With less than 10 days to municipal elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Friday promoted the candidates of his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) for Karabük, a Black Sea province. His address to a crowd of supporters, as usual, focused on criticism of the opposition.

"Elections are not merely a feast of democracy in our country. It is also an opportunity to see who sides with whom," he said. The president said that the new administration of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) "got off easy" with staving off criticism of their own electorate. "They heap the blame (for past election losses) on Mr. Kemal," Erdoğan said, using an affectionate nickname he devised for CHP’s former chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Kılıçdaroğlu lost an intraparty election to current chair Özgür Özel last November after he came under fire for successive defeats in general elections against the AK Party.

Erdoğan recalled the "table for six" alliance of the opposition parties set up against him in last year’s general election. "What's left of this freak alliance is a freak relationship between CHP and DEM," he said, referring to the pro-PKK Green Left Party (YSP), informally known as the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), a successor of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). "They claim they are not allied with but they are endorsing candidates of each other. DEM had a bargain with CHP and we don’t know what a dirty deal they made. If they don’t have dignity, they would even volunteer to join the terrorist organization," he said, referring to PKK.

The president said DEM and CHP are doomed to fail in the face of his party's policies to "serve the public with projects and public services."

In the aftermath of last May’s general elections, which Erdoğan and his ruling People’s Alliance won against a six-party opposition bloc, municipal elections on March 31 look set to be a test of popular support for all competing sides. The party, which has more than 11 million members nationwide, is aiming to concentrate its program on strategically key provinces, particularly by assigning small groups to make house calls to establish face-to-face communication.

More than 61 million people are eligible to vote, and 1 million young voters will cast their ballots for the first time in this election. More than 50% of the voters are women, while men make up 49.1% of the electorate, according to the statistics. More than 3.3 million of voters are aged 75 and above. Most of the electorate is in 30 big cities, while more than 13.5 million voters will cast their ballots in 51 other cities.

Voters in opposition-run municipalities mostly complain about the lack of municipal services, such as problems in water utilities that lead to frequent water outages and traffic issues stemming from troubles in road construction and improvement of existing roads.