The March 31 local elections resulted in a victory for the main opposition party, CHP. The ruling party AKP became the second party for the first time since its foundation. This was not an expected development, given the results of the elections held in May last year. Therefore, these results brought about a new debate.
Doğan Gürpınar, one of the academics who tried to provide an ideological explanation for the CHP’s success, argued that the result disproved the argument that nationalism was on the rise, while Ali Yaycıoğlu interpreted the election results as the success of the left.
On the other hand, the widespread opinion is that the economic crisis, especially the deterioration in pensions, had an impact on the results. In a post-election survey, İPSOS found that 58% of pensioners voted for the CHP. According to this view, the voters’ reaction showed that they had got rid of obsessions with ideology and identity and could even vote for CHP candidates if necessary.
When this is combined with the ideology debate, it can be argued that the conservative and nationalist identity attributed to the Anatolian provinces has become irrelevant. As a matter of fact, Bekir Ağırdır, writing in Oksijen Newspaper, talked about a great social transformation and considered the March 31st elections as a belated birth.
It is true that the entire cost of the economic policy implemented after the May elections has fallen on the shoulders of people with narrow and middle incomes. It is also true that nationalist and right-wing parties failed in the March 31st elections. But these facts do not confirm major social changes or ideological ruptures. As Ali Çarkoğlu puts it, the results are different, but society remains the same.
Another development that deepened polarization at least as much as the presidential system was the elimination of the commercial media. Most recently, the Erdoğan administration has transferred Doğan Media to Yıldırım Demirören, a businessman close to Erdoğan, with a loan from Ziraat Bank. Thus, the era of mainstream commercial media came to an end in the country. In its place, publicly funded pro-government media and weak opposition media remained.
Following the 2019 local elections, the opposition media has gradually developed following the opposition’s successful results. On the other hand, effective alternative digital platforms were established, especially in the opposition camp, and they managed to survive with funding from abroad. However, with the collapse of the mainstream, there was no media where both pro-government and opposition people received news in common. Thus, citizens were exposed to intense propaganda from both the ruling and opposition sides.
As a result of this propaganda, a common sense of truth was lost in society. Moreover, journalists who took refuge in the opposition media from the mainstream had no choice but to play the role of activists and opinion leaders. When the opposition media was added to the ruling media, which was already doing this, the society was completely drawn into political debates and became more partisan.
The local elections were the moment when the balance of polarization broke down against the AKP. Because the AKP failed to mobilize its own voters sufficiently. Voters who had long voted for Erdoğan either did not go to the polls to support AKP or MHP (nationalist party who supports Erdoğan) candidates or voted for CHP and YRP (newly founded Islamic opposition party) candidates. On the other hand, the CHP managed to rally almost all opposition voters around its logo.
For some time now, the gap between Erdoğan’s personal vote and the AKP’s party vote has been widening. This was clearly seen in the 2018 and 2023 elections as a problem of the presidential system. While voters did not question Erdoğan’s presidency, they expressed their objection to the AKP by voting for parties other than the AKP that supported Erdoğan. With the presidential system, the AKP as a political party has lost its influence and no AKP politician has expressed an opinion on the agenda. Erdoğan’s advisors, journalists close to the presidential palace and even Twitter trolls have become more politically influential than AKP MPs.
There is no longer an AKP politician who stands out and expresses an opinion on any social or political development. Advisors and bureaucrats appointed by Erdoğan are far more influential than AKP politicians. This is weakening the AKP day by day, and parties like the MHP and the YRP are able to get the votes of voters who previously voted for the AKP in exchange for their support for Erdoğan. In other words, the AKP cannot fulfill the voters’ need for politics. Instead, parties like the MHP and the YRP aspire to represent the reaction of right-conservative voters without the need for a radical move like changing the head of state.
For the AKP to succeed in the elections, the local elections had to take place in an atmosphere of strong polarization, with voters voting for other concepts rather than candidates. This required Erdoğan himself to take to the field and make fiery speeches. The opposition had to be criminalized and AKP supporters had to be rewarded with economic benefits.
However, it is impossible for the cabinet formed after the May elections and the rational policies pursued in the economy and foreign policy to coexist with the usual politics of polarization. The language that defined the opposition as traitors, terrorists and threats to survival of the state in previous elections and presented the elections as a holy struggle against the Western Crusader states could not be used in these elections. Turkey is going through a severe economic crisis, which requires the AKP to act as a coherent actor in both domestic and foreign politics. Therefore, the AKP could not use conspiratorial, anti-Western and militarist rhetoric that threatens regional stability and could not create the atmosphere of polarization that it wanted during the local election campaign.
In fact, Erdoğan reacted more softly than expected on the Gaza issue. Trade between Israel and Turkey continued until April 9. Erdogan has been cautious and avoided actions that could jeopardize the barely repaired relations with both Egypt and the Gulf countries and the rapprochement process with the US. Those who witnessed the days of the Arab Spring will remember that Turkey was the house of condolence for any humanitarian tragedy in the Islamic geography. And the opposition, which called for sanity, was blamed for supporting the Sisi coup in Egypt and Assad’s operations in Syria. So it would not be surprising if Erdoğan used such crises to mobilize domestic political mobilization. But this time he had to be more careful. This policy of moderation and ambivalence, in turn, allowed the YRP, which had managed to recruit more extreme groups, to play politics in a moralistic and populist space. Thus, the AKP came under pressure from groups further to the right than itself.
Finally, we need to focus on actors. The most positive change in the opposition after the May elections was the defeat of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu at the CHP congress in November and the election of Özgür Özel as the new leader. This development remotivated opposition voters who had become apathetic and disengaged from politics. Instead of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and his colleagues, whom many opposition members blamed for the May defeat, a younger cadre came to the CHP leadership.
The most important feature of this new cadre was to change Kılıçdaroğlu’s alliance strategy, which was based on protocols. Kılıçdaroğlu had chosen to proceed on the basis of power sharing with different ideological groups and political parties. He presented the resulting alliance as a moral and democratic transformation project.
Instead of publicly negotiating with the elites of other opposition parties, the new CHP administration chose to nominate names with different political backgrounds under the party logo. Moreover, winning the elections has been transformed from a great moral cause into a rhetoric of limiting and warning Erdoğan. Such compromises are more difficult to realize than one might think. Until this election, it was expected that a few party elites would shake hands behind closed doors. Before these elections, however, the CHP commissioned preliminary surveys and field research for almost all electoral districts. The candidate selection process was based on this data. In addition, research continued during the campaign and problematic areas were addressed. In other words, it is possible to talk about an institutional reflex that made the CHP’s success more than a coincidence.
On the other hand, the IYI Party (opponent nationalist party) was plunged into a major institutional crisis after the May elections, with the party’s top echelon publicly accusing each other of corruption. Five deputies who entered parliament from IYI Party lists resigned, followed by a wave of resignations in party organizations. Party leader Akşener tried to overcome this process by saying that her party would enter the elections without an alliance and with an intense anti-CHP discourse. However, the IYI Party was perceived as a political structure that determines its strategy according to Akşener’s mood rather than an institutionalized structure.
Akşener displayed a victim psychology, seeing the source of the problems as external and acting out of anger over a conflict with the CHP on which she had no interests. Especially with the influence of the CHP media, Akşener was perceived by the metropolitan voters as an actor who wanted to make the CHP lose more than the ruling AKP. When this was combined with the weakness of the candidates, the IYI Party was seen as a party that had lost its integrity and had no clear political purpose, resulting in the IYI Party losing 3 million 100 thousand voters.
The HDP-YSP (leftist opposition) line, which was renamed DEM after the elections, continued to experience a complex process within itself. Selahattin Demirtaş lost his monopoly on leadership. Names like Leyla Zana and Ahmet Türk came to the fore and hinted at a possible rapprochement with the AKP. This argument emphasized that the Kurds were losing as they got closer to the opposition, and claimed that diverging from the opposition, i.e. indirectly winning Erdoğan over, would bring some gains for the Kurds.
The DEM followed an ambiguous strategy here. It fielded its own candidates in many constituencies but did not run an enthusiastic election campaign. Moreover, Selahattin Demirtaş made a comment supporting neither his party’s candidate nor Imamoğlu for the Istanbul elections. Thus, while DEM received votes below its potential, many DEM voters living in metropolitan areas turned to CHP candidates. The main reason for this was nothing but the leaderless and unstable behavior of the DEM party.
The election results showed that the CHP has increased its strength in the opposition. In other words, the CHP’s victory was not only against the AKP, but also against the other opposition parties. The reason for this, obviously, was that it was able to activate the reflex to change after the May elections and to put forward a style that was both flexible and serious in order to win the elections.
Neither the IYI Party nor the DEM was able to display this integrity and institutionalization. Therefore, ideological and sociological readings comparing the May 14 elections with the March 31 elections actually neglect phenomena such as the deterioration in the balance of polarization, the institutional capacity of the CHP and the economic crisis that put a lot of strain on certain segments of the population.
Are the Elections Over?
It is actually not yet clear how the elections turned out. The March 31st elections will gain meaning with Erdoğan’s reaction to these results. The first possibility is that Erdoğan will continue with his current economic policy and foreign policy approach. However, this has become a threat to his own power.
Deprived of instruments such as polarization and populism, and thus unable to become authoritarian enough, Erdoğan may lose the game he built with the presidential system. Erdoğan’s strategy of dividing the opposition to overcome this did not work in the March 31st elections. Erdoğan may therefore abandon the presidential system and seek a new system in which the parliament gains weight. This could replace bipolar politics with a multipolar system and strengthen parties that have been eroded by polarization, especially the opposition DEM and İYİP.
In addition, the gap between Erdoğan’s vote and the AKP’s vote may narrow and voters who fled the AKP for parties such as the MHP and the YRP may return to the AKP. The parliamentary system will force the AKP to become a policy-making body again, representing society rather than the state. The commercial media could be re-established and the polarization in the media could gradually decrease.
This possibility implies a fundamental change. The AKP is likely to break the coalition it has built since 2015 and face conflicts in the political sphere and the bureaucracy. To overcome these costs, it will need to find new allies. It is thought that if the AKP, which is preparing a new constitution, comes up with a parliamentary system proposal, it will receive support from the IYI Party, Deva, Gelecek, Saadet and even the DEM Party, and the CHP will be forced to support this proposal. Thus, the MHP would be the party pushed out of the system. However, this would not be a smooth transition, given the increasing weight of the MHP in the judiciary, public administration and police bureaucracy in recent years.
In the second possibility, Erdoğan may think that the current policy has lost him the elections and may revert to authoritarian, arbitrary and populist discourse. Thus, he could rally the People’s Alliance voters around him again, which he has failed to mobilize. He may dismiss the economic administration led by Mehmet Şimşek and return to the low interest rate policy. Thus, he can quickly recover the votes he lost in the local elections.
However, given the current economic conditions, this policy would be a very costly choice. At a time when the economy is showing signs of recovery, a sudden decision to deviate from the current policy and abandon the rational stance adopted in foreign policy may create an economic collapse that cannot be recovered even with populist policies. Therefore, the absence of elections for the next four years buys Erdoğan some time.
The last possibility is that Erdoğan will give the current rational policies until the end of the year and wait for inflation to fall. If this policy succeeds and the economy stabilizes again, he can continue on this path. He would not be in a hurry to change the presidential system and would act based on how society reacts to the improving economic situation. If the expected success does not materialize, it may revert to a populist and authoritarian policy. Until then, it can fill the time by occupying the agenda with constitutional debates. We can say that this option is more likely to be adopted. This is because Erdoğan may not want to make a move with the current economic conditions. He may avoid triggering either a political or economic crisis and prefer to wait until the end of the year.