ANKARA — The national vote of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has fallen to a critical level, 9% lower than what it registered in the local polls held March 31, an election analyst at the University of Illinois at Chicago has found. “If the AKP continues on its current path, then its voters may start looking for an alternative, as they did in 2002,” Ali Akarca said, referring to the election of November that year when conservative voters deserted the True Path and Motherland parties and brought the newly created AKP to power.

Akarca’s findings, released this month, will be encouraging for the opposition in the rerun of the Istanbul election on June 23. The AKP claims it was robbed of victory in the city on March 31. “They stole it” is the party line, but Akarca says the AKP actually got more votes than it deserved because conservative voters had to mark their ballots for alliance candidates or not vote at all, and the alliance names were usually AKP candidates.

An economist, Akarca has built an econometric model of Turkish elections based on the results of every multiparty local, parliamentary and presidential poll since 1950. He feeds the model with current factors, such as the rates of inflation and economic growth, and obtains forecasts that are impressively accurate. Last year, Akarca predicted the AKP would receive 42.8% of the national vote in the parliamentary polls. It got 42.6%.

The official results of the local elections in March show that the AKP got 44.3% of the national vote, a rise of 1.7% from what it received in the 2018 general elections. Akarca insists this is wrong. “The AKP lost votes compared to 2018,” he said in a phone interview.