Democracy is on the line in Turkey’s looming election. If Erdoğan wins again, young Turks fear they may never vote again.
- Israeli airstrikes killed three commanders of Islamic Jihad.
- Putin told troops in Red Square that war had been unleashed on Russia.
- The UK’s Liberal Democrats said they would table a vote of no confidence in Rishi Sunak after the Conservatives lost 1061 council seats in last week’s local elections.
In five days’ time nearly 60 million Turkish voters will be asked whether to give Recep Tayyip Erdoğan another five years in power. If they do, that will make 25 years as president or prime minister. If they don’t, Erdoğan could still refuse to go.
So what?
- Turkey’s democracy is at stake.
- So is the question of whether Turkey can resist one-man rule.
- And so is its place in the world, as a G20 country and Nato member that consorts with Putin’s Russia and a contender for EU membership that has twisted the rule of law so far out of shape that it may not recover.
On the ropes? To hear some members of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) tell it, winning against Erdoğan should be easy.
- Turkey is enduring a deep economic crisis compounded by Erdoğan because he insists on holding down interest rates even with rampant inflation. The lira lost over half its value in the past year alone. The price of onions is up five-fold in 18 months.
- Erdoğan’s attacks on civil liberties (the leading Kurdish politician has been locked up since 2016) have reshaped life for every citizen in Turkey and come amid attacks on the press.
- And his government mishandled its response to twin earthquakes in the south that killed over 50,000 people earlier this year and laid bare the cost of weak building codes and corruption in construction and planning on his watch.
Surely unseating an increasingly unpopular autocrat who has tanked the economy should be straightforward?
Not so fast. Most polls have Erdoğan and his main challenger, the former accountant Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, roughly neck-and-neck. At best Kılıçdaroğlu manages a slim lead. The bespectacled 74-year-old leads a six-party coalition that was publicly at war with itself over his candidacy just two months ago, when the leader of its second largest party accused Kılıçdaroğlu of imposing himself as candidate over others with a better shot at beating Erdoğan.
Still, this is an opposition that promises deep changes if it wins.
The pitch. The Nation’s Alliance wields a thick document of 2,300 policy ideas whose main aims are to
- dismantle Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian executive presidency and return Turkey to parliamentary democracy;
- overhaul the judiciary to roll pack Erdoğan’s crackdown on dissent;
- jumpstart the economy by purging financial institutions of corruption, luring back foreign investment and stabilising the lira; and
- repair relations with the EU even at the cost of the close relationship Erdoğan has built with Putin’s Russia.
The European relationship would still be strained, not least because the coalition would continue Erdoğan’s policy of deporting the millions of Syrians currently in Turkey despite a pledge to uphold international law. But Western governments would welcome a Kılıçdaroğlu win as a win for democracy worldwide.
The incumbent. In his two decades in power, Erdoğan has fine-tuned a mix of Turkish nationalism, control of most media and grandstanding on the world stage to bolster legitimacy at home. The combination returned him to office in 2015 and again in 2018 despite mass protests in Istanbul and Ankara against his creeping erosion of secularism and the rule of law.
No surprise, then, that a recent meeting between the US Ambassador to Ankara Jeff Flake and Kılıçdaroğlu sparked his anger, prompting Erdoğan to say he would no longer receive Flake who he perceived as being overly supportive of the opposition. “We need to teach the United States a lesson in this election,” he said.
As the vote draws closer, Turkey’s biggest and newest warship is docked in Istanbul, where citizens are invited aboard to sample the future of technology and strength promised by Erdoğan. Kılıçdaroğlu prefers to talk quietly from his kitchen about the price of onions.
The choice facing Turkey could hardly be starker.
