Fears grow as poll looks set to give more power to autocratic Erdogan

Raf Sanchez

Burhan Yuksekkas

RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN sat in stony silence as he listened to the complaints of his citizens. During his final drive for votes ahead of tomorrow’s elections, the Turkish president agreed to go on a popular radio call-in show, where the host nervously played recordings of people who had phoned in with their gripes.

The callers raised bread-and-butter issues that any democratic politician might expect to face – hospital waiting times, school exams, small business regulations – but Mr Erdogan’s face darkened as he answered.

“The things that they have said are not true,” he told the host. “They haven’t said these things after serious examinations and because of that I reject them.” Fifteen years after Mr Erdogan first took over as prime minister of Turkey, he appears on the cusp of an election victory under a new constitutional framework that would make him more powerful than ever.

Thanks to a controversial referendum he pushed through last year, Mr Erdogan would become the country’s first executive president, with sweeping authorities to pass laws by decree and exert control over the judiciary.

To critics at home and abroad, Mr Erdogan’s power is growing at a time when he is angrier and more erratic than ever. He refuses to accept even mild criticism of his rule, is cut off from Turkey’s economic reality, and blames unseen enemies for his country’s problems. “Erdogan lives in an echo chamber that he has created,” said Soner Cagaptay, author of The New Sultan, a biography of the prime minister. “And he’s in there with the 40million Turks who support him and all of his political advisers.” The new presidential system will mean Mr Erdogan’s own temperament is more central than ever to Turkey’s governance.

His unpredictable anger has been most sharply on display in his recent struggle against rising inflation and the falling Turkish lira, which has lost around 20 per cent of its value against the dollar in the last six months.

Mr Erdogan has lashed out against a shadowy international “interest rate lobby”, which he says is determined to strangle Turkey’s economic growth by hiking interest rates. He has hinted he might seize control of the country’s central bank after the election in response. The comments have alarmed foreign investors, many of whom see Mr Erdogan’s instinct to grab power as a destabilising trend in Turkey.

“Turkey is not like Russia or Iran because we don’t have natural resources,” said Behlul Ozkan, associate professor at Marmara University. “This is Erdogan’s dilemma: he can’t move to a fully authoritarian system without losing the Western investment that he needs.”

Mr Erdogan has long believed that he is struggling against entrenched foreign and domestic interests. That belief went into overdrive after the failed 2016 coup against him. But Turkey remains a member of Nato and a key strategic player in the Middle East, meaning Western governments have no choice but to try to work with him.