, according to a survey conducted by the Ankara-based MetroPoll.){kind=link}
İstanbul’s opposition mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu is likely to secure re-election against three possible candidates to be nominated by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), according to a survey conducted by the Ankara-based MetroPoll.
Turkey is scheduled to hold local elections on March 31, 2024.
The results of the survey, which was conducted on 1,500 individuals across İstanbul’s 39 districts between Dec. 9 and 13, were revealed by Sözcü columnist İsmail Saymaz in a piece published on Tuesday.
According to Saymaz, the survey showed İmamoğlu, from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), garnering the majority of the vote in İstanbul against former environment minister Murat Kurum as well as Selçuk Bayraktar, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law and the chief technical officer of Turkish unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) producer Baykar, and Ali Yerlikaya, the current interior minister and former İstanbul governor.
Among the three possible AKP mayoral candidates, the one who gets the highest percentage of votes against İmamoğlu is Bayraktar, standing at 38 percent to İmamoğlu’s 45.1 percent.
While 79.6 percent of nationalist opposition İYİ (Good) Party supporters and 75 percent of pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) voters said they would vote for İmamoğlu, Bayraktar receives support from only 11.5 percent of İYİ supporters and 2.7 percent of DEM Party voters.
In the event İmamoğlu competes against Yerlikaya, İmamoğlu would receive 46.6 percent of the vote and Yerlikaya 37 percent, with undecided voters accounting for 16.4 percent.
According to the survey, İmamoğlu has the support of 80.4 percent of İYİ supporters and 69.6 percent of DEM Party voters. Yerlikaya, on the other hand, receives 12.5 percent support from İYİ voters and 6.3 percent from DEM Party voters.
In a scenario in which Kurum runs against İmamoğlu, the mayor would defeat Kurum by a more than 14-point margin, with Kurum garnering 33.9 percent and İmamoğlu receiving 48.2 percent of the vote. Undecided voters make up 17.9 percent.
Survey results indicate that 84.2 percent of İYİ supporters and 75 percent of DEM supporters would vote for İmamoğlu, while 6.1 percent of İYİ voters and 2.7 percent of DEM Party supporters state that they would vote for Kurum.
“When evaluating these data, it is essential to consider that the İYİ Party and DEM Party candidates were not included as options in the survey,” Saymaz noted in his article.
İmamoğlu ended the yearslong AKP rule in İstanbul when he defeated the AKP’s mayoral candidate twice in the local elections of 2019. He won a rerun election by a larger margin than the first, which had been canceled due to supposed irregularities.
The mayor, who is battling a court case, was officially barred from politics after being convicted in December of “insulting a public official” and sentenced to nearly three years in prison.
İmamoğlu appealed and can still serve as mayor.
But the possibility of a higher court upholding the sentence effectively ruled him out of running against President Erdoğan in the May general election.