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Tekin Geze got a free refrigerator and a washing machine two weeks ago, courtesy of the government. They have been stowed -- still wrapped in the cardboard they came in -- in the only corner of his mud-brick shack that doesn’t leak.

Geze, who is unemployed and has not paid electricity bills for six months, has little to put in either machine. He says he depends on his neighbors’ charity for food; his 4-year-old daughter plays bare-legged in the winter cold.

In the run-up to the March 29 local elections, Geze, 26, is one of thousands in the eastern province of Tunceli to benefit from an aid program that the opposition is calling political bribery and the election board says is against voting rules. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is loosening the purse strings after fighting off efforts by generals and prosecutors to oust his administration over the last two years.

"The government’s trying hard to make sure there’s no erosion in its support, and that means spending a lot," said Serhan Çevik, an economist at Nomura International Plc in London. "But there’s a library full of studies showing the returns on this kind of election-related spending are very low."

Erdoğan is departing from the International Monetary Fund-backed prudence that helped him preside over record growth in Turkey’s $700 billion economy since he came to power in 2002.

In Tunceli, a largely Kurdish-populated city ringed by mountains, the Governor’s Office has spent about 5 million Turkish Liras ($3 million) on the appliance campaign, said Oğuz Alp Çağlar, the centrally appointed provincial deputy governor. The entire municipal budget, which covers salaries for 200 people plus services such as the fire brigade and street cleaning, is only twice that.

"In 2009, a television and a fridge aren’t luxury goods, they’re basic necessities," Çaglar said. "The timing has been a problem, but people know we’re above politics. You can’t shut down the state’s functions just because there’s an election."

About 48 million Turks are entitled to vote on March 29 to choose mayors and municipal assemblies in Turkey’s 81 provinces. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, can expect between 40 and 45 percent, more than its three nearest rivals combined, according to a survey commissioned by New York-based economic research firm, Medley Global Advisors LLC.

Cihan Açıkgöz, the Tunceli’s AKP mayoral candidate, said he would win. The appliance handout has nothing to do with the AKP, and will not affect the election because the civil servants distributing them are not telling anyone how to vote. "We’ll teach people to fish, not give them fish," Açıkgöz said.

’Free and fair’

The handouts breached the constitutional requirement for elections to be "free and fair," Turkey’s electoral board ruled Feb. 7. The board asked prosecutors to investigate and an inquiry began Feb. 11, CNBC-e television reported. There’s no question of canceling the election results in Tunceli, the board’s chairman, Muammer Aydın, told reporters Feb. 27. Addressing lawmakers in Parliament on Feb. 10, Erdoğan praised the Tunceli campaign. Since its 2007 landslide, the AKP, which has roots in a banned Islamist movement, has faced repeated challenges from its secularist opponents.

In July, a lawsuit filed by the top prosecutor to ban Erdoğan and his party for inciting religious fundamentalism failed by one vote in the 11-member Constitutional Court. In Tunceli, Nuri Balcı, a 40-year-old unemployed man, watched a porter carry his new refrigerator up the stairs to his apartment and said it would not make him support the government. "They’re trying to influence the election, but it won’t work. We won’t sell our votes for fridges," he said.