Months after it secured a majority in Parliament and had its leader installed to top office again, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) faced a critical challenge. Municipal elections in March will be a litmus test for the party to measure the public support for cities' administrations it controlled for years.

Starting on Jan. 7, the party disclosed all candidates for big and small cities and is expected to roll out the list of candidates for district mayoral candidates in the coming days.

Candidates announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are a mix of reliable names, successful incumbent mayors, senior officials of the party and former ministers. Erdoğan on Thursday unveiled the names of candidates for 48 provinces, including the capital Ankara. The list was similar to the one unveiled on Jan. 7, with most incumbent mayors nominated again, such as Konya's Uğur Ibrahim Altay or Gaziantep's Fatma Şahin. However, eight names who served for a long time as AK Party mayors were replaced with new candidates. Some were mayors of provinces affected by the February 2023 earthquakes. The party has already signaled new candidates for those provinces. In some places, the party turned to former and current bureaucrats, such as Kars Governor Ziya Polat, nominated for Adıyaman and Abdullah Erin, a Mardin-born former governor nominated as a candidate for the same southeastern province.

In Ankara, the party turned to Turgut Altınok, a veteran mayor who long ran the working-class Keçiören district and cultivated wide public support, though he switched parties over the past decades. Altınok has a similar background with stints in nationalist parties like his main rival Mansur Yavaş, who runs for the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP).

The AK Party is trying to win back control of the main cities from the opposition CHP after unprecedented defeats in the 2019 elections.

The CHP rose to power in Istanbul and Ankara in the 2019 elections, puncturing the aura of political invincibility the AK Party garnered for more than two decades thanks to overwhelming public support. Erdoğan has set himself the goal of winning back both cities along with opposition-held Izmir after securing reelection last year for a five-year term as president.

The AK Party had earlier this month selected former environment minister Murat Kurum to challenge Istanbul's current mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, in the polls.

Erdoğan on Thursday said that their main rival, the CHP, was a hostage of imperialist circles supportive of PKK terrorism.

"Our country's second-largest party, the CHP, is acting as a servant of imperialism," Erdoğan told supporters during the event where candidates were announced on Thursday.

"We are not only going to liberate our cities and give them proper services. We will also save them from these servants of imperialism and terrorism," he said. "Terrorism" here refers to CHP's close ties with 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). Though the latter signaled they would not endorse the CHP candidates as they did in earlier elections, it left room for a possible alliance in some cities.

On Saturday, the party is set to announce candidates for the districts of Istanbul, which includes places with more population than an average province in Anatolia. Meanwhile, the opposition parties take their time to announce their picks. The Good Party (IP), a former ally of the CHP, for instance, is expected to disclose the names later this month. The New Welfare Party (YRP), which endorsed Erdoğan in the general elections in 2023, appears undecided on renewed support in municipal elections in big cities. The party, led by Fatih Erbakan, son of Erdoğan's political mentor, the late Necmettin Erbakan, so far announced 309 candidates, including 10 for the big cities.