After decades in the doldrums, Turkey’s main opposition scored several major victories against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in nationwide municipal elections Sunday, snatching the political capital, Ankara, and the commercial capital, Istanbul, from its jaws and injecting renewed faith in what has long seemed a broken political system.

The election results saw the AKP lose several other major cities, including Antalya, a major tourist hub on the mediterranean, and Mersin a major port to the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) along with Bolu and Bilecik in the west, Sinop in the north and Ardahan in the east. The AKP also lost to its electoral ally, the Nationalist Action Party, in seven cities, although their so-called "Public" bloc led the polls with 51.63% of the overall vote.

The reversal — the biggest electoral setback suffered by the AKP since it shot to power in 2002 — comes amid a weakening economy, now formally in recession. The government’s last-ditch efforts to hold on to voters by setting up vegetable stalls at subsidized prices and propping up the sagging the lira that shed nearly 30% of its value in 2018 through unorthodox interventions appear to have failed. The economy had long been the AKP’s strongest suit during its more than 16 years of uninterrupted power. 

But several other factors appear to have tipped the scales. The first is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s unabashedly polarizing rhetoric throughout the election campaign labeling his opponents as terrorists and traitors. “Even his own supporters have grown fed up with this divisive language. Some simply refused to vote,” said a party insider with close ties to Binali Yildirim, the AKP’s mayoral candidate for Istanbul. Another is some 50% of Kurdish voters who normally cast their ballots for the leftist People’s Democracy Party (HDP).