Why Turkey's Municipal Elections are of Global Significance

When Reccep Tayyep Erdogan party, the AKP, won a landslide victory in Turkey's 2002 general elections he became a very different kind of Turkish leader from his predecessors. The AKP is a religious party in what was an avowedly secular political tradition.

For a time, Erdogan presided over a booming economy and was hailed for being a modernizing muslim leader in a troubled region. His relations with Europe and the United States were strong, and he sought to play a stabilizing role in the middle east.

But all the while, Erdogan was consolidating his power. It started slowly at first and in recent years the degradation of Turkey;s independent institutions has accelerated. This includes clampdown on media and the corruption of the courts and a massive political purge following what Erdogan alleged was an attempted coup in 2016.

Erdogan was become the quintessential example of a new kind of leader around the world--the illiberal authoritarian democrat. That is, someone who is democratically elected, but then systematically uses the power of the state to entrench himself in power.

This brings us to recent events in Turkey. On March 31, an opposition leader Ekrem Immoglu won election as Mayor of Istanbul, a position incidentally that Ergoan held before he became Prime minister. Election authorities, clearly at Erdogan's request, invalidated those results and called for a re-run of the election and weeks later, Immoglu won again--this time by a wider margin.

So what does this election tell us about Ergodan's hold on power and the trajectory of Turkish politics? On the line with me to explain the global significance of municipal elections in Turkey is Howard Eisentstat, he is an associate professor of middle eastern history atSt Lawrence University and senior non-resident fellow a the Project on Middle East Democracy.

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