Erdoğan appears set for a runoff

Turkey is a strange kind of democracy. But nonetheless it is a democracy where an apparently invincible strongman can — in theory at least — be deposed after two decades in power by the will of the electorate.

With 95 percent of the votes of Sunday night’s presidential vote counted at the time of writing, it looks like neither the sixty-nine-year-old Recep Tayyip Erdoğan nor his challenger, the seventy-four-year-old veteran leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, have managed to break the required 50 percent threshold. That leaves third candidate, ultranationalist Sinan Oğan, with about 5 percent of the vote (up from a pre-election estimate of 1 percent) as a potential kingmaker in a runoff in two weeks’ time. 

A vote against Erdoğan would be a plunge into the unknown for the majority of Turks

President Erdoğan’s opponents have regularly described him as a dictator, and his supporters know him as “the Sultan.” In the aftermath of an attempted military coup in 2016, Erdogan jailed tens of thousands of suspected plotters, fired 150,000 officials and army officers and increased state control of Turkey’s media to over 90 percent. And yet in Sunday’s presidential and parliamentary elections, Erdoğan has come perilously close to being unseated by an electorate furious at galloping inflation and years of government corruption that contributed to the estimated 50,000 death toll from a catastrophic earthquake in February. 

Sunday night’s vote came down to a nail-biting finale, where official estimates of a decisive Erdoğan win — fueled by early vote counts in generally pro-Erdoğan rural areas — were steadily eroded by results from the big cities where discontent against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) runs stronger. Local AKP election managers also adopted a tactic of routinely filing recount appeals in voting precincts where Kılıçdaroğlu had shown strong results. That meant an apparent 72 percent pro-opposition vote in Diyarbakir, a majority Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey, was not immediately uploaded onto the official electoral system.

A vote against Erdoğan would be a plunge into the unknown for the majority of Turks who have spent their adult lives under his rule. But his challenger Kılıçdaroğlu — the loser of eight previous  elections and referendums against Erdoğan — managed to unite six fractious opposition parties as a united candidate. Famously modest and professorial compared to Erdoğan’s macho image as the “reis,” or “captain” of the country, Kılıçdaroğlu is seen as a safe pair of hands after years of political repression and conspiracy theorizing by Erdoğan, who often blames the country’s 40 pe cent year on year inflation rate and other economic problems on international cabals. 

But many Turks — especially from the conservative and religious Anatolian heartland of Turkey — also venerate Erdoğan for tripling the country’s GDP in his years in power and bringing the country regional influence and heralding what Erdoğan describes as “the Turkish century.” This core vote has also been boosted by two decades of shameless promotion by the AKP of its supporters to positions at every level of the Turkish state, from local policemen to judges, prosecutors and local officials, creating a payroll vote tens of millions strong. Erdoğan’s social conservatism, from encouraging Islamic headscarves as the norm in government offices (they were illegal when he came to power) to Friday prayers becoming de rigueur for state employees (unheard of two decades ago), are also popular among working-class, small-town Turks. 

The AKP’s deep local popularity, in spite of discontent with Erdogan over economic woes, has been reflected in Sunday’s other vote, to elect a new Turkish parliament. In this race, with 80 per cent of ballots counted, Erdogan’s People’s Alliance (a coalition of the AKP and its nationalist the MHP) appear on track to become the largest block. The opposition Nation Alliance, led by Kılıçdaroğlu’s CHP, had just 35.6 per cent of the vote. 

That means that even if Erdoğan loses the presidency, his party’s dominance in parliament will gridlock Turkey’s future governance at a time when IMF-recommended deep austerity measures and a huge hike in interest rates are sure to cause economic pain and generate political unrest. 

But Erdoğan’s fall remains a big “if.” With the enormous resources of the state at his disposal, Turkey’s “Sultan” is likely to double down on blatant electoral bribes, such as his recent promise to hike state workers’ pay by 45 percent. With Turkey’s media, bureaucracy and judiciary at his beck and call, Erdoğan’s powers are vast.

The opposition, meanwhile, can hope that the Reis will overplay his hand and produce a similar result to Istanbul’s mayoral elections in 2019, when an AK-disputed re-run produced a resounding win for the opposition candidate. The final result will impact Turkey’s future relationships with the EU, Russia and the Middle East — as well as determine whether Turkey’s Islamic course will deepen or reverse. The stakes could hardly be higher.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.