Turkey will go to the polls on 31st March 2019, to elect its local representatives.
Turkish citizens will vote for their mayors and municipal council members for the next five years.
This election will be the first under the presidential system.
There are two major alliances dominating the elections; the People's Alliance and the Nation's Alliance.
The People's Alliance consists of the ruling AK Party and the Nationalist Movement Party, the MHP. They will cooperate in 30 different metropolitan municipalities
The second alliance is the Nation's Alliance where the opposition CHP and IYI Party will cooperate in 23 metropolitan municipalities.
The outstanding feature of this election is the abundance of women candidates.
The AK Party has announced 4 women mayoral candidates for Turkey's most important city, Istanbul.
They are confident that they can win, and say that the influence of women should be felt in all corners of cities across the country.
Şeyma Doğucu, AK Party mayor candidate in Istanbul, told A News: "We see women enrollment in politics like never before in Turkey's history, AK Party has a huge contribution in this. In Turkey, womens' path in politics is widely open. As women we're sure that we will contribute a lot to the country, we're sure about our talents and our knowledge."
Under the AK Party's rule women have set new records, seeing their involvement in politics reach the highest point in the republic of Turkey's history.
Fatma Şahin, mayor of Gaziantep metropolitan city, also told A News: " When we founded our party under the leadership of our excellency president, we believed that strong and sustainable national development can only be possible through following a development model involving both men and women and therefore we placed the women to the very center of the politics. The love, compassion, mercy and grace should prevail in the world and that is why we should involve more and more women in decision-making mechanism and continue our journey."
Out of 81 provinces of Turkey, 30 have metropolitan municipalities with each consisting of more than 750,000 residents. The most important three metropolitan municipalities are Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.
