With only weeks to go before Turkey’s June 7 elections, opposition parties are heavily focusing on economic problems and social welfare, generating huge voter interest and pushing the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to the defensive for the first time.

The main opposition Republican People’s Party has cornered the AKP with a series of promises targeting the popular masses, including a hiked, tax-free minimum wage of 1,500 Turkish lira ($561) per month and two bonus pension payments per year for about 11 million retirees. The two other main opposition forces, the Nationalist Action Party and the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party, are campaigning on similar platforms targeting workers, farmers and retirees.

Social welfare support, including handouts of food and coal for heating and various financial aid schemes for poor families, used to be the AKP’s primary trump card in previous elections. This type of assistance, aimed at millions of low-income or impoverished people including housewives, the elderly and the jobless, has proven to be the ruling party’s biggest success story ever since it swept to power in 2002 with promises to end corruption, poverty and political prohibitions. After 13 years of AKP rule, however, it turns out that poverty has actually increased in Turkey, becoming the opposition’s biggest advantage in the elections.

Opposition parties maintain that far from fighting poverty, the AKP has pursued a deliberate policy of poverty management, exploiting the poor for its political ends and reducing the sector to a voter reservoir. The opposition is now pledging to genuinely stamp out poverty.