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.

There is perhaps a “matter of survival” not for Turkey, but for Erdogan. His concern, so it seems, is to prevent an unmanageable loss of votes for the AKP amid Turkey’s deepening economic crisis. Hence, his attempt to create the perception of a survival threat over unidentified regional developments came across as a move to consolidate the nationalist voter base in a bid to overcome the actual threat, which is the prospect of electoral losses.

A possible step beyond the rhetoric was to take action in Syria and launch a low-risk but high-success military operation ahead of the polls. Two frameworks were already in place for such action. The first was the still-unimplemented timetable that Ankara and Washington agreed in June to cleanse Manbij, a town on the western bank of the Euphrates River, of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which both sides designate as a terrorist group. The second was the idea for a “safe zone” on the Syrian side of the border, stretching from the eastern bank of the Euphrates to the Iraqi frontier, to keep the YPG-PKK and regime forces away from the Turkish border.