1929 Constantinopolitan general election (Queen of Cities)

The 1929 Constantinopolitan general election was held on December 8, 1929 in order to elect all members of the bicameral Parliament of the Sovereign City of Constantinople. The election resulted in a relative victory for the multi-party Citizens' Front as it gained a plurality of seats in both Chambers. The 1927 electoral reform led to the reduction of the number of parties in Parliament, as their number went down from eight to five.

On December 16 the new Parliament elected members of the Second Directory for the 1930-1934 term. The members of the previous Directory were almost all re-elected, except for Ahmet Shevket who did not stand for election and was replaced by Murad Hodja as Minister of Commerce.

Electoral system
The two chambers were elected on a single ballot using two different electoral systems. The Chamber of Deputies was elected via proportional representation from a nationwide district. For the election of the Chamber of Nations, each of the five communities were reserved 20 seats that would be filled using a first-past-the-post system.

Context
The election was held a year after the adoption of the Panayiotou Law, a piece of legislation that significantly facilitated the path to citizenship for immigration, which widened the electorate by hundreds of thousands of people. The legislation proved to be extremely controversial, as it sparked outrage in the Turkish community, resulting in protests and riots throughout 1928 and 1929. The effects of this law were immediate, as those that had arrived in the country during the 1923-1924 population exchange between Greece and Turkey gained full voting rights, greatly benefitting Constantinople's Greek community. By the time of the election, the share of the electorate that identified as Turkish declined from 41 to 31 percent while those that identified as Greeks now also represented 31 percent, up from 26 percent in 1925. As a result, the importance of Greek parties rose significantly while Turkish politicians lost importance in the Chamber of Deputies.

Additionally, the election marked a clash between the traditionalist and conservative ethnic parties and the progressive-liberal Citizens' Front. Representing clashing visions of Constantinopolitan identity as the ethnic parties argued for large autonomy and self-governance of ethnic communities vis-à-vis the government, a strong role for religion and education in the ethnic language while the Citizens' Front represented a modernist and universalist vision that sought to implement large-scale reforms that would erase differences between ethnicities, such as the proposed education reform that would make all schools public, free, French-speaking, and secular. As a result, the months before the election were marked by growing polarization and political tensions.