In battle for Istanbul, city election could decide a country’s future

After his momentous election victory last year, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made it clear that Turkey’s economic and political powerhouse was next in his sights. 

“Are we ready to win Istanbul back?” the veteran leader asked his roaring audience as he celebrated his triumph in the country’s May 2023 presidential race. “We started with Istanbul, we will go on with Istanbul.”

Last year’s presidential contest was devastating for Turkey’s secular opposition, which had seen the vote as its best chance of dislodging Erdoğan since he assumed national power in 2003.

This Sunday’s election in Istanbul, which comes on the same day as regional and municipal votes across Turkey, is a case of double or nothing. 

If Erdoğan’s anointed candidate snatches back the country’s most important metropolis, where the president himself made his name, it would snuff out the remaining bastion of opposition to his rule. 

But if the opposition Istanbul mayor holds on and keeps control of the city, which accounts for 18 percent of Turkey’s population and a third of its economy, it could provide him a stepping stone to national power. 

According to Turkey’s often unreliable polls, the race looks to be close. Recent surveys give the opposition Republican People’s Party a lead that ranges between nine points and less than one point. Another survey gave a slender one-point advantage to Erdoğan’s Islamist-rooted AKP.

The stakes, both practical and symbolic, could hardly be higher for politicians fighting over Turkey’s future. The election will decide whether Erdoğan deepens and consolidates his autocratic and Islamist-oriented rule, or whether an alternative path still remains.

Winning Turkey

For Selin Nasi, a visiting fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, “Istanbul is not only Turkey’s commercial and economic hub but also the country’s cultural and intellectual heart … a microcosm of Turkey.”

As a result, she said, “winning Istanbul is considered to be winning Turkey” — partly because of the economic clout that comes with control of the city’s budget, and partly because of its “profound symbolic significance” for Erdoğan himself, who launched his career with a surprise victory in the city’s mayoral elections exactly 30 years ago. 

Those ties are among the reasons Erdoğan was so stunned by the triumph in the last mayoral contest of Republican People’s Party candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu — an opposition politician who, for some, has achieved a superstar quality in Turkish politics.

Indeed, so aghast was the AKP at İmamoğlu’s shock 2019 Istanbul win that it engineered a rerun of the poll — but lost in a landslide. It remains one of the ruling party’s most ignominious defeats to date.

Five years on, Erdoğan is trying to finish off his younger rival — and with him Turkey’s fractious opposition. 

“If İmamoğlu loses, the secular opposition will not be able to gather its forces, will be in complete disarray and unable to challenge the current governing bloc and the consolidation of an increasingly Islamizing and authoritarian system,” said Soli Özel, a senior political analyst at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. 

Özel projected that it could take a decade for the opposition to recover from a defeat in Istanbul and in other major cities like Ankara.

Conversely, if İmamoğlu prevails it would burnish his reputation as the one politician in the last quarter century who has been able to best Erdoğan — and perhaps put him on a path to national power himself.

“If İmamoğlu wins again this would be his third victory against Erdoğan — after that he would be walking toward the presidency,” a politician from İmamoğlu’s Republican People’s Party told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. 

“Erdoğan sees this and he wants to stop him right there.”

To represent the AKP in this defining contest Erdoğan has tapped Murat Kurum, a  former environment minister and previously one of the government’s point men on the response to the cataclysmic February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey that killed more than 50,000. 

Critics lambasted the government for being too slow to respond to that disaster; Erdoğan and Kurum say they have sought to rebuild what was destroyed. 

‘Elections of fate’

The president has not shied from campaigning for his candidate, calling on the Istanbul electorate to punish the opposition for their alleged incompetence and failure to build up the city’s infrastructure. “Let’s give them the lesson they deserve on March 31,” he declared at an Istanbul rally this month while describing Sunday’s contests as a “judgment” and “elections of fate.”

The president has thrown his entire political weight into the contest, sending no fewer than 17 government ministers to campaign in Istanbul.

Many commentators predict that Erdoğan would use a victory in Sunday’s votes, which will determine who has power and economic resources in cities and regions across the nation, as a launchpad to amend the constitution so he can serve more terms as president.

As Istanbul mayor and opposition figurehead, İmamoğlu is arguably the main obstacle to Erdoğan’s ripping up the constitution to extend his rule.

The mayor’s role has been boosted by chaos in the ranks of the opposition. Following its defeat in last year’s presidential vote, a multi-party alliance collapsed and former Republican People’s Party leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was forced out.

But İmamoğlu denies he has designs on the presidency. 

Asked about his ambitions by POLITICO, İmamoğlu said in a statement through his adviser: “Managing Istanbul is a sacred duty … No other issue is on my agenda right now.”

İmamoğlu is already battling government-inspired lawsuits that seek to disqualify him from public office because of supposedly insulting comments he made about the officials who annulled his initial election as mayor.

But as he girds for battle over a megacity that could determine his country’s future, İmamoğlu sounded a defiant note. 

Asked what he will do if he loses to Erdoğan’s forces, he said: “I do not base my career plan on failure.”