Turkey continues to be a most intriguing case for political analysts of the global wave of authoritarianism. Ekrem İmamoğlu’s resounding ballot-box victory against a humiliated Binali Yıldırım in the re-run of the Istanbul municipal mayoral election on June 23 added new impetus to the already bourgeoning curiosity about Turkey’s political future. As the number of post-election analyses has mushroomed, pundits have almost unanimously celebrated this landslide victory as a revitalizing moment for the opposition and a nearly fatal blow to Erdoğan’s grip on power.
Observers have cast this moment variously as proof of: 1) ‘how democracy is/has won;’ 2) the vanquishing of populism; and 3) ‘the persistence of human agency under authoritarianism.’ Indeed, İmamoğlu’s June 23 win went far beyond expectations and has set the hopes up for an opposition that, in our view, is best defined as an ad hoc association. Given the suffocating and dire political climate that prevails in Turkey at present, such a crushing blow to Erdoğanist authoritarianism has thus understandably spread a renewed sense of optimism among many analysts.
Despite the merits of these accounts in capturing various aspects of this rather dramatic moment, they all fall short of locating it within a more prolonged, unfavorable process underway since the parliamentary elections of June 7, 2015 when the AKP government for the first time since it came to power in 2002 could not win enough votes and form a single party government. Overlooking how various events since then changed the political psychology of Turkey’s ruling elites, the configuration of power struggles within the state apparatus—and thus the nature of electoral politics—leave these accounts of June 23 Istanbul re-run decontextualized.
