Political Analysis #5

Two weeks until local elections

So mayoral elections in Turkey are at the end of the month.

I wasn’t planning on spending much time on this one. It didn’t seem very significant. For a while I didn’t look at the polls or changed the channel when it came up. I’d tune out my friends when they talked about it.

But it kept coming at me from all sides, clawing at my attention, until I had to admit that there were some interesting things happening in there.

I’d use the original, but who am I kidding? George it is.

So here we are. I have to admit that this is shaping up to be a strange election. Up until a few weeks ago, it looked boring. The Erdoğan regime was building on its success in last year’s national elections. They had smashed the opposition into pieces and remained united themselves. Local elections only require pluralities, so they could just run their cookie-cutter strategy across the board and take back the big cities, including Ankara and Istanbul.

Some of that dynamic persists, but there are also significant deviations. I’ll go through some of it below. As always, feel free to comment or email with any questions you may have. Those with a Substack account can also DM me or start a chat thread.