Turkey's local election campaigning took on the tone and tenor of general elections this year, and survival was the predominant theme in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's campaign discourse.

Turkey will hold municipal elections tomorrow. The People's Alliance and the Nation Alliance have worked very hard to win over undecided voters and maximize turnout.

If the People's Alliance succeeds in the elections, the AK Party and the MHP may deepen their ties and continue to institutionalize the new political system, buoyed by this enthusiasm

This analysis explains the March 2019 local election’s significance to Turkish politics and concentrates on the ways in which the visions of various political parties for local government have changed over the years.

On March 13, the European Parliament voted on the suspension of accession talks with Turkey.

As expected, the municipal election campaign in Turkey has ended up bogged down in national issues.

It has been awhile since political parties in Turkey began preparations for the upcoming local elections. Indeed, they had already been focusing on implementing a new approach to broaden their appeal before the snap election decision.

As Turkey inches toward the municipal elections, the "national survival" debate is deepening with new wars of words between competing definitions of nationalism.

Following a decade of fragile coalition governments in Turkey throughout the 1990s, voters reshaped Parliament into a more stable, two-party rivalry in the 2002 general elections when the newly formed Justice and Development Party (AK Party) entered the country's political sphere.

The AK Party's campaign for the March local elections involves both contemporary and traditional methods of reaching voters, and seems to be winning the support of all the generations

Yet, the pain that accompanied Britain's decision to leave the EU two years ago hasn't ended just yet. The nature of the agreement fueled a new public debate in Britain, where former Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of the mildest critics of the Brexit deal, called it "pointless."

The Erdoğan-Bahçeli meeting on Thursday reconfirmed that the two political blocs, namely the People's Alliance of the AK Party and MHP and the opposition's Nation Alliance, formed for the June 24 presidential elections, will remain in place for the next local elections

The AK Party and the MHP finding themselves at odds over certain issues is only normal and does not mean that their alliance will be damaged or come to an end

President Erdogan: “There are many things that we can contribute to the European Union. They may have things to contribute to us but what should be done is, I suppose, to consult with 81 million people [in Turkey] and see what they will decide.”

Turkey has been discussing the possibilities and limitations of pre-electoral alliances in the local elections for awhile now.

Turkey's opposition parties have no choice but to engage questions about identity, ideology and policy development, and to find ways to genuinely connect with the people

The chaos unleashed on Turkey's opposition by the June 24 elections won't be over anytime soon. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the chairman of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) that oversaw the formation of the Nation Alliance by "lending" 15 parliamentarians to the newly-formed Good Party (İP), has his back to the wall.