A sea change in Turkey: the humbling of Erdogan
It was the moment that liberals such as myself have been dreaming of for decades, said Bedri Baykam in Cumhuriyet (Istanbul). We’ve watched with profound dismay as Turkey has slid into authoritarian rule ever since President Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. And we didn’t hold much hope of change when local elections were held across Turkey on 31 March. After all, to Turkey’s shame, the state-funded TRT (Turkish Radio and Television) has been turned into a vehicle for Erdogan propaganda: it allocated 97% of the time set aside for election broadcasts to the AKP. Yet in the event, our pessimism was completely misplaced: votes flowed towards the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) like a “tsunami”, leaving it with victories in town after town.
This was a truly extraordinary result, said Ulrich von Schwerin in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). The CHP didn’t just win in cities such as Ankara and Istanbul, where the high-profile opposition leader Ekrem Imamoglu was re-elected as mayor by a ten-point margin; it also hoovered up votes in the conservative heartlands of Anatolia and AKP strongholds such as the city of Bursa. “So how can this victory be explained?” The immediate cause is Turkey’s ailing economy, said Ibrahim Karatas in Daily Sabah (Istanbul). The currency crisis that began in 2018, made worse by the Covid pandemic and Erdogan’s unorthodox economic policies, has left people struggling. On top of that, last year’s devastating earthquakes on the border with Syria “cost the economy a whopping $105bn”. And all that has fuelled a rising discontent over migration (Turkey hosts 3.2 million Syrian refugees). But economic pressures aside, the truth is that people simply get bored when one party is in power for too long, especially the young, only 20% of whom voted AKP. They, more than anyone else, decided to send Erdogan a message.
And nowhere was that message delivered more emphatically than in Istanbul, said Al Jazeera (Doha). Erdogan was born and raised in the city of 16 million, and once served as its mayor himself – so the re-election of Imamoglu was a “personal blow”. Imamoglu, 52, first won the city’s mayoralty in 2019, “ending 25 years of rule by the AKP and its conservative predecessors”. And though he was sentenced to two years and seven months in jail in 2022 for insulting Turkey’s Supreme Election Council, his appeal is ongoing, so he was able to run again – and win yet again – this year. Imamoglu is the man Erdogan just can’t seem to shake off, said Reha Ruhavioglu in Karar (Istanbul). He’s now expected to challenge the incumbent for the presidency in 2028, and who knows, he might just win: after all, the CHP is younger and more dynamic than the AKP, and has many more female candidates, a flood of whom were elected on 31 March.
For now, however, Erdogan’s still running the show, said Marc Pierini on Carnegie Europe (Brussels) – and he has wasted no time in reasserting his authority after these losses, making telephone calls to world leaders and authorising air strikes that killed Kurdish militants in Iraq. So for the next few years at least, the EU and Nato are stuck with the same Erdogan they’ve grown used to: a man “acutely aware of his country’s geopolitical value”, a man always “ready to shed a given foreign policy option if he finds a more attractive alternative”. Even so, these results should have an impact domestically, said Sinan Ülgen in Project Syndicate (Prague). At the very least, the “newly diminished” AKP is now likely to be prevented from amending Turkey’s constitution to extend Erdogan’s mandate beyond 2028. That has to be good news. Erdogan, now 70, has severely eroded Turkey’s democratic institutions in the past decade; yet in these elections, voters showed their deep attachment to multiparty democracy and their faith in the ballot box as a vehicle of change. The Turkish Republic, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, may not be the same as when Erdogan first took office; but for now at least, it remains “firmly anchored in the democratic world”.