President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) on Thursday officially launched its campaign for the presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14 as it pledged to kick off a series of mega projects to push Türkiye ahead in the second century of its being a republic.
From advanced city hospitals to “Europe’s biggest airport” and oil discoveries to the defense industry, the AK Party is promising to shoot the country into “an era of development” if it claims victory next month.
The party rose to power 20 years ago as Türkiye emerged from a period of rampant inflation, promising sound government after the coalition of the time was accused of mismanagement. At the height of its success, Türkiye enjoyed a protracted economic boom with rising living standards for its 85 million people.
As the winner of successive elections in the past two decades, the AK Party boasts of fulfilling its pledges in previous elections. The arching theme of its campaign will be the centenary of the Republic of Türkiye, which will be marked on Oct. 29, 2023.
Under its Century of Türkiye vision, a set of ambitious projects and steps Erdoğan announced in October 2022, the party will focus on “development” in the name of the party and will highlight investments to that extent, along with democratic and social steps.
The AK Party promises to “make Türkiye shine” through its existing triumphs in air travel, health care, industry and defense. Istanbul Airport, which remains Europe’s biggest airport, adding more state-of-the-art city hospitals, the product of a major transformation that started in the 2000s and accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and advanced drilling ships like Abdülhamid Han and Kanuni, with which Türkiye hopes to end its dependency on foreign resources by unearthing natural gas and oil reserves in its northern waters, are among projects the party promises to expand.
The party also boasts 650,000 residential units across Anatolia, $3.7 billion worth of exports and an 80% domesticity rate in Türkiye’s defense industry, including indigenous software, and manned and unmanned combat jets, as well as the homegrown automobile Togg, which hit the road with countrywide deliveries starting this week.
The AK Party government and Presidency, which weathered multiple challenges over the years, from a bloody coup attempt to economic hardships, head to the elections in the aftermath of the Feb. 6 earthquakes, which killed thousands in the country’s southeast.
The disaster led the party to modify its campaign in respect of the victims and center earthquake recovery in its projects, with Erdoğan saying, “People are mourning, people are worried and our cities struggle for recovery. In such a climate, nobody can conduct election campaigns as they did in the past; they should not do. It will be a quiet but influential campaign, and our main theme will be the Century of Türkiye.”
For Erdoğan, the election is particularly crucial for “the direction of all the right moves we took in the past 20 years” as he believes his party is “on a course we cannot afford to deviate from, let alone halt.”
“We represent a political mindset working for the good of the nation by shortening (bureaucratic) processes miraculously, unlike the illusion of shared governance through the parliamentary system,” he previously said in a jab at his opposition.
Scrapping Türkiye’s new presidential system in favor of what they call a “Reinforced Parliamentary System,” which envisages seven vice presidents and a potential prime minister for the president in a coalition government, has been a consistent electoral promise for the six-party opposition bloc Nation Alliance.
The bloc’s joint candidate and the head of the main opposition’s Republican People's Party (CHP) Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu launched his own ambitious campaign late last month with a video ad promising “Springs will come again.”
In the meantime, the party is hoping to bolster voter turnout abroad after it slumped to 50% in the last elections, according to the AK Party’s Overseas Election Coordination Center (YKSM) chief and Adıyaman representative, Muhammed Fatih Toprak.
“In the past two weeks, Türkiye has registered at least 120,000 applications from citizens abroad (for the May 14 vote), which is huge and proves our citizens overseas are very interested in this election and we have a lot to do,” Toprak told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Friday.
The party is currently working to ensure some 3 million people abroad can go to polls, he added.
Denouncing the description of election preparations in Germany, which houses roughly 3 million Turks, as “an election war,” Toprak said: “The upcoming election will be very critical; we call it a democracy festival and expect our citizens in European countries to make more contributions to this festival. They will show they have a say in the future of Türkiye.”
The voting period abroad starts more than two weeks ahead of Türkiye, on April 27; Turkish Consulates in Germany, the United States, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), Britain, Denmark and France will be setting up voting stations for the first time in some 24 cities for the occasion, Toprak revealed.
After Erdoğan oversaw landmark legislative changes in 2014 that enabled Turks abroad to cast their ballots via polling stations, citizens used to vote only in areas surrounding the consulates they were registered in after booking an appointment. “This was the biggest service the AK Party provided its citizens. Turks abroad have issues that concern both (Europe) and Türkiye, like mobile phones, using foreign-registered cars in Türkiye and retirement. We continue working to improve their conditions,” Toprak said.
This year, citizens registered in the address rosters can vote at the nearest assigned place, he added, noting that the YKSM operates 750 branches in 180 regions worldwide and is working on an election “organization” rather than a “campaign.”
A total of 500 ballot boxes will be set up abroad, with nearly 10,000 supervisors on duty.
Toprak further pointed out a surge in the young voter population, saying, “There are only 150,000 left of the first-generation Turks that immigrated here over 60 years ago. The rest of our citizens are people ranging between the ages of 18-50, indicating a large young population. We are working to meet their expectations and demands.”
