Is this the local polls or general elections?

I saw the party flags hanging in the streets of Beşiktaş, Istanbul the other night. But I’ve never seen such a huge poster of a mayoral candidate.

I think candidate mayoress Sibel Çarmıklı of the governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP, started this race. Â

In recent weeks, Çarmıklı hosted a big party at the Conrad Hotel with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the guest of honor. She is one of the three laic and modern AKP candidates to weaken the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, fronts in Beşiktaş, Bakırköy and Sarıyer districts. The business world closely knows the AKP candidate in Bakırköy. He is the former chairman of the Exporters Assembly of Turkey, Oğuz Satıcı. Candidate Mayor Sinan Gerim in the Kadıköy district, a historic CHP front, is an architect putting his mark on successful restoration projects. Each of these candidates backed by Erdoğan also has the AKP’s financial support. The reason why I said the "local polls have recently created an atmosphere of general elections" is enormously high election campaign expenditures.

A helicopter even for a small party
Giant meetings are being organized in big cities, as television channels and the Internet are bombarded with party advertisements as party centers in election districts are ornamented with billboards. It is also known that some candidate mayors pay astronomic figures to have a time slot on televisions.

As I write this piece, the helicopter carrying the Great Union Party, or BBP, leader Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu is lost in mountains. Given the limited budget of this small party and Yazıcıoğlu’s renting a helicopter to catch up with meetings, you can have a pretty good idea about the amount of spending. Did anyone hear from a party leader or a mayoral candidate with a decent solid project or program? Although I met some nominees in Istanbul, I haven’t heard anything satisfactory from them.Speaking about projects, Taha Akyol of CNN hosted Psychiatry Professor Tarık Yılmaz.

Yılmaz scanned through a total of 30,000 words Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Deniz Baykal of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, uttered in eight meetings. Yılmaz wanted to determine which word the two used often. According to his notes, Erdoğan uttered "project" 51 times ad Baykal remained at seven. A party leader seeing himself on the left, lacks projects and I think this is remarkably important in this election period. Another thing worth mentioning is that the CHP dwells on the corruption claims rather than traditional issues including laicism and religion.

Notes of Yılmaz reflect that Baykal used the word "corruption" 190 times, but Erdoğan uttered it five times only. It is a matter of curiosity how the CHP will reflect the discourse of corruption to ballot box.