Turkey: Strongman holds off toughest challenge yet
Turkey is finding it tougher than expected to get rid of authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said The Guardian (U.K.) in an editorial. In power for 20 years, first as prime minister and then as president, he has presided over a gradual weakening of the rule of law and the jailing of tens of thousands of perceived opponents, and he’s lasted this long only because the fractious opposition has been riven by infighting. But his “assumption of quasi-monarchical presidential powers” after the last election, in 2018, finally succeeded in uniting the opposition, and for this week’s election they coalesced behind the mild-mannered pro-democracy figure Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Polls showed Kilicdaroglu well in the lead, and many expected him to defeat Erdogan in the first round, but that optimism was “sadly misplaced.” Not only did Erdogan force a second round, taking 49 percent to Kilicdaroglu’s 45 percent, but his party won “a surprise majority” in the parliament as well. Kilicdaroglu could still win the runoff in two weeks, but it will be an uphill climb. It’s a disappointment for the U.S. and Europe, which had hoped an opposition victory would see Turkey, a NATO member, “turn more toward the West.”
The results show the deep divisions in Turkish society, said Fritz Zimmermann in Die Zeit (Germany). The election pitted the religious, conservative rural voters who support Erdogan against the secular, pluralistic urbanites who see themselves as heirs to Ataturk’s vision of a Western-oriented Turkey. Kilicdaroglu tried to bridge that divide, “forming his hands into a heart shape” at his rallies. But it wasn’t a fair fight. Erdogan had all the power of the state behind him in the campaign and was able to rain money down on the poor regions recently stricken by the earthquake. He not only gave free gas to all households and a 45 percent pay raise to all government workers, but he also got nonstop fawning press from television news, having crushed most independent media. Twenty years of Erdogan’s rule has worn Turks down, said Yalcin Dogan in T24 (Turkey). The economy is terrible right now, with inflation at 50 percent, and that should have favored the challenger. But our society has grown “accustomed to poverty, accustomed to corruption, accustomed to arbitrary rule.” We no longer find “the suspension of fundamental rights and freedoms” shocking. Public expressions of Islam that were once unthinkable, such as wearing hijab at a government job, are now the norm. If Erdogan wins, we will “break away from the West for good and become a backward Middle Eastern country.”
Kilicdaroglu still has a chance to win this, said Emre Kongar in Cumhuriyet (Turkey). It’s encouraging that, for all Erdogan’s manipulations, the president still did not muster a majority outright. The test now will come in seeing whether Kilicdaroglu can woo the 5 percent of voters who chose third-party candidate Sinan Ogan. These are ultranationalists who are turned off by Erdogan’s Islamist leanings, and they could be won over. “The struggle for democracy is hard and long,” but it isn’t over yet.