Daily Review: Istanbul’s Mayoral Vote Has Foreign Policy Implications

Daily Review: Istanbul’s Mayoral Vote Has Foreign Policy Implications
Ekrem Imamoglu, the new mayor of Istanbul from Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, at a press conference the day after he took office, Istanbul, June 28, 2019 (AP photo by Lefteris Pitarakis).

Today’s Top Story

Millions of voters across Turkey will cast ballots in local elections Sunday, with the most consequential polls taking place in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey’s capital. In both cities, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationally dominant Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is attempting to retake the mayor’s offices after surprise losses to the opposition in 2019. (Reuters)

Our Take

Local elections across Turkey will be the first electoral test for both the AKP and the country’s opposition since last year’s presidential contest. In that vote, Erdogan ended up winning reelection convincingly, despite the opposition finally uniting behind a single candidate, which led many observers to anticipate a close race.

Buoyed by that victory, the AKP set its sights on reclaiming control of Ankara and, more importantly, Istanbul, where Erdogan got his political start as mayor in the 1990s. The current opposition mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, is one of Turkey’s most popular politicians and as such poses a threat to Erdogan and the AKP. When Imamoglu first won a close mayoral race in 2019, the AKP pushed election authorities to nullify the results. In the election rerun, Imamoglu won in resounding fashion.

Based on polling, observers expect a close race in Istanbul this year, although the ballot looks different than in 2019. The opposition isn’t running under a single banner this time around, and an upstart Islamist party could pull some votes away from the AKP candidate. Were the AKP to lose, Erdogan’s worst anti-democratic tendencies could reveal themselves once again.

Still, even without control of Istanbul, Erdogan’s grip on Turkish politics has already been cemented by last year’s presidential election. Where local elections could counterintuitively be more consequential is in foreign policy, since Erdogan’s moves abroad are often dictated by domestic politics.

Were the AKP to lose in Istanbul, Ankara or both, Erdogan may feel the need to galvanize popular support by stoking tensions that tend to fuel nationalist fervor, with Israel and Greece being the usual—because convenient—targets. On the former, Erdogan has been surprisingly quiet amid the war in Gaza, especially considering he and the AKP took a more hard-line stance against Israel until just a few years ago, when he initiated a diplomatic reset. Turkey is also in the midst of a thaw in relations with its historical rival Greece, one that Erdogan may find it opportune to abandon if he feels his domestic position has been weakened.

Put simply, what happens in Istanbul on Sunday could be felt throughout the entire region.

On Our Radar

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned China not to flood the global market with cheap clean energy exports, just days before her second trip to China as a Cabinet member. Yellen said China’s previous overcapacity and excess production has distorted the global market and warned that the same could happen with clean energy products.

The warning comes just a few weeks after China’s legislative session essentially confirmed that Beijing is indeed shifting back toward exports as the engine of growth and innovation. As Mary Gallagher wrote last week, the decision could exacerbate trade tensions not just with the West, but also with developing economies.

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French PM Gabriel Attal defended the country’s secularism and said the government would stand by a Paris school principal who asked a student to remove her Muslim headscarf and later resigned after receiving death threats over the incident.

Under a contentious 2004 law, French students are prohibited from wearing any ostentatious sign of their religious faith in school. Because it is often seen by critics as specifically targeting Muslim students, the law has become not only a source of tensions in France over freedom of religion, but also of misunderstanding in the United States.

Editor-in-Chief Judah Grunstein broke down the roots of the trans-Atlantic dispute in this in-depth article last year:

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Satellite images appear to show a new airstrip being built on a Yemeni island in the Socotra Archipelago at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, with piles of dirt next to the runway that spell out “I LOVE UAE.” As Jon Hoffman wrote in 2022, control of the islands off Yemen have become a significant geopolitical flashpoint because they sit at the crossroads of numerous political, economic and security rivalries.


French President Emmanuel Macron called a proposed trade agreement between the EU and the South American bloc Mercosur a “very bad deal,” particularly because it lacks proper climate considerations. The agreement had been negotiated on-and-off for more than two decades, but a series of obstacles have prevented its passage since being finalized in 2019, as Bruno Binetti foresaw in a Q&A at the time.

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