As of the New Year, Türkiye is set to officially kick off the race for local elections scheduled for March 31, 2024, when some 64 million eligible voters will elect new mayors and other office-holders in the local governments of 81 provinces and their districts.

Political parties permitted to compete will be announced on Jan. 2, while provincial and district electoral boards will release lists of certified candidates on March 3, the Supreme Election Council (YSK) said Friday as it unveiled the electoral program.

Throughout January, election boards, ballot placements and candidate objections will be concluded, and citizens will be assigned voting stations in February.

On March 21, propaganda and campaigns will end as the blackout period starts. In the following days leading up to the vote, YSK officials will be preparing election materials, distributing notices of voting locations and training ballot observers.

The propaganda period will officially end at 6 p.m. local time on Saturday, March 30.

The polls are taking place nearly a year after the presidential and parliamentary elections were held in May this year, and they seem to hold as much of a stake for the competing parties.

Türkiye’s local elections, recurring every five years, cover mayoral seats of metropolitan cities, provinces, provincial districts and towns, as well as mukhtars of villages and neighborhoods, board of alderman, and members of city councils and municipal boards.

Race for Istanbul

Owing to the traditional lore around it, the mayoral vote is the flashiest of them all and Istanbul is considered, politically, the most important administrative region in the country.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is, therefore, eager to recapture Türkiye’s biggest metropolitan, as well as the capital, Ankara, from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) this March.

"We are preparing for elections where we have no choice but to win with a crushing landslide," Erdoğan told the provincial heads of the AK Party on Thursday. "Our goal is to bring back real municipalism to all cities, especially Istanbul and Ankara, that have been grappling with a lack of services for the past five years."

The AK Party lost control of Istanbul and Ankara for the first time in 25 years, as well as some five megacities, to CHP in the last local elections of 2019.

A controversial rerun handed Istanbul to CHP’s Ekrem Imamoğlu, who now faces the risk of a political ban in an ongoing lawsuit. With his trial postponed to April 2024, the popular mayor is looking to run for a second term after leading a coup to replace CHP Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu with his favored man Özgür Özel last month.

Under Imamoğlu, worldwide favorite Istanbul has fallen into disrepair and begun exhausting its residents, Erdoğan lamented, citing CHP’s "failure to produce any works or even continue projects launched by the AK Party."

The AK Party is choosing its mayoral candidates through extensive voter satisfaction surveys and public opinion polls, the president said, adding that discussions were underway with People’s Alliance partner, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), to cooperate in major cities.

"AK Party vision is always distinctive. We owe it to our citizens to choose our candidates with a mindset free of personal political clout-chasing. We will be working day and night until the elections for this," Erdoğan said.

Having refreshed cadres, replacing 52 provincial chairs and over 400 district chairs after the May polls, the AK Party has been zeroed in on the upcoming vote for over five months. It ran surveys in big cities run by opposition parties to determine major problems citizens suffered.

In Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, the most prominent issues were high living costs, transportation, irregular migration and infrastructure problems.

Last week, the party also held an online vote asking some 150,000 members their opinions on the tenures of current AK Party mayors.

Between Nov. 9-22, the party registered applications for mayor hopefuls, whose names will likely be announced in the first half of December, according to Deputy Chair Hamza Dağ.

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

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 southeast.

Opposition struggles

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.

March 2024 is poised to be a critical test for the opposition parties, which were united under a coalition in 2019 that only fell apart after last May’s defeat.

Despite new management, the CHP faces dwindling odds as its allies, the nationalist Good Party (IP) and PKK-affiliated Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), seek to field their own candidates.

Rumors of another alliance have circulated frequently since newly-minted CHP leader Özel on Wednesday made his first visit to IP Chairwoman Meral Akşener, bringing with him an official offer to team up only for the local elections and not for "a comprehensive bloc like the Nation Alliance."

Akşener will reportedly ask the IP administrative council to reconsider their commitment to running alone in 81 provinces. However, pundits have said their combined power could still fail as Akşener’s previous outbursts and CHP’s consistent losses have eroded public trust.