With a few days remaining before the municipal elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday was in the northern province of Tokat. The Turkish leader highlighted the significance of the vote, the first test for his People's Alliance since last year's general election.

"Any conscious person knows that it is not about Erdoğan, not about the AK Party, not about the People's Alliance. It is about (the fate of) Türkiye," Erdoğan told some 45,000 supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party).

During Erdoğan's long tenure as prime minister and president, the veteran politician, for the first time, went into a runoff election after an apparently tight race against the opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the 2023 general election. Earlier, the president signaled that the municipal elections would be his "last" election, implying he won't seek another term in 2028.

The president said some "circles" were disturbed by Türkiye's threefold growth in 21 years of AK Party governance and advances in the League of Democracy with rights and freedom reforms. "Those who cannot accept how Türkiye raised its clout in its region and in the world with its moral and fair stance wait to ambush Türkiye. As we set our sights on bigger goals through the 'Century of Türkiye' (vision), some people await us to stumble and fall. They are so disturbed by the presence of our nation in this exceptional region that their thousands of years old hatred is still burning bright. Some Western statesmen personally told me this fact in our talks," Erdoğan said.

He stated that the AK Party governments and the People's Alliance staved off "all attacks" with the support of the nation and the will of God and foiled plots.

Erdoğan, buoyed by a strong showing in last year's general elections, has set his sights on winning back Istanbul, Türkiye's most populated city. In Tokat, he asked voters to "phone" their relatives in Istanbul, which is home to more than 450,000 people who migrated from Tokat, to convince them to vote for the AK Party's candidate.

The main opposition, the Republican People's Party (CHP), seized back control of the city, Türkiye's economic powerhouse, in 2019 for the first time since before Erdoğan ruled it as mayor in the 1990s. Those watershed 2019 elections also saw the opposition win back the capital, Ankara, and keep power in the crucial Aegean port city of Izmir.

Erdoğan has entrusted his former environment minister, Murat Kurum, to run for mayor of Istanbul in the upcoming election.

The powerful president bounced back last year to win a tough presidential election that came in the throes of a massive earthquake that claimed more than 53,000 lives in Türkiye.

Now, Erdoğan has set his sights on winning back Istanbul, the city where he grew up and where he launched his political career as mayor in 1994.

Incumbent CHP Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu edged out an Erdoğan ally in a 2019 election that gained international headlines for being controversially annulled. He won a re-run vote by a massive margin, turning him into an instant hero for the opposition.

The 52-year-old is widely seen as the opposition's best bet at winning back the presidency from the AK Party in 2028.

"Imamoğlu is an effective political operator and at this point in time represents one of the very few glimmers of hope for constituents who oppose Erdoğan and the AK Party," Anthony Skinner, director of research at geopolitical advisory firm Marlow Global, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

But last year's poor general election showing fractured the opposition and prompted 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), the third largest in Parliament, to put up its own candidates for municipal vote. This could cost the opposition.

"The underperformance of the political opposition in the May 2023 elections demonstrated its failure to effectively challenge the political status quo and, by extension, the resilience and resourcefulness of Erdoğan," Skinner said.

In 2019, Imamoğlu received support from a wide range of political parties, including the right-wing Good Party (IP). But the lack of unity this time will likely cost Imamoğlu several percentage points.

"We will open the door of a new era on March 31," Erdoğan told a huge rally in Istanbul on Sunday, hoping to unite supporters behind Kurum. "We will work a lot and win back Istanbul."

Berk Esen, an associate professor at Istanbul's Sabancı University, portrayed Istanbul as "the biggest prize in Turkish politics."

He said winning back the city was extremely important for Erdoğan, 70, who said these March local elections would be his last.

"Obviously, this is his city," Esen said. "But it goes beyond that."

"Istanbul is a city with enormous municipal resources that provides services to 16 million citizens," he said.

Opinion polls suggest it will be a close-run affair.

But Erman Bakırcı from the Konda polling company insisted Imamoglu was "ahead" in Istanbul and suggested there could be "a gap between the (opinion) polls and the actual election results." Osman Nuri Kabaktepe, head of the Istanbul branch of the AK Party, told AFP that Istanbul was crucial because it is "our gateway to the world," comparing it to the importance of New York and Berlin.

In the capital, Ankara, CHP Mayor Mansur Yavaş appears to be ahead in the polls. But "a very tight race" could play out, political communications expert Eren Aksoyoğlu said, adding that AK Party's nationalist allies were "putting all their weight into the battle."

On Monday, Erdoğan said Türkiye would observe the "feast of national will" on March 31.

"One thing that worried me most in the past 30 years is the state of the opposition in our country. Türkiye, unfortunately, does not have an opposition ready to govern nor an opposition that will inspect what the government does. We always went against a system of tutelage and confronted coup attempts. The mindset of the CHP took sides with putschists and did nothing else. So, we have to work on our own to learn from our mistakes. Today's opposition is disappointing. They fight each other so much, they barely have time to check out the developments in the world," Erdoğan said.

The president said it would be the 18th election for himself and his party, and they all came out victorious in all those.

"God willing, we will see an end to this opposition mindset," he said.