home to nearly 16 million people and one of the few bastions of opposition power.
“No local election has ever been so important,” said Özer Sencar, a pollster and political analyst at the Ankara-based research group Metropoll.
The elections come at a time when Turkey is grappling with a long-lasting and painful inflation crisis. Concerns are also growing both among international observers and in many sectors of Turkish society over Erdoğan’s slide towards autocracy.
Whoever gains control of Istanbul will inherit a power plant that, with its subsidiaries, has an annual budget of about 516 billion Turkish lira ($16 billion) and about 40,000 employees, giving its mayor a powerful platform for direct access to voters.
İmamoğlu, 53, gained control of Istanbul from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2019 after a highly charged election in which the presidential candidate lost in both the initial polls and the second round of voting that followed .
In the years since, İmamoğlu, a charismatic activist, has become a leading force in the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Turkey’s main opposition group, and is widely seen as a future presidential candidate.
“İmamoğlu is a very important figure. He is not only the mayor of Istanbul, but the only person willing to challenge the government. Everyone else is afraid to speak,” said Ahmet Dil, a 58-year-old Istanbul resident.
Erdoğan, who rose to national prominence as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, campaigned aggressively for Kurum, 47, during the 2024 elections, holding rallies across the city, including on Saturday. Turkey’s state-aligned media also covered every twist and turn of Kurum’s campaign, while Erdoğan sent top ministers to lobby for his candidate in Istanbul.
The outcome of the elections will likely be determined not only by the turnout of AKP and CHP voters, but also by those intending to vote for smaller political parties. The pro-Kurdish DEM party, the Islamist New Welfare Party and the nationalist İYİ Parti are all fielding their own mayoral candidates in major cities, and analysts expect that some of these groups’ supporters will eventually support the AKP candidate or of the CHP.
Erdoğan, who came to national power at the turn of the millennium on an Islamist-leaning platform, remains one of Turkey’s most popular politicians and its most important leader since founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In recent months he has been zigzagging around the country, trying to use his star power to shore up support for AKP candidates.
“Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is doing what is necessary in the interests of Turkey,” said Aziz Bulut, a 55-year-old resident of the southeastern city of Şanlıurfa, citing the president’s “conservative” values and patriotism. “Until the end, until death, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.”