The results of the local Turkish elections held on March 31 are stunning, not only for those pessimists who expected nothing interesting out of the vote, but even for the optimists who thought the elections would serve as a lesson for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

It was Erdogan who transformed the municipal elections into a referendum of sorts, one that would renew and enhance his executive presidency, by employing a frenzied election campaign. And he lost this referendum.

It is true that his party is still, mathematically, the leading force in Turkey, garnering 44.3% of the vote with an 83% voter turnout. It is also true that the sum of the total votes of the nationalist alliance Erdogan forged with his ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), led by Devlet Bahceli, stands at 51.6%, a figure similar to that which gave him the victory in the first round of the presidential election in June 2018.

Yet Erdogan is the loser of the local elections when viewed as a referendum on the president himself. This is because these elections were — more than anything else — of symbolic importance on whether he could retain his party's control of Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey’s commercial hub and capital, respectively.