Turkey’s Local Elections of March 2019

 

Following very intensive and sometimes dirty campaigns Turkey has finally voted for the local administrations. The results are good for both sides. The AKP who currently holds the majority in the parliament won the local elections by 44% of all the votes. AKP established an alliance with MHP, who gethered 7% of the votes. So together they have more than 51% of all the votes. However, that alliance is not completely happy with the results as they have lost the central municipalities in three major cities of Turkey, namely Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir. In all of those cities the main opposition party CHP succeeded to win the elections. CHP gathered 30% of all the votes and this can be considered as a major success as they increased their votes by 7-8% since from the last elections.

For the last two decades the party in power, AKP and President Erdogan appered to be the undisputed winners of all possible elections but in that election the oppostion found a great motivation for the future as winning the major cities were the main goal for all the parties.

The elections were held relatively in peace. There were couple of unwanted events around the country but for a poplulation of 50 million voters this can be considered normal.

During the campaigns President Erdogan again showed a tremendous performance for the good of the party in power. He sometimes held 8 meetings in one day and appeared on live television debates at the same day. The opposition did not like the fact that a President is working with all the facilities and power of the state for the good of AKP. The opposition tried to stay calm and did not want to increase the tension during the campaign and the increase in their votes shows that it was the proper tactic for the opposition parties. Very high unemployment rates and weak economic performance of the last year together with very high inflation rate helped the opposition to win the elections at major cities.