Abstract:

Starting from the campaign of Ekrem Imamoğlu, who won the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality in 2019, creating an explanatory theoretical framework for political history is the subject of the work. In the study, the aim of the process of building a political campaign based on the story is to study the meaning pattern and the arguments that are consistent with it. In this framework, the focus is on processes processing through language instead of visual-focused digital content. The campaign speeches of the politician have been analyzed and the elements that draw the electorate into the story in the speeches have been investigated. The elected date range is ten days before the repeated elections on 23 June after the first election was cancelled. News and audio recordings in the online versions of the Speaker and Nationalist newspapers, located in different political positions, have been used to reach conversations. Thus, the news texts on the 31 speeches made by Imamoglu in front of the community have been resolved as qualitative. Imamoğlu's speeches include the political narrative themes that build the campaign story and the arguments that his speeches contain these themes. The main function of political narrative themes is to present the qualities that will position the candidate as the hero of the process and to legitimize his actions. The second function of the subjects is to support the solutions the candidate proposes to the problems and to make their arguments valid in the eyes of the public. The findings show that the campaign uses meaningful units believed to be accepted by society within the framework of world perception and beliefs. In the story story axis, this situation has made it easier for the voters to adopt the solutions he proposed against criticisms that he has made it possible for Imamoğlu to determine his own position positively and the rival’s position negatively. This result of the study contributes to the scope for the construction and functioning of political story narrative strategies.

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