Turkey’s March local elections unseated President Reçep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in several cities and districts nationwide. The AKP lost all but 12 metropolitan municipalities (out of 30) and 21 city municipalities (out of 50) to the opposition, ceding the local governments in Turkey’s largest and most vibrant cities with larger tax bases and greater financial potential. Coming in second in an election for the first time since 2001, this was a surprising defeat to the ruling party, which had built its way to political hegemony in the country through municipal services and the provision of local social and public goods. 

For over two decades, Erdoğan designed Turkey’s past, present, and future. First elected mayor of İstanbul in 1994, Erdoğan rose to prominence in Turkish politics thanks to his performance in the metropolitan municipality. Since 2002, Erdoğan’s AKP has become a dominant force thanks to successive electoral wins, thereby controlling the national government, overseeing most municipalities, and designing the country’s political institutions. In the 2023 national elections, Erdoğan once again won the presidential race and captured the majority of the seats in the parliament, including several seats won by the far-right Islamist parties. 

Shift to the right  

In the lead-up to the twin elections of May 2023, Erdoğan, wary that he might lose the presidential seat and parliamentary majority, was concerned with the deepening economic crisis. Inflation had soared to 70%, and relief efforts following the February 2023 earthquake were poorly managed. 

In response to his government's growing failures, Erdoğan hoped that ideological appeal to religious and nationalist values and political polarization would consolidate his base; his supporters feared that Turkey’s religion, family values, and national integrity were at stake. 

To consolidate the right-wing vote, he co-opted far-right parties with more conservative agendas, like the Kurdish Islamist Huda-Par and neo-Islamist YRP, to preempt defection among his supporters. Erdoğan accepted some of the YRP’s demands, which broadly included that the AKP government quit attempts to establish gender equality, repeal the legislation to prevent violence against women and domestic violence, restrict the scope of alimony payments to women, and criminalize adultery.

The AKP’s electoral alliance with the far-right reinforced its shift toward autocratic Islamization, which had been underway in the last decade.

The AKP’s electoral alliance with the far-right reinforced its shift toward autocratic Islamization, which had been underway in the last decade. Since 2011, Erdoğan, with his growing popularity, exerted greater influence over the Turkish media and courts, suffocated Turkish civil society, and put pressure on electoral councils to overturn results when they were unfavorable. As he subverted democratic practices, he also hollowed out secularism and turned public institutions into agents of Islamization.

Erdoğan redefined the mission of the Directorate of Religions Affairs (Diyanet) to expand its scope of activities to “protection of the family,” while the government restricted abortion and insisted that women have at least three children, stop having Cesarean sections, and refrain from divorce. Erdoğan’s government also ‘reformed’ the education system to introduce greater religious content into the school curriculum and increase the number of religious schools, which received a disproportionate share of the public budget. 

After carrying out a series of symbolic gestures, in 2021, President Erdoğan pulled Turkey out of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women (The İstanbul Convention), which the country hosted and signed in 2011.

When Turkey’s vibrant women’s rights movement mobilized to protest this decision, the AKP government reacted with force, restricting their freedom to protest and assemble. Women’s rights activists were detained and harassed by security forces while pro-government media defamed their activism as anti-Islamic and anti-family. Women’s associations have also been subject to increased scrutiny by the Ministry of Interior which carries out frequent audits. The courts placed further pressure on the movement when a prosecutor initiated an investigation against the largest women’s platform for alleged “illegal and immoral activities.”

AKP’s twin pivot towards Islamization and authoritarianism posed serious threats to political rights and civil liberties and challenged the country’s secular democratic institutions. 

AKP’s twin pivot towards Islamization and authoritarianism posed serious threats to political rights and civil liberties and challenged the country’s secular democratic institutions. Despite this growing repression, the women’s rights movement remained resilient and the most visible pro-democratic movement in the country.

AKP in recent elections

Still, Erdoğan managed to get elected president in 2023. So, why did he lose the local elections ten months later? 

Although the opposition bloc was demoralized and disintegrated after the May 2023 elections, leadership change in the main opposition, deepening economic hardships for middle and low-income families, and the lower stakes of local elections affected the outcome. The fact that the YRP split the vote by fielding its candidates against the AKP also enabled defections among Erdoğan supporters and made the YRP the third-largest party with more than 6% of the votes.

Aside from these short-term factors, Turkey, despite Erdoğan’s autocratic leadership, has a strong democratic stock. Since the first multi-party election in 1950, Turkish voters have gone to the polls to hold their leaders accountable for their underperformance. Women held suffrage since the 1930s and have been a critical part of electoral politics and regularly exercised their rights, even if they have yet to achieve equal representation in elected offices. They indeed formed the majority of voters in the local elections. 

Their choices have, in fact, given direction to Turkish politics. Conservative women, for instance, have long supported Erdoğan partly because he expanded the educational and professional space for women who wear headscarves. 

The party’s increasing attacks on women’s rights did not help either, as younger devout women have begun to turn their backs on Erdoğan’s party.

That support has started to wane in recent months, though. Many defected as they faced challenges in managing family finances due to rampant inflation and declining real wages. The fact that mayors from the main opposition party catered to their local needs with free transportation for mothers, as well as subsidized childcare, milk, and bread, made them a viable option to the underperforming and increasingly corrupt AKP. The party’s increasing attacks on women’s rights did not help either, as younger devout women have begun to turn their backs on Erdoğan’s party.

What’s next?

The local elections proved that Turkish democracy is quite resilient, and the public has maintained its sense of efficacy and electoral accountability despite the country's recent shift toward authoritarianism. 

Although the recent political trends seem to favor the opposition, Erdoğan’s government will remain in charge of national, economic, social, and educational policies until 2028. He also has an oversized influence over the media and the courts. Besides, the YRP is now the third largest party. To co-opt the party and appeal to its base, Erdoğan may pursue greater conservatism and make policy concessions, which may directly affect women. 

He might submit to the pressure of this small but vocal conservative group. He could try to set local governments up for failure by restricting their purviews and budgets, which could harm their prospects of delivering services to the people. He already tried this with the İstanbul and Ankara municipalities, yet the local election results proved their limited impact. Still, Erdoğan has a few tricks up his sleeve. The next four years will be critical for the future of democracy in Turkey.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not express the official position of the Wilson Center.