December Issue
By Yasmin Abbasoy
March
The 2019 elections were an undisputed success for a weary Turkish opposition. On a late-night political talk show of the sort that is omnipresent in a pre-election Turkey, then-leader of the main opposition Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu received nothing but laughter from the moderator when stating his party’s goals for the campaign. Listing the names of coveted provinces including the capital, Ankara, and the city that is arguably the heart of Turkey, Istanbul, he went on to state that the opposition would “be taking all of these places.” Despite the laughter and the ridicule he later received online, he was proven right by a prodigious result in the elections; the opposition alliance emerged having wrested away from the governing Justice and Development Party, and its People’s Alliance, the metropolitan municipalities of five additional provinces, among which were Ankara and, crucially, Istanbul.
In Ankara, main opposition Republican People’s Party candidate Mansur Yavaş prevailed over longtime member of the President’s inner circle and current minister Mehmet Özhaseki relatively uncontroversially. His past as a member of the ultranationalist alliance partner of the government, the Nationalist Movement Party, was much-discussed but seemed to have little bearing on final vote totals. In Istanbul, whose mayorship carries unparalleled pragmatic and symbolic value, the race was much more fraught. As the largest city in Turkey in terms of population and industry, Istanbul is valuable for its rent-generating properties. Its status as the cultural capital and beating heart of the country has however transformed it into the nucleus of Turkish politics. President Erdoğan started his political career as the mayor of Istanbul in 2001, and engraved this path into the collective public consciousness with his often quoted phrase: “Whoever takes Istanbul takes Turkey.”
The opposition candidate, Ekrem Imamoğlu, was at the time the mayor of a small western district of Istanbul. He emerged as the underdog, supported solely by Kılıçdaroğlu over other candidates which were more prominent in the public eye. He emerged mostly unscathed despite a state-supported campaign which saw him accused of everything from being a “crypto-Greek',”a fifth columnist opposed to Turkish national interests, to a supporter of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party. This was a true trial by fire for a candidate who constructed his persona on tolerance and pacifism as encapsulated by his slogan, “Everything will be alright.” Imamoğlu won the first round of the election with a margin of 14,000 votes, though the results were contested by the governing coalition and later annulled by the supposedly-impartial Supreme Election Council. This proved to be a strategic mistake on the part of President Erdoğan, as Imamoğlu increased his margin of victory to over 800,000 votes to lead the opposition to its most significant victory in decades.
On the heels of this triumph, widely interpreted as the first blow to Erdoğan’s two-decade regime, the opposition coalition was optimistic heading into general elections in 2023. Hopes were dashed, however, when alliance parties were unable to decide on a unity candidate. The nationalist Good Party pushed for Imamoğlu, but was opposed by the main opposition, who cited a pending criminal case filed against him by the government, which would render him unelectable if he lost. Party chairman Kılıçdaroğlu was ultimately chosen as the candidate, upon which the Good Party announced a withdrawal from the alliance, setting off a cascade of meetings and backroom talks which saw crisis averted but the deep fractures in the alliance laid bare.
A campaign that had already been launched on the back foot failed to sway nationalist and islamist voters and further failed to retain the Kurdish vote. A disappointing finish in the first round saw the alliance pivot sharply to the right and campaign on the lowest common denominator in Turkish politics: sending Syrian refugees back to Syria. There was a hasty attempt to establish ties with the far-right ultranationalist Victory Party, whose chairman Ümit Özdağ has been credited with mainstreaming the idea of sending refugees ‘home’ in buses involuntarily. Local media reported that Özdağ, who was courted by both the opposition and the government, had been offered a significant ministerial position from the opposition–a red line for the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party — who was not officially a part of the alliance but had been promised support on key issues. Shockingly, after this large-scale compromise of principles, Özdağ elected to support the government party instead. In the aftermath, Erdoğan won the second round with a comfortable margin of around 2 million votes.
In a way, it has always been Kurdish voters who have decided the fate of the opposition. In 2019, the People’s Democratic Party broke with tradition and did not field a candidate in Istanbul, despite not being party to a formal alliance. During the campaigning stage for the second round of elections, Abdullah Öcalan, the former leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party who has been jailed since 1999, released a letter urging Kurdish voters not to unite under the banner of the opposition alliance. The coverage this letter received on pro-government news channels and discussion panels was no coincidence. When Kurdish voters coalesced around Imamoğlu, it was what won him the election. In 2023, pro-Kurdish parties again chose not to field candidates and to support the opposition alliance for informal guarantees. In return, however, they found an opposition that was perfectly willing to take their votes for granted all while attempting to form alliances with violent racists.
This was yet another datapoint in an ongoing pattern for an opposition which sees Kurds as ‘vote depositories,’ according to senior party officials. Most direfully, the main opposition has consistently displayed a chilling disregard for what was and continues to be potentially the most salient issue in the Kurdish political space: the appointment of ‘trustees’ in the place of elected officials to 48 People’s Democratic Party municipalities since 2019. This practice, which has been referred to as a ‘coup on local democracy’ by party officials and the Council of Europe, has failed to draw overt condemnation from the main opposition.
The opposition alliance broke apart almost immediately after the general elections. The main opposition replaced its chairman for the young(er) and allegedly more charismatic Özgür Özel, who inherited a party that had alienated most of its allies. The People’s Democratic Party, on the other hand, faced pressure from their base to drop the quasi-alliance strategy, especially in the light of an ongoing criminal case over tenuous links to terrorist organizations that could lead to the closure of the party. Party leaders admitted their strategy had not worked, and expressed their intention to run candidates in all big cities in the 2024 elections.
The 2024 local elections will see Imamoğlu defend his position against Murat Kurum, an unremarkable man most notable for his role in rebuilding efforts after the devastating earthquakes of 2023 as the Minister for Forestry, Urbanism, and Climate Change. For Imamoğlu, a victory is essential to establish himself as a viable future presidential candidate, an opportunity for which he has already been passed over once. The field of candidates is a wide one — almost every single political party has at least one candidate in the running. The People’s Democratic Party, for their part, have put forward their co-leaders under the banner of the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party, a joint venture with the left-leaning Green Left Party. Polling figures show that the overwhelming majority of People’s Democratic Party voters who voted for Imamoğlu in the previous election would vote for their own candidate in 2024. In this scenario, the margin of difference between Imamoğlu and Kurum would be a mere two percent.
It is these dynamics which will determine the result that comes out of the Istanbul elections. Like so many other elections in Turkey, what really matters here is not promises or ideological notions. This election is being played out in the past, as a response to two decades of betrayal from the main opposition. Until now, Kurdish voters have gritted their teeth and arguably voted against their best interest for the sake of democracy, and it seems that we must now imagine a world where they do not.