In a speech in late January, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used exceptionally strong terms to describe the significance of the March 31 municipal elections. “The latest developments in our region have made March 31 more than just local administration elections. The elections have become a matter of survival, an election of survival for our country,” he told members of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Antalya.
Since Erdogan failed to specify what developments made the local elections a “matter of survival,” it was up to us to determine whether such developments had really taken place. The region he referred to could have been no other than Syria. Yet nothing had happened in Syria at the time that posed a direct, close, real and current threat to Turkey; hence, one could hardly claim the elections had become a “matter of survival” for that reason. The two most significant developments were President Donald Trump’s announcement in December that he was withdrawing US troops from Syria and the fall of Idlib to the al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in January. Yet to claim those developments made Turkey’s local polls a “matter of survival” would not have been realistic at all.
