President Erdogan campaigning for municipal elections

The municipal elections are being held on March 31 in Turkey, and promise to be very competitive. Less than two months before the election, the personal involvement of the Head of State gives it a national dimension.

For these municipal elections, it is President Erdogan who is leading his camp’s campaign. This is the most blatant sign that this local election has a national dimension. For Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it is a question of revenge, of honor one could say. During the last election in 2019, the opposition captured several major cities, including the two largest: Ankara, the capital, and Istanbul. Erdogan has vowed to take them back.

Istanbul above all, the city of which he was mayor and which was his stepping stone towards more important functions, the city also where he was born. He is leading a real guerrilla war against the popular mayor Imamoglu, who is the subject of several trials which he denounces as political and fabricated, but which could result in him being banned from all political life for several years.

The earthquake, a campaign argument

And it is therefore the president, who bears the sword against the opposition in this campaign. This week, he was on tour in the provinces affected by the earthquake: he went to meet of course in different cities, distribute the keys to new housing but he took the opportunity at each stop to unveil the list of his party’s candidates, the AKP, for these municipal elections.

These are a priori acquired lands: Kahramanmaras, close to the epicenter of the earthquake, is even one of the strongholds of the AKP. But in Antioch, the only important city held by the opposition in the region, the most destroyed even today, he engaged in a sort of blackmail, suggesting that if his candidate won, help for reconstruction would come more easily. It’s quite paradoxical, but it’s even the heart of the campaign in Istanbul. The megacity sits on a seismic fault that can trigger an earthquake at any time.

Erdogan chose as his candidate Murat Kurum, a technocrat who headed the government’s collective housing agency, and who promises to make Istanbul earthquake-resilient. It also has an undeniable advantage: it has no political base and, in the event of victory, will not become a political rival of the president.