Why do opinion polls signal stability?

The latest data suggest that the AKP + MHP bloc is polling around 40%, though an alarmingly high number of people now face poverty. The middle class has eroded. Inflation is so high that people have stopped keeping track of it.

• Given the severity of the economic crisis this high polling outcome is surprising on many accounts. Ordinarily the incumbent parties would lose all support under similar conditions. It happened in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.

• The core constituency of AKP is polling at at least 20%, possibly higher. MHP is an ideological party and its irreducible core is around 7%. The MHP is sliding back to its core, but the AKP isn’t.

• There is a high correlation between consumer confidence and votes. Confidence is currently low. The most recent data show that economic confidence is at its lowest since September. However, the incumbent bloc’s votes aren’t falling.

• With the new electoral law there is a distinct possibility that even 42-45% of the votes could bring an electoral majority in the parliament.

The opposition’s disadvantage is its multi-tiered structure. • For the presidential election, I think will all depend on who the opposition candidate is. Having said that, it may already be too late to rally around a single candidate.

• The history of political systems and ideas tells us that the personification of power is a permanent tendency. Not only for Germans in the 1930s or Italians in the 1920s, but almost everywhere the persona of the ruler matters more than their programs or plans.

• Perhaps in a world that is increasingly becoming uncertain and unsafe, people are looking to the candidate qua persona and trying to find solace in the real person, not in a fictitious committee or a mystical party.

• The person and the office are becoming inextricably bound up once more, as it was in the Middle Ages.

Perhaps the expression “New Middle

Ages” (Alain Minc) isn’t just empty rhetoric.