Building from the base: How Turkey’s opposition mounted a comeback
- Written by Selin Bucak
- Edited by Ankita Anand
- Illustration by Smaranda Tolosano
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Key strategy: Relational organizing
Relational organizing focuses on building long-term, non-transactional relationships with potential voters. For instance, community clean-ups, volunteering to help those in need, and social events that take place in and outside of campaign seasons.
Key strategy: Data-Driven Campaigning
Rather than relying on assumptions, data-driven campaign involves gathering all kinds of information about voters to inform parties about who their voters are and what matters to them, and basing campaign decisions on that analysis.
Key tactic: Ignore the competition
In a media eco-system that is substantially captured by those in power, it doesn’t always pay to respond to every reported attack or allegation. In this strategy, politicians ignore attacks by their competitors and concentrate instead on speaking directly to their voters.
On 19 March 2025, police surrounded the residence of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu to take him into custody. The allegations? Corruption and terrorism.
In a social media video filmed before his arrest, İmamoğlu, speaking while putting on his tie, indicated there were hundreds of police gathered outside his residence. “We are facing a great tyranny, but I want you to know I will not be discouraged,” he declared.
Thrice elected to become mayor of Turkey’s largest city, İmamoğlu had been battling one lawsuit after another even before his arrest. His popularity and electoral success have been seen as the biggest threat yet to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule. Erdoğan’s critics maintain that these cases aim to discredit İmamoğlu and ban him from participating in politics.
Since İmamoğlu and the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, won electoral victory a year earlier, the government has used lawfare and bureaucratic hurdles to put pressure on them, so İmamoğlu’s arrest – along with the arrests of 51 others, including that of his political consultant Necati Özkan – did not come as a surprise.
Many have said that this repression exposed President Erdoğan’s insecurity, and was a reaction to what the year 2024 had proven the newly revamped opposition could achieve.
A blow to Erdogan’s power
“We did not respond to any attacks and constantly talked about the economy, the situation of the retired, those who have financial difficulties, the problems of the youth and how our mayors will produce solutions to all this locally."
Women, youth and technology: these were the three pillars of the campaign that saw the opposition in Turkey emerge victorious, only a year after a disheartening defeat.
The 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic in 2023 had been bittersweet for the country’s opposition parties. Just months before, they had gotten the chance to dethrone President Erdoğan, who had been in the role since 2014. But they lost following a breakdown in alliances and the nomination of someone many young voters viewed as the wrong presidential candidate. It was a big emotional blow to those who had supported these politicians for decades and seen them through numerous failures.
In the months that followed, some of the party’s most popular personalities, such as Istanbul Mayor İmamoğlu, highlighted the need for a new beginning. Özgür Özel, 50, took over as opposition leader. The success he was to achieve in the 2024 local elections, within months of his appointment, was something the CHP hadn’t witnessed since 1974.
He said the most important thing the party did was to accept that it had experienced a great disaster, face it head on, and undertake an institutional “self-critique”.
As Özel and the local candidates started preparing for the 2024 elections, they were not only confronting a party that had dominated elections for the past 22 years, but also the anger of an electorate that had trusted them and felt let down.
“I said, there is an emotional break between us and our voters. As we [Özel and Ekrem İmamoğlu] shared common observations, we decided to start a movement. If the CHP had gone to the local elections without any change, it would have suffered a huge defeat,” Özel added.
Upending an outdated system
Traditionally, in Turkish elections, the majority of campaign budgets is spent on booking or building stages where the candidate can hold a traditional rally. Instead, Özel’s team opted to hold its rallies in a more modest location: on top of buses.
One of the first actions Özel took was to ensure that none of the old guard remained in leadership positions, appointing young people and women. When it was time for the party’s provincial congress elections, Özel and his team went to the local electorate. “We stated there would be no one from the old party management cadres, that there would be women and youth in the new management,” he said. The average age of the party’s central management is now 46 and that of the party assembly is 43. The shadow cabinet is made up of nine women and nine men.
Another change Özel brought was a renewed focus on data, research and internal elections. Prior to the 1980 military coup, candidates in elections were mainly selected through a process of pre-selection, via the votes of the provincial delegates of the parties. But in later years of the CHP, this practice had largely disappeared. Candidates were selected by the party leader and the central management.
First, the party leadership held focus groups, to understand which candidates in which towns and cities had a chance to win. They did surveys and crunched the data. Where one name stood out, that person was selected as a candidate. Where the numbers were too close to call, they decided to hold an election. In total, they conducted 350,000 surveys internally to determine the candidates and 250,000 surveys to track their progress among the electorate. They ended up spending most of the campaign budget, around 500 million Turkish Lira (over 11 million euros), on focus groups, surveys and digital ad campaigns, Özel said. “While in the past not even half a percent of the election budget was allocated to measurement and evaluation, we allocated 16 percent to it,” he added.
Traditionally, in Turkish elections, the majority of campaign budgets is spent on booking or building stages where the candidate can hold a traditional rally. Instead, Özel’s team opted to hold its rallies in a more modest location: on top of buses.
In the meantime, Erdoğan’s party and the propaganda apparatus he had spent years building, gaining total control of much of the mainstream media, was working hard on a smear campaign. They were telling voters that if the CHP came to power, they would stop the call to prayer, divide the country, and oppose religious values.
Özel and his team responded by declaring their aim of creating a “Turkey Alliance” with social democrats, conservatives, nationalists, and Kurdish democrats, essentially anyone who would celebrate Turkey’s successes, like the national football team scoring a goal, or the women’s volleyball team making it to the Olympics.
“We explained this was not a general election but a local election, that they should entrust the cities to good, young, women, hardworking, well-educated candidates. We explained that the defeat the AK Party would receive in this election would only be a yellow card. If they didn’t not solve the problems of the poor, the unemployed, and the youth, then this would be a call for a general election.”
“We did not respond to any attacks and constantly talked about the economy, the situation of the retired, those who have financial difficulties, the problems of the youth and how our mayors will produce solutions to all this locally,” Özel explained.
How to think about elections in the modern era
For Necati Özkan, the founder of creative agency ÖYKÜ /Dialogue International Istanbul and the campaign manager for İmamoğlu, in order to fight authoritarianism, people need to understand the current political environment.
“The period we are living in is one in which populism is on the rise, post-truth communication is prominent and echo chambers are getting stronger. Campaigns carried out without understanding these characteristics have no chance of creating an impact,” he explained.
The rules of campaigning have changed and the power of parties has diminished. Campaigns have to be created around strong political identities, and there has to be international cooperation, said Özkan.
“Do not communicate with populist leaders. If you respond to them, you will be following their agenda.”
– Necati Özkan
Guerrilla tactics used to win the war
The battle for Istanbul is a good case study of how the opposition’s thinking changed since its loss in 2023. İmamoğlu already had a successful campaign under his belt in 2019, and some tactics adopted by his team informed the campaigns of other candidates across the country. He had six key principles in designing the campaign for the mayor of Istanbul.
Özkan, who has been with İmamoğlu since the first campaign for Istanbul’s mayor in 2019, says that all election campaigns need to be thought of as military operations. Once the candidate is selected through a democratic process, the campaign itself has no room for democracy.
“Parties are democratic institutions. They can have discussions on their own issues but elections are not democratic. The election campaign is a complete military operation. Therefore, after the parties and candidates decide on their own issues, visions, projects, etc., the election campaign begins and it must be conducted with complete military discipline. Politicians cannot interfere in that process,” he said.
The second principle was focusing on the candidate, not the party. This included creating an “İmamoğlu” logo, and using that, rather than the party logo, in all the communications. “We thought the surname İmamoğlu (meaning the son of an Imam) would be effective in Turkish society. So we wrote that in big, bold letters,” he explained.
The third was ignoring the competitor while embracing their voters. “Do not communicate with populist leaders. If you respond to them, you will be following their agenda. If you don’t, you can explain your own agenda because you cannot compete with a populist politician on the subject of populism,” Özkan said.
The fourth was organizing a massive field campaign, with the candidate talking to citizens, meeting market vendors, talking to business people and listening to people’s problems.
The fifth was creating impact in the digital world. Much of the traditional media and TV channels were controlled by pro-Erdoğan businesses. Social media and digital campaigns were the main tools left with the opposition. They used new technologies like AI to segment the voters. In 2024, Özkan said, just for Istanbul, they could send separate messages to 94 different segments during the campaign.
The sixth element was focusing on content creation to fight disinformation. “We campaigned on a level we can call ‘complete truth’ against the government. Focus on the truth, and use the power of the truth.”
Content creation in a time of media oppression
In Turkey, pro-Erdoğan corporations control most of the media. During election campaigns, aside from spreading disinformation against the opposition, these channels refuse to air the campaign videos of people like İmamoğlu.
Özkan’s team shot several campaign videos where they used the testimonies of citizens and tried to connect with voters on an emotional level. “The Istanbul Succeeded campaign was one in which we used facts to destroy the perception built by the authoritarian media, which portrayed İmamoğlu as an unsuccessful mayor. Our campaign was based entirely on the testimony of citizens,” Özkan elaborated.
But they knew they couldn’t distribute these through traditional channels. Instead, they used machine learning and algorithms to figure out which digital channels they could use to reach the different segments of voters, from single mothers to farmers, the unemployed or students.
The success of these tactics and the distribution of İmamoğlu’s successes in Istanbul created what some have called the “İmamoğlu effect”. A feeling across the country developed that if İmamoğlu, a CHP mayor, had done such good work in Istanbul, maybe another CHP mayor could do the same in their own cities.
Of course, for these tactics to work, the team needed a charismatic leader to rally behind. Born in the Black Sea region of Turkey, İmamoğlu had a clear ability to bring people together and inspire them, regardless of their background, appealing to both the religious and rural segments of society, as well as the more secular. The slogan from his first campaign, “everything will be OK,” is still echoed by many in Turkey, in the face of increased oppression and challenges of day-to-day life, including the rising cost of living.
There are videos of him singing folk songs with shopkeepers in Adıyaman, which was hit by a devastating earthquake in 2023, or answering questions from children like why he always wears suits, or discussing whether being a politician or a father is more difficult. These interactions have helped paint him as a relatable and down-to-earth candidate.
Outside of Istanbul, the CHP also adopted similar tactics to overcome the bias in the media, said Nesteren Davutoğlu, the former head of the Advertisers Association in Turkey and responsible for much of the campaign in 2024.
Traditional media channels exploited religious sentiments and attacked secularism to weaken CHP’s societal connections. “Because the party saw this as a problem, they decided to conduct extensive field research. They established a dedicated strategy and research department for the election period, they brought in a trusted manager with years of experience to run it,” she said.
This department collaborated with several research companies to gather reliable data about the target audience. This comprehensive data collection enabled the communication unit to develop informed briefs and discuss them before devising creative solutions. Creative agency and public relations officers were also included in special briefings attended by important executives within the party, including Özel.
In addition to the films dealing with election promises, works that were musical, informative and thematic were also produced for special days. Considerable effort was made to establish cooperation with the leading advertising agencies of the country. Although many agencies used by organizations on the periphery of the government approached this cooperation with concern, it was possible to reach an agreement with impartial, objective, and creative working partners, she said.
“It was time to oppose the positioning of secularism by the government as almost atheism. The party emphasized its commitment to national and local values. It produced an election campaign that reflected the lifestyle it adopted and its members’ perspectives on life in a colorful, modern and traditional style. Without compromising the line of Atatürk, the founder of the Republic, a communication language based on traditions and customs was adopted,” she noted.
The party was also active in the field and developed hundreds of special projects for target groups such as families, youth, women, tradespeople, farmers, peasants and business circles. The projects included opening childcare facilities and dorms, creating bread factories to provide bread at a cheaper price, and projects to restore and renovate historical sites, like the Basilica Sistern.
Creating a volunteer army
The sixth prong of the “campaign machine” in Istanbul was building a volunteer army, Özkan said. “In this period of populism, it was necessary to abandon the old games and develop new rules. Although the CHP was 100 years old, we saw that the cadres and the power of the party in the field were not widespread enough to manage an election. In addition to the party’s power, we needed to create a civilian power to make the field campaign effective,” he said.
The team created the Istanbul Volunteers back in 2019 – initially to oversee the ballot boxes and the counting of the votes – who were also active in the 2024 campaign. They reached 27,500 people in Istanbul, only 13 percent of whom were members or supporters of the CHP. Since the elections, the group of volunteers has worked on other projects as well, with the mission to create a “just, green and innovative Istanbul”.
Ensuring election security
“Authoritarian regimes think winning with the votes of the opposition is a skill. They do not see this as immoral, and resort to any means to retain power. Therefore, the impartiality of the state and the impartiality of the judiciary cannot be trusted in such regimes.”
Aside from running the campaign effectively, the opposition parties need to manage election security due to concerns over widespread malpractice.
“Authoritarian regimes think winning with the votes of the opposition is a skill. They do not see this as immoral, and resort to any means to retain power. Therefore, the impartiality of the state and the impartiality of the judiciary cannot be trusted in such regimes,” Özkan pointed out.
“You have to protect the vote of the citizens. That’s why we, the Republican People’s Party organizations, the organizations of other parties in alliance with the CHP, and volunteers, have established an election security team for the election night. But we have also created an election security mobile application for them.”
Lawyers across the country were mobilized, with the CHP providing the papers for them to observe the vote count at different ballot boxes. Tunç Özdemir, a lawyer who has been volunteering in elections for the last 20 years, mentioned that volunteers were in multiple WhatsApp groups that would notify them about which areas needed volunteers the most.
He recalled that in 2024 there was a visible change in how hopeful people in the opposition were. The number of volunteers had significantly increased. However, he pointed out, the appointments of lawyers to different municipalities were still left to the last minute in some cases – something the CHP should look to improve in future elections.
Being in the field, he also observed the impact of the change within the CHP among voters. “In May 2023, due to the extremely fragmented structure of the opposition and other factors, the CHP couldn’t fully realize its potential. But in the local elections (in 2024), when they selected candidates who focused on rural areas, and who were accepted by sections the opposition couldn’t win over for years, it created enthusiasm,” he said.
The results
Finally, all of this culminated in the biggest victory the CHP had achieved in 50 years. Compared to the parliamentary elections in 2023, CHP increased its support by 12.4 percentage points. It increased the number of provinces under its control from 14 to 35 out of a total 81, including winning major cities like Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antalya and Bursa. It won 37.77 percent of the overall vote, versus 35.49 percent won by the ruling AKP. İmamoğlu won in Istanbul with 51.14 percent of the votes. Out of 39 districts in Istanbul, the CHP candidates won 26 – up from their previous 14.
But of course, the fight has not ended there.
Following his successes in Istanbul, İmamoğlu was voted to become the opposition’s next presidential candidate, in elections set to be held in 2028 – although there is a good chance that they will be held earlier.
Although İmamoğlu is a real threat to Erdoğan’s decades-long rule in Turkey, it is not the first time the president has gone after an opponent. Back in 2015 when the AKP lost its majority in the parliament and there was momentum behind pro-Kurdish HDP party co-chair Selahattin Demirtas, he was also jailed and has been in prison ever since.
A big difference though, is the organization of the CHP and the popularity of İmamoğlu. Country-wide protests erupted following his arrest, and he has continued being active from behind bars. The CHP has rallied behind İmamoğlu, holding rallies across the country and gathering support from international allies, all the while fighting its own legal battles.
İmamoğlu has now been behind bars since March, and was recently sentenced to remain there for insulting Istanbul’s chief prosecutor. In a recent message to the people, he says: “Turkiye’s future won’t be decided by courtroom plots, but by the very people who live with their consequences daily … Let no one dare to believe that the soul of this nation has been subdued.”
About the Author
Selin Bucak is a freelance journalist and the author of The Last Day Before Exile: Stories of Resistance, Displacement & Finding Home. She writes about finance and economics, as well as human rights issues for publications that have included Citywire, The Financial Times, The i Paper, Wall Street Journal, Alternative Credit Investor and Lazy Women.
