Türkiye is bracing for municipal elections set for March 31, 2024. As smaller parties have already fielded their candidates, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) continues to pursue a meticulous process to select names for mayors and city and town councils.

On Sunday, the party held a meeting with its members around Türkiye to choose among the 6,000 people who applied for candidacy.

Every AK Party branch administration in provinces is asked to choose a name, while members are required to determine three names among applicants in electronic voting. The party administration will then prepare a report on candidates picked by branch administrations and thousands of AK Party members and will present it to the party’s head, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğan, after consulting with the party administration, will give final approval to the candidate list. Candidates are expected to be unveiled in December though no dates have been announced yet.

Some 150,000 members of AK Party branches joined the online voting simultaneously held in 81 provinces. Members are also asked about their opinion on the tenure of current AK Party mayors. The party is already conducting public opinion polls on potential candidates.

AK Party deputy chairs oversaw the electronic polls in major cities on Sunday as the party members gathered. Hamza Dağ was in AK Party-run Konya as the members convened in a sports hall. Dağ said they started working for municipal elections immediately after May’s general election, in which the party and President Erdoğan emerged winners.

Candidacy applications opened on Nov. 9 and ended on Nov. 22. Dağ said their culture of democracy continued with opinion polls among its members. "We have to be meticulous in determining the candidates," he told reporters. Dağ said the names of candidates will likely be announced in the first half of December.

Dağ criticized municipalities run by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and said CHP mayors ignored their constituency during their tenure of over four years.

"They have gone to eat fish, on vacation while their cities struggled with disasters," he said, in a veiled reference to Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu who drew the ire of the public when he was spotted having dinner with his guests while Türkiye’s most populated city succumbed to fallout of a major snowstorm.

"They worked for their own political futures, not for the cities," he said, in another reference to Imamoğlu who was apparently preoccupied with finding the next candidate to replace CHP Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu before the latter was ousted by Özgür Özel in a recent intra-party election.

"CHP’s way of running municipalities is purely a string of PR stunts. We cannot give people the years they lost under CHP municipalities but we will return the cities to a better state than CHP mayors dragged them into," he said.

Erkan Kandemir, the party’s deputy chair, was in Izmir, a CHP stronghold, for Sunday’s vote. "We saw what became of Izmir in the slightest case of precipitation. Izmir and its towns deserve better," Kandemir told reporters.

Though it retained the majority of municipalities in the 2019 elections, the party aims to win more, especially in big cities like the capital, Ankara, Istanbul and the third largest city, Izmir.

Between May and October, the party conducted 350 surveys, seeking an insight into voter behavior.

The AK Party launched an unofficial election campaign one day after the first round of general elections on May 14. Despite uncertainty about the outcome of the runoff held on May 28, the party has already focused on municipal elections. It first renewed cadres, replacing 52 provincial chairs and over 400 district chairs.

Following the recent extraordinary congress, the party also added new names to its central executive committee and parted ways with some stalwart figures.

The party’s surveys concentrated on big cities run by the opposition parties and asked the voters to list the major problems they suffered from. In Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, the most prominent issues were high living costs, transportation issues, irregular migration and infrastructure problems.

The issue of stray animals also looms large in the list of issues voters complain about. A string of attacks by stray dogs that injured and killed people across Türkiye in the past few years brought the issue to the spotlight. The government has pledged to tackle the issue by taking more stray dogs to shelters, but shelters run by municipalities appear insufficient to host a large number of homeless animals.

As for irregular migration, the government stepped up efforts to better inspect undocumented migrants and sped up the deportation process.

In Istanbul, the AK Party’s campaign theme will be urban transformation, an ambitious nationwide project to replace crumbling old buildings with new ones. Istanbul is among the cities under imminent risk of earthquakes and Türkiye stepped up efforts to speed up the transformation project after the Feb. 6 earthquakes, which killed thousands in Türkiye’s south.

Istanbul has been run by the CHP since 2019, but the tenure of Imamoğlu has been stained with failures, from chronic problems in mass transportation, such as buses often breaking down to subway escalators that almost daily stop functioning, to the chagrin of Istanbulites forced to climb steep stairs. Imamoğlu is criticized for poor response to major meteorological incidents, from floods to heavy snowfall.

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

Erdoğan has instructed his party to seek out candidates with a good public image, "not candidates simply favored (by political lobbies)."

The AK Party lost control of Istanbul and Ankara for the first time in 25 years, as well as five of Türkiye’s largest cities, to the CHP in the 2019 elections, something the opposition characterized as a blow to the AK Party’s popularity, but both the president and his party came out victorious in May.