Turkey is heading toward the most unusual election in its modern history. After his party lost the Istanbul mayoralty to an opposition candidate this spring, Turkey’s authoritarian president has ordered a re-run of the city’s election with no credible legal justification. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s blatant disregard for the popular will has cast the upcoming vote on June 23 as a battle for democracy – rallying millions throughout Turkey behind the modest Istanbulite fighting the strongman to keep his hard-earned job.
Yet the Istanbul re-vote signifies much more than resistance to an extrajudicial power-grab. The campaigns of both candidates betray a battle for the soul of Turkey – a contest between a republic defined by a monolithic one-man regime and one defined by pluralist democracy.
Ekrem Imamoglu won Istanbul’s mayoral election on March 31 as the candidate of Turkey’s pro-secular main opposition party, though only with essential support from a broader coalition of voters. Despite Erdogan’s efforts to paint the entire opposition as terrorists, his candidate lost. Now in the race for the rerun, the strongman’s media and loyal officials have focused on propagating a new argument to undermine their opponent: namely, that Imamoglu is “Greek.”
