A powerful woman is challenging President Erdogan – could she shape Turkey’s future?

It was a harsh assessment of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on a topic that is near and dear to him, and one upon which he prides himself: international relations.

“He’s always talking about other leaders as ‘my dear friend’ or ‘my beloved fellow leader’,” the opposition political party leader Meral Aksener said to a crowd in Istanbul on Thursday. “In foreign policy, respect is good. In friendship, there can be love. But in foreign policy, the first question he always asks is, ‘Does he love me?’”

Aksener, a 66-year-old former university lecturer, is perhaps the most successful woman in Turkey’s recent political history. If polling is somewhat accurate, the Iyi (or Good) Party she founded is quickly becoming one of the most important players in the country ahead of the 2023 elections that will determine the country’s future.

Iyi has tripled its support since it was founded less than five years ago, establishing itself as the country’s third-largest political grouping. According to Europe Elects, the party is receiving support from around 16 per cent of voters. In some polls, it is even approaching parity with the main centre-left opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP), the country’s second most popular after the dominant Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by President Erdogan.

“Iyi is one of the most interesting and underreported stories of Turkish politics,” says Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s the only political bloc consistently expanding its base. Most interesting is that the movement is being led by a woman, just when Erdogan is trying to shove cultural conservatism down the throats of Turks.”

On Thursday, in front of hundreds of supporters in an Istanbul conference room, Aksener and her Ivy League-educated economic maestro, Bilge Yilmaz, presented their vision for the economic future of the country. Turkey’s economy is being battered by record-high inflation, youth unemployment and declining foreign investment. Shortly after Aksener and Yilmaz spoke, Erdogan’s hand-picked Central Bank governor stunned global markets by further cutting interest rates, adding to inflationary woes and further weakening the Turkish lira in trading with the dollar.

The collapse of the lira and inflation that independent analysts assess as being higher than 150 per cent has weakened Erdogan and the AKP’s 20-year grip on power, and created openings for the opposition.

Aksener spun Iyi off from the centre-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) after its leader decided to throw in his lot with Erdogan in support of the conversion of Turkey’s political set-up from a parliamentary system to a presidential one. Iyi now regularly trounces the MHP in polling.

“In an age of rising nationalism in Turkey, the Good Party has pursued an unequivocal (ultra)nationalist agenda,” wrote political scientist Mehmet Yegin in a recent essay. “This has provided it the chance to carve out a political space as the most nationalist party.”

In recent months, Aksener has embarked on well-publicised listening tours of towns and cities around the country. She met earlier this month with young healthcare workers, many of them eager to emigrate abroad because they are paid little despite their heavy workload, and find themselves tired, burnt out and in financial distress.

On a recent visit to the Black Sea region, she met with producers of hazelnuts, a major export, who complained that government-set prices were making it close to impossible to earn money.

During her speech on Thursday, she said she had noticed an evolution of people’s thinking and bravery during the tour. In preliminary meetings, she said, residents were hesitant to speak about their woes or criticise the government’s policies when cameras were recording.

As soon as they stopped filming, however, the shopkeepers asked her more candid questions about her programme, as if they were testing the waters of voting for her. “They would come up ... and say, ‘Sister, what are you going to do?’” she said.

But in recent months, as Turks have felt ever more economic pain, so too have they grown ever more willing to speak out. “The wall of fear has been knocked down,” said Aksener.

Nationalist discourse and reverence of the country’s secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, continue to dominate Turkish politics. Aksener’s MHP background bolsters her nationalist credentials. Her supporters include a core of disaffected members of the MHP as well as members of the CHP turned off by its centre-left stances.

Disillusioned AKP supporters who have vowed never to vote for the CHP because of its anti-Islamist past may be gravitating towards her, recognising that she is offering a centre-right alternative to the powerful political machine that Erdogan created.

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Aksener’s avowed nationalism repels the Kurdish voters who are often a key to opposition success in elections. But she has attempted to soften her stance on Turkey’s key ethnic faultline. She has assembled an impressive team of savvy advisers who include veterans of the AKP and the CHP.

Her accomplishments are all the more impressive during a time when Erdogan and his allies control much of the country’s broadcast media and menace opponents with the courts and security forces. “Erdogan’s base is not expanding, it’s shrinking, and it’s one of the reasons Aksener is doing well,” says Cagaptay. “And she’s building this movement in an environment that looks like Belarus.”

Aksener has formed an alliance with the CHP and several other smaller opposition parties ahead of the elections next year. If victorious, the opposition alliance vows to return Turkey to a parliamentary system and curtail the powers of the executive branch, which Aksener said have crippled governance and decision-making. “A single person decides on every big and little thing,” she said on Thursday. “Even where to place a single glass of water.”

The vote next year falls on the centennial of modern Turkey’s founding from the ashes of the Ottoman empire and the First World War. Few believe that Aksener and her party will gain enough power to become the dominant force in the country’s politics. She herself aspires to be prime minister, in a parliamentary system, in a coalition with other parties. But both Erdogan and his opponents see the vote as a chance to shape the country’s future.