Some 61 million voters are expected to show up at polling stations on Sunday to elect mayors and other administrators in local elections. The municipal elections, which is simply an administrative affair to run the cities elsewhere, has been more than that in Türkiye for a long time. This Sunday, long-serving President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ever-popular Justice and Development Party (AK Party) will see whether their rule will be cemented by growing voter support.

The elections will gauge Erdoğan’s popularity as his AK Party tries to win back key cities it lost five years ago. A victory will be added to the president’s impressive record of successive election wins in the past two decades.

Meanwhile, retaining the key cities' municipalities would help invigorate Turkish opposition, left fractured and demoralized following a defeat in last year's presidential election.

In the last local elections held in 2019, a united opposition won the municipalities of the capital Ankara and the commercial hub of Istanbul, ending the ruling party's 25-year hold over the cities.

The loss of Istanbul especially was a major blow to Erdoğan, who began his political career as mayor of the metropolis of nearly 16 million in 1994. Erdoğan has named Murat Kurum, a 47-year-old former urbanization and environment minister, to run against incumbent Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu, a popular politician from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP). Imamoğlu has been touted as a possible presidential candidate to challenge Erdoğan.

This time around, however, Imamoğlu, 52, is running in the local elections without the support of 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) and nationalist Good Party (IP) who are fielding their own candidates. Elsewhere, the New Welfare Party (YRP), chaired by Erdoğan’s political mentor, former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, threw its hat into the ring. The YRP courts conservative voters.

Opinion polls point to a neck-and-neck race between Imamoğlu and Kurum who have both promised infrastructure projects to render buildings earthquake-proof and to ease the city's chronic traffic congestion.

The opposition is widely expected to maintain its hold on Ankara where the incumbent mayor Mansur Yavaş, who has also been named as a future presidential candidate, remains popular.

Leaving nothing to chance, Erdoğan, who has been in power as prime minister and then as president for more than two decades, has been holding election rallies across the country, campaigning on behalf of candidates running for mayor.

On Tuesday, he was in Aksaray, a province in the Anatolian heartland. Addressing a crowd of some 35,000 people, Erdoğan acknowledged Türkiye’s current economic problems and said their priority was to curb the rising inflation. He cited Türkiye broke records in production and growth in the past 21 years of AK Party rule and was now facing the fallout of wars and crises.

"We are fighting high cost of living stemming from a hurting inflation," he said.

He highlighted the government’s work to improve the income of pensioners, including raises and bonuses, adding that better days were ahead for Türkiye once the inflation drops in the second half of the year.

"It doesn’t matter how much we pay the public in this inflation circumstances. We are taking steps to recover losses in purchasing power," he said.

A six-party opposition alliance, led by the CHP, has disintegrated following a devastating election defeat last year. The alliance's supporters were left demoralized after it failed to unseat Erdoğan despite the economic woes and the fallout from a catastrophic earthquake.

The CHP's ability to hold onto the major cities it took five years ago would help revitalize the party and allow it to present itself as an alternative to the AK Party. Losing Ankara and Istanbul to the AK Party could, on the other hand, end Yavaş and Imamoğlu’s presidential aspirations.

The CHP went for a leadership change soon after the electoral defeat, but it remains to be seen whether the party's new chairperson, 49-year-old pharmacist Özgür Özel, can excite supporters.