Half a million security personnel and thousands of observers on duty on Sunday to oversee elections, officials say.
As Turkey prepares for Sunday’s local elections, ensuring a free and fair vote is foremost in the minds of many across the country.
Ballots across all 81 provinces will decide local officials, from neighbourhood and village representatives all the way up to the mayors of metropolitan municipalities in charge of massive budgets.
While in many countries local polls are seen as lesser contests to general or presidential elections, in Turkey, they are a crucial barometer for the ruling party and can see vast resources reallocated as control of major cities shifts. The last local elections in 2014 saw a turnout of nearly 90 percent.
This year’s campaign has largely focused on Ankara and Istanbul – the country’s capital and commercial hub respectively – with speculation mounting that they could fall to opposition mayors after a quarter of a century under the sway of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and its political predecessors.
The elections, which will be the last nationwide polls before joint presidential and parliamentary elections due in 2023, are being held as the country faces an economic crisis that has tested support for the AK Party.
The pressure has seen President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who began his mainstream political career as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, ramp up his rhetoric during an unforgiving schedule of rallies and TV appearances.
In particular, the president has sought to portray the main opposition alliance as being aligned with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which in turn Erdogan accuses of backing the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), labelled a terrorist organisation in Turkey and the West.
Amid this febrile atmosphere, 57 million voters will head to polling stations on Sunday. To safeguard the process, thousands of volunteers from political parties and independent monitoring groups will be on hand to oversee the counts.
“It’s an important duty to safeguard our democracy,” said Baris, an election volunteer from Ankara. “We want to protect the ballot boxes to prevent what happened in the last local election.”
The 2014 poll in Ankara was marred by claims of vote-rigging as Mansur Yavas, who is standing again for the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in the capital, was narrowly defeated by AK Party incumbent Melih Gokcek.
