The race is on for the March 2024 municipal elections, the next big challenge for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which emerged victorious once again in general elections in May. 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.

The party is conducting several polls before deciding on the candidates who are expected to be chosen after surveys in November, according to media reports. 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 more than 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 Türkiye’s most populated city, 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 main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) since 2019, but the tenure of Mayor Ekrem 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. In at least two cases, Imamoğlu was on vacation while the city was grappling with heavy precipitation.

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.

In November, the party will start carrying out surveys among voters, asking their opinions of candidates the party will determine. Still, first, voters will be asked who they want to see to run for the AK Party in their city or town. The party’s chair, President Recep Tayyip 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.