2023-05-09 21:58:42
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is risking his future and his political legacy in this Sunday’s elections, “the most important in the country’s history since the first free and fair elections in 1950,” Soner Cagaptay told elDiario.es , director of the Turkey Research Program at the think tank Washington Institute. The president is virtually even with opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who by most estimates holds a slight lead that could end up expelling Erdogan after 20 years of absolute domination of the country.
If none of the candidates reaches 50% in the presidential elections, a second round will be held on May 28 between the two most voted. In parallel, parliamentary elections are held. The Grand National Assembly is made up of 600 deputies and Erdogan’s AKP currently controls 286, but his alliance with the ultranationalist MHP formation allows him to advance his legislative agenda. Until 2015 he had governed without interruption with an absolute majority, but the progressive loss of support is evident. The Economist rates the appointment as the most important elections of 2023 around the world.
“Either Erdogan loses and steps aside, which would mean Turkey’s return to democracy, a more transatlantic foreign policy, the release of political prisoners, the restoration of the rule of law, institutional autonomy and media independence; or he wins and the opposite will happen: the few remaining institutions will fall under his hand and Turkey will continue to be an even more autocratic personalist regime, ”says Cagaptay.
There is a perception that this may be the last chance to oust Erdogan from power. “Turkey is now like Hungary and Poland, that is, a democracy that has fallen under an autocrat. A victory for Erdogan would take the country further into the camp of Russia and Belarus in democratic terms,” Cagaptay argues.
As for the legislative ones, Ilke Toygur, a professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid and a senior researcher at the think tank CSIS Europe Program, believes that “a more important bloc of the opposition” will be formed: “Not only of the formations of the alliance opposition, but also from the coalition of the green left. There is a tendency for cooperation between the two, although they are very different. A very tough legislature awaits them in the economy, reconstruction of institutions, foreign policy, etc. There is a long way to go”.
a united opposition
After more than a year of tough negotiations and delicate balances, the so-called ‘Table of Six’, an alliance of highly diverse opposition formations that met for the first time in February 2022, presented its candidate: Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the formation heir to the founder of the homeland, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the main opposition force. The historical nature of these elections pushed the union of the opposition.
The coalition also includes the Good Party (Iyi Parti), born as a moderate split from the ultranationalist MHP formation; and other minor parties. Among them the Islamist-leaning Happiness Party and two others founded by former ministers who have fallen from Erdogan in recent years, including Ahmet Davutoglu, who was foreign minister and prime minister to the president.
The great absentee, but greatly necessary in this anti-Erdogan amalgamation in which Islamists, nationalists, conservatives and social democrats are mixed, was the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the second opposition party. His entry into the table would blow up the coalition for his support for Kurdish autonomy, but his votes are essential to defeat Erdogan.
Finally, two weeks before the elections, the coalition that includes the HDP, Alianza Trabajo y Libertad –the second force of the opposition– announced that it would not present any candidate for the presidential elections and expressed his support for the Table of Six. “In these historic elections we once again ask the people of Turkey to vote for the Labor and Freedom Alliance in the parliamentary elections and for Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential ones,” they said in a statement, in which they clarified that this was the only way to achieve a “victory against fascism”.
Selahattin Demirtaş, former party chairman and imprisoned since 2016, tweeted an image of Kılıçdaroğlu under the caption: “Turkey’s 13th President. I believe that you will end the divisions and create social peace. My vote is for you.” To avoid possible banning in the multiple court cases besetting the HDP, the party has decided to run for Parliament under the banner of the Green Left Party.
The 13th President of Turkey, Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu,
May God open your way.
I sincerely believe that you will end the segregation, ensure social peace, and bring peace and prosperity to Turkey.
My vote is for you, Mr. #PresidentKılıçdaroğlu pic.twitter.com/BQlJQAxKNy
— Selahattin Demirtaş (@hdpdemirtas) May 3, 2023
War dirty
Erdogan knows that his support has been deteriorating for years and that there is a real possibility of losing the presidency. He is concerned about the association between the pro-Kurdish party and the opposition alliance and has also given some indication of his possible response to defeat. “My nation will not hand over this country to someone who becomes president with the support of Kandil,” said the president in reference to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) militia base, which Erdogan links to the HDP.
On Sunday, at a massive rally at Istanbul airport that the official media said was attended by 1.7 million people and described as “the largest witnessed in Turkey or Europe”, Erdogan played a doctored video in which one of the founders of the PKK, Murat Karayılan, seems to be asking for the vote for Kılıçdaroğlu. Some experts maintain that it is a ‘deepfake’, while others point to a mounting. The part of the video in which the PKK militant appears corresponds to a fragment of a speech published in 2021.
President Erdoğan had Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s “Come on” commercial film edited by PKK’s Murat Karayılan and watched as if PKK members were singing the CHP’s song at the Istanbul rally. pic.twitter.com/BgJy5O1Wot
— 23 DEGREES (@yirmiucdegree) May 7, 2023
The Minister of the Interior, Süleyman Soylu, has even gone so far as to affirm that the elections are a coup attempt political state of the West. “July 15, 2016 was his actual coup attempt. May 14 is their attempted political coup,” he said. Soylu is referring to a statement by Joe Biden in 2020 in which he said that he would support the opposition to defeat Erdogan.
“If Erdogan wins, it is democracy. If he loses, it’s a coup. Although elections cannot be rigged (Turkey has been holding free elections longer than Spain), if the results are too close, Erdogan will challenge them in the same way that Trump did. He will not recognize it, ”Cagaptay maintains. “He controls 90% of the media and can write a fraud narrative,” he says.
“We’re really getting into unknown land in terms of Turkish politics. We’re up against two things that have never happened before: a completely unfair race alongside a possibly hotly contested result; and, furthermore, never in history have we had a leader suggest that he would not recognize the result if he loses”, he adds.
It would not be the first time. After losing the mayoralties of Ankara and Istanbul in 2019, which the AKP had controlled since 1994, Erdogan said “thieves” had stolen the “national will” and “illegalities” had been committed. Then his party officially requested to annul the results and call new elections. The courts (whose index of judicial independence is among the worst in the world) they agreed with him, but not only did he fail to reverse the results, but the opposition greatly multiplied his margin of victorygoing from a difference of 13,729 votes in the first ballot to 777,000 in the electoral repetition.
After his surprising victory, the new mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, from the CHP, sounded like a possible opposition candidate against Erdogan in the presidential elections next Sunday, but the court disqualified him for calling those who ordered to repeat the elections “idiots”. The mayor has appealed the sentence.
“Democracy is a tool, it is not the goal”, said in 1996 the then mayor of Istanbul. After 20 years of uninterrupted power, democracy could now be the end of it.
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