Ajit Karn
Turkish elections: Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the authoritarian leader of Turkey, is confronting the greatest test of his two-decade rule, although he remains a formidable candidate.
Opinion polls indicate that Erdogan’s AKP party and his nationalist allies in the MHP will receive nearly the same percentage of ballots as the six-party opposition bloc in the upcoming parliamentary elections. However, in the concurrent Presidential elections on 14 May, opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, also known as Turkey’s Gandhi, is approximately 10 percentage points clear of Erdogan.
Turkey’s economy is in bad shape due to Erdogan’s unorthodox policy of low-interest rates, which has caused inflation to spiral out of control and the value of the Turkish lira to plummet. The upcoming elections are anticipated to determine the future course of Turkey’s economy.
In addition, the elections will reveal whether Turkey’s executive presidency will be abolished, whether Erdogan’s recent efforts to mend relations with countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Greece are genuine, and, if the opposition wins, what direction Turkey’s foreign policy will take.
Kilicdaroglu will not be the only candidate to challenge Erdogan, according to the final list of candidates for the position of Turkish president. Muharrem Ince, who left the Republican Party (CHP) in 2021, and Sinan Organ, a former MHP member who now represents five small nationalist organizations, are the other candidates.
Ince was the CHP’s candidate in the 2018 election because, at the time, the party believed he had a greater chance of defeating Erdogan than the mild-mannered Kilicdaroglu. In these elections, Ince received 30.6% of the vote.
His candidacy is anticipated to be detrimental to Kilicdaroglu, as he may receive thousands of votes that would have otherwise gone to Kilicdaroglu, making it exceedingly difficult for “Turkey’s Gandhi” to secure 50 percent of the votes cast, the threshold needed to be elected president in the first round.
According to a number of published polls, neither the People’s Alliance ruling block of Erdogan’s AKP and Devlet Bahceli’s MHP nor the Nation’s Alliance – the six-party main opposition alliance commanded by Kemal Kilicdaroglu – are expected to win decisively. Therefore, a great deal depends on how the pro-Kurdish HDP, the third largest party in Turkey, votes in the upcoming elections.
The imprisoned former leader of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, has stated categorically that “Erdogan is a black page that Kurds have definitively closed”
The HDP, which represents Turkey’s 15-million-strong Kurdish minority, is facing a closure case before the Constitutional Court due to its alleged ties to the outlawed PKK; if convicted, it will be prohibited.
HDP has repeatedly criticized Erdogan’s one-man rule, but has refrained from proclaiming Kilicdaroglu’s open support. However, the pro-Kurdish party’s decision not to nominate a candidate for the presidency will undoubtedly benefit Kilicdaroglu, who, unlike the other candidates, has never been hostile to the Kurds.
Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stated that the opposition “has never been this close to winning in the first round of voting on May 14” in response to the announcement that the HDP will not field its own candidate for the presidency.
Given that Erdogan’s rule is fundamentally undemocratic and that he wields immense power and control over many facets of Turkish life, the issue of whether Turkey’s elections will be free and fair is crucial. He has purged more than one hundred thousand civil servants from state institutions, controls the majority of the country’s media outlets, imprisons journalists and ordinary citizens who express opinions he disapproves of, and has suppressed parliamentary democracy.
Since 2015, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the largest regional security organization in the world that promotes stability, peace, and democracy for over a billion people, has refused to recognize Turkish elections as free and fair.
Using the justice system that he controls, Erdogan has prevented Ekrem Imamoglu, the popular mayor of Istanbul who was widely regarded as the strongest opposition candidate, from running for office.
In December of last year, a Turkish court sentenced the charismatic Imamoglu to two years and seven months in prison for a statement he made two years prior: “Those who cancelled the Istanbul mayoral election are fools.” The court ruled that he insulted the Higher Electoral Board, which had controversially issued the decision to cancel the election. (Imamoglu won both that election and the rerun of it on June 23, 2019).
The court also barred him from holding elected political office and engaging in other activities for the duration of his potential prison term, should the conviction be upheld on appeal.
With the dynamic and fiery Imamoglu out of the way, Erdogan believed he could easily win over the mild-mannered Kemal Kilicdaroglu. However, the devastating earthquakes on February 6, which killed more than 50,000 people, destroyed about 650,000 homes, and left millions of people homeless, combined with Erdogan’s reluctance to mobilize the army in rescue efforts, have eroded a significant portion of the popular support for Erdogan and his ruling AKP party.
President Erdogan has vowed to rebuild the country and stated that he intends “to restore cities in the earthquake zone by handing over 319,000 residences and village houses to their owners within a year,” a goal that appears unrealistic.
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Nobody can be certain of the outcome of the Turkish elections. Much will also hinge on whether Erdogan exploits the state of emergency declared in the ten earthquake-stricken provinces and whether he permits free and fair elections.
