Turkey's local elections — and whoever wins Istanbul — could dictate the future of the country

• A win for the opposition on Sunday could set the country in a new direction, presenting a major challenge to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the AK Party's decades-long hold on power.
• Erdogan himself rose to prominence as Istanbul mayor in the 1990s before later going on to win the presidency.
• Now he is pushing hard for his party's mayoral candidate Murat Kurum, a 47-year-old former environment and urbanization minister.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said that whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey. If that's the case, the stakes are high for Sunday's elections as people across the country of 85 million prepare to select their local leaders and administrators.

Such is the importance of this weekend's vote that political analysts are speculating that a victory for Istanbul's incumbent mayor, the center-left Ekrem Imamoglu, would make him a frontrunner for the Turkish presidency in 2028.

That is the last thing Erdogan wants, having already seen his conservative, Islamist-sympathizing Justice and Development Party, abbreviated in Turkey as AK Party or AKP, trounced by Imamoglu and the more secular, moderate Republican People's Party's (CHP) in the city's elections in 2019. So incensed was Erdogan by the election result that he called a second election, only to see Imamoglu beat the AK Party's mayoral candidate by a yet wider margin.

A win for the opposition on Sunday could set the country in a new direction, presenting a major challenge to Erdogan and the AK Party's decades-long hold on power. Erdogan himself rose to prominence as Istanbul mayor in the 1990s before later going on to win the presidency. Now he is pushing hard for his party's mayoral candidate Murat Kurum, a 47-year-old former