2014 Turkish local elections
Local elections were held in Turkey on 30 March 2014, with some repeated on 1 June 2014. Metropolitan and district mayors as well as their municipal council members in cities, and muhtars and "elderly councils" in rural areas were elected. In light of the controversy around the elections, it was viewed as a referendum on the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. About 50 million people were eligible to vote.
Image: Erdogan 2014
Image: Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu VOA (cropped)
Image: Devlet Bahçeli VOA 2015 (cropped)
Image: Selahattin Demirtaş Yıldız Yazıcıoğlu (cropped)2
2009 Turkish local elections
Local elections were held in Turkey on 29 March 2009. The overall winner was the ruling party Justice and Development Party, although the party saw a decline in its vote relative to the 2007 general election. The leading opposition party, the social democratic Kemalist CHP, increased its vote share, as did a number of smaller parties including the SP, DTP and BBP, whose party leader Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu had died in a helicopter crash four days before the election. The third largest party, the Turkish nationalist MHP, enjoyed a more modest vote surge. The election was not contested by Cem Uzan's GP. The AKP failed to take certain provinces it had publicly targeted, such as Diyarbakır, İzmir and Urfa, and did not achieve its goal of exceeding 47% of the overall vote.
There was localized election-related fighting in southeastern Turkey, in which five people were reported to have been killed and about a hundred injured.
Image: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Poland (cropped)
Image: Devlet Bahçeli VOA 2015 (cropped)
Flags of political parties before the Turkish municipal elections in Şile. The most visible ones are Nationalist Movement Party and Justice and Development Party) flags.
CHP (Republican People's Party) election bus before the Turkish municipal elections in Kadıköy, Istanbul