The Turkish Elections Swung from Hope to Despair

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In the weeks between the first and second rounds of the Presidential election in Turkey, I visited a muhtar—whose role is something like a neighborhood chief—in a lower- and middle-class neighborhood in Istanbul that is overwhelmingly conservative. He wore a red, Turkish-flag pin on his lapel, and a photograph of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk hung above his head. He said that the economy was so terrible—inflation is running at about forty per cent—that shop owners in the neighborhood had started putting arbitrary surcharges on things like pizza or döner kebab. One day something could be one price, the next another. As a result, trust among neighbors was degrading as people’s lives got worse. This was scary because, in hard times, the neighborhood had been the only thing that people had. “Keep the Syrians,” the muhtar told me, one of the few Turks I’ve heard say such a thing about the war refugees who have come to Turkey in the past ten years—more than three and a half million at last count. “They’re more hardworking and honest than our people.”

The muhtar was upset because he knew that the Syrian-refugee crisis had made a huge impact on the election, and because he knew what was coming in the second round, on May 28th. On Sunday, Erdoğan won reëlection, with fifty-two per cent of the vote, and it wasn’t a surprise. The opposition’s optimism had largely flamed out after the strong showing of Erdoğan’s party—the Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P.—on May 14th, in the first round, in which Erdoğan led in the Presidential election and his main right-wing ally (the Nationalist Movement Party) triumphed in parliament. That was enough to put the wind at Erdoğan’s back for the runoff, against Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, but he hardly needed wind. The advantages accrued by a canny, cruel, autocratic leader of twenty years could overwhelm even the most charismatic challenger: there were pre-election giveaways of cheaper electricity and gas, timely surges in wages for civil servants, decades of charity to the poor, and almost total control of the media, which has occluded the causes of Turkey’s devastating recent earthquake. Erdoğan has jailed and persecuted thousands of dissidents, delivered inflammatory rhetoric about the opposition’s association with the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and painted Kurds as allied with terrorists—including a mendacious montage video claiming that the P.K.K., a Kurdish militant group, supported Kılıçdaroğlu. In an interview, Erdoğan defended the video: its veracity was irrelevant, he argued, capturing an era.

Kılıçdaroğlu, the stubborn head of Turkey’s oldest party, the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., isn’t a charismatic leader, and his party has no recent record of governance to stand on. But, in the months before the elections, Kılıçdaroğlu’s conciliatory nature and his inclusive rhetoric inspired many to believe that he could somehow bring the varied groups of the opposition together. When he fell short of a majority, in the first round, he abandoned his softness. After a rabidly anti-migrant third place candidate, Sinan Oğan, secured five per cent of the vote, Kılıçdaroğlu reiterated, “The border is honor.” Billboards appeared all over Istanbul with Kılıçdaroğlu’s face and the words “The Syrians. Will. Go.” A recent poll suggested that seventy-one per cent of Turks wanted the Syrians repatriated—this has been clear especially since 2019, when the refugee issue helped lose the Istanbul mayoral elections for the A.K.P. (Erdoğan had welcomed the Syrians, in 2012.) But Kılıçdaroğlu, after all the months of sweetness and inclusivity, suddenly sounded not only violent but disingenuous.

This election was always going to be tricky for Kılıçdaroğlu: he was representing a six-party umbrella movement, one that included former A.K.P. conservatives, right-wing nationalists, secularists, leftist liberals, and, unofficially, much of the Kurdish left. The opposition—the people themselves—who monitored the voting in classrooms, who posted videos of voter intimidation on Twitter, or worked together to assess election irregularities, have somehow not given up hope or energy in the past twenty years. But we will see many people leave Turkey in the next year—those with opportunities abroad, but also those under threat, especially people facing trumped-up charges of terrorism. On the night of the election, Erdoğan said that he would not let the Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş (whose party was threatened with closure before the elections) out of jail. The crowd chanted, “Selo’ya idam”—execution for Demirtaş.

Those who stay in Turkey will live in a country on the brink of economic ruin. The people will suffer, but Erdoğan’s government will likely be bailed out. The Turkish pundit Soner Çağaptay listed the leaders whom he expected to reach out to Erdoğan: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Mohammed bin Salman, Mohammed bin Zayed (the President of the United Arab Emirates), Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (the Emir of Qatar), Ilham Aliyev (the President of Azerbaijan), Anwar Ibrahim (the Prime Minister of Malaysia). European and American leaders tweeted their congratulations. (The Syrian-refugee crisis long ago prompted the European Union to send billions of euros to Erdoğan’s government, in order to keep the Syrians from their own countries.) On Sunday and Monday, many opposition Turks responded to the tweets with scorn. When Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, tweeted, “I look forward to continue building the EU-Türkiye relationship,” the veteran Turkish journalist Amberin Zaman replied, “And to keeping brown Muslim people out of Europe.” Turks have been expected to care for a refugee population and a crisis caused by Western wars and Western leaders who are intent on keeping the chaos they’ve caused in the Middle East on the other side of the Bosporus.

Turkey’s geography has proved too big to fail. Erdoğan has continued to make himself important to America as part of NATO, even as he has embraced anti-American rhetoric; to Europe, as the strongman-shepherd of Arab and Muslim refugees; and now to Russia, which needs Erdoğan during this time of isolation because of the war in Ukraine, and also for trade, especially in gas and food. Erdoğan benefits from others’ foreign-policy narcissism. The day after his victory, the front page of the Times Web site read, “Will Erdogan’s Victory Soften Turkey’s Opposition to Sweden in NATO?” At the end of the day, it’s not clear that the leaders of the West really wanted Erdoğan to go.

In Turkey, his voters’ pride in such mega-projects as airports and bridges and roads has turned to pride in drones and military prowess. “At the heart of Islamism is the promise of exceptionalism and geopolitical significance,” the Turkish analyst Selim Koru has said. “Erdoğan promised the continuation of the imperial project he has embarked upon. He used his power over the media to strongly equate the opposition with the ‘enemies of the nation,’ be they Western powers, Kurdish separatism, or simply irreverent metropolitan élites.” The morning after the election, an American friend said to me, “Crazy that so many countries love their autocrats”—and surely the muhtar in the conservative neighborhood would agree. But Erdoğan’s voters don’t believe that they live in a dictatorship. They believe that what they have now, because of Erdoğan, is a democracy—that Erdoğan wouldn’t throw people in jail unless they were guilty, and that they, the voters, in exercising their right to vote, have participated in one of the greatest democratic experiments in recent history. On Sunday night, thousands of people gathered in front of Erdoğan’s palace and sang:

He is the loud voice of the oppressed
He is the free voice of the silent world
He is as he seems,
Taking his power from the nation,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
Man of the people, lover of truth.

There is a possibility that the winner was, in fact, near-recent history. With voters, the first ten years of Erdoğan’s rule—in which he restored the dignity of religious people, and improved the health-care system, public services, and much civil infrastructure—may carry more power than the second ten, in which he engaged in unfathomable corruption, oppressed a large proportion of the citizenry, and squandered the people’s money. With its stronghold on information and media, the A.K.P. has manipulated the understanding of the economic crisis and the earthquake; many people still think that the only person who can fix the mess that the country is in is the one who fixed it before.

Erdoğan will serve for five more years, and there will likely be more surprises; that creative dynamism of discontent that was once the domain of his constituents is now with the opposition. The muhtar worried a bit about his critical language after I spoke to him, as countless Turks will now worry more about everything they do and say. But then he said, laughing, “Of course, I am not scared. I can take them.” ♦

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