Faced with a completely different political landscape after the overturning of the municipal elections, Tayyip Erdogan finds himself just one year after his third election as Turkey’s president.
The loss of Istanbul and the country’s two other major municipalities of Ankara and Izmir, but above all the major electoral decline of the AKP party, which on the basis of the comparative results is narrowly in second place behind the CHP, show that President Erdogan is no longer ‘invulnerable’.
He now has a strong opponent in Ekrem Imamoglu who, despite the weaknesses and fragmentation of the opposition, has managed to inflict a second personal political blow on Erdogan by winning the Istanbul Municipality.
In a battle that Erdogan chose to fight himself as head of his party, thus wanting to highlight the importance of the battle of Istanbul for the country’s course under his leadership.
The results now undermine the image of Erdogan’s political hegemony and pose serious challenges to his next steps, which are a revision of the constitution and possibly early elections to seek another term beyond 2028.
With the new facts if they become entrenched in Turkey’s political scene, T. will hardly be able to win a referendum on changing the Constitution and will have to seek new alliances with parties and forces from the conservative nationalist and Islamic areas in order to have a chance.
This will likely lead him to continue his current policies at home and a more aggressive foreign policy, although as it turns out his “Achilles heel” has been the economy as he underestimated the impact of high inflation on the popular classes that make up his electoral base.
The dilemmas for the Turkish leader will be many in the coming day as any detour from the “orthodox” economic policy pursued by Finance Minister Simsek in order to proceed with benefits and pension increases would once again derail the Turkish economy…
And now T.Erdogan realizes that the “recipes” he followed in the last 22 years to tame the opposition and the discontent of certain social strata are now outdated.
The map of Turkey after the municipal elections – AKP second party after 22 years
Meanwhile Erdogan was trying tonight to send a message of calm and that everything is under control and he is committed to his presidential duties.
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Check out the posts from the presidency in the last few hours after his defeat began to become apparent. All of the posts mention the phone calls the Turkish president had with foreign leaders
