Pearls and Irritations

In Turkiye, deep polarisation and the long struggle between the Atlanticists and the Eurasianists over Turkiye’s soul seems to be ending in victory for the latter. The EU has little appeal for Turks now. It lives in vassalage to the US, which itself seems to be thrashing around in the last days of empire. The ‘west’ watches and calculates. It would have greatly preferred Kilicdaroglu. He would have been more malleable whereas Erdogan is hardly malleable at all. He gravitates between the ‘west’ and Russia or China, benefitting always from Turkiye’s geostrategic position. Internally, no loosening of his grip on the Turkish state and society can be expected. 

Turkiye’s elections ended predictably, the triumph of experience over hope for those who really believed Recep Tayyip Erdogan could be ejected this time. One starting point for discussion of the outcome is that whereas Erdogan has never lost an election, his main opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has never won one. Apparently close to half the electorate thought he could win this one.

Both main parties, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican Peoples Party (CHP), formed alliances. Kilicdaroglu’s Nation Alliance (Millet Ittifaki) – his ‘table of six’ – swung from mild centre left to the hard nationalist right. It was not just the voters who ultimately did not regard him as the leader they wanted. The alliance’s ‘table of six’ had hardly been assembled before one of its legs, Meral Aksener, withdrew her Iyi (Good) party because she did not regard Kilicdaroglu as the best possible candidate, when the popular Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, and Mansur Yavas, the mayor of Ankara, were available.

She returned to the alliance only after Kilicdaroglu agreed to appoint the two of them as vice presidents and effectively run on a ticket of three. This open internal division was bound to create uncertainty among voters. If elected, they might wonder, how long would such an alliance last?

The governing People’s Alliance (Cumhur Ittifaki) lost 13 seats in the parliamentary elections but still emerged with a comfortable majority of 323 seats out of 600, compared to 212 for the Nation Alliance (Millet Ittifaki). Erdogan’s AKP won 35.6 per cent of the vote compared to 25.3 for the CHP. The AKP’s main alliance partner, the rightwing/fascistic National Movement Party (MHP), the ideological home of the Grey Wolves, picked up more than 10 per cent of the vote, giving it 50 seats (an extra one).

It is indicative of the musical chairs that characterises Turkish party politics that one of Kilkicdaroglu’s strongest alliance partners, Meral Aksener, was once an MHP member and MP, breaking with the party leader, Devlet Bahceli, in 2017 to form the Iyi Party. In the MHP Aksener was known as asena (she-wolf) because of her affinity with the youth wing of the party, the grey wolves (ulkucular) and would be seen at rallies giving their wolf head hand salute.

In the presidential elections Erdogan fell 0.5 per cent short of the 50 per cent he needed to surpass if there was not to be a second round, giving his supporters the opportunity to argue that what kind of dictator would allow an election to be lost by 0.5 per cent. Kilicdaroglu came in with 44.8 per cent, enough for his supporters to think he had a fighting chance of unseating Erdogan in the second. Given the government’s control of the state media and the support of most of the media in the private sector this was a decent result for the CHP.

At this point the support of the hard right Ancestral Alliance (Ata Ittifaki) became crucial. Its presidential candidate, Sinan Ogan, who received 5.1 percent votes in the first round, pledged his support for Erdogan in the two-man runoff. However, his alliance partner, Umit Ozdag, of the Victory (Zafer) Party broke ranks and swung behind Kilicdaroglu on the basis of his pledge to send all Syrian refugees – about four million of them – back to their country. There are millions more refugees from other countries but it was the Syrians, underpaid and undercutting the Turkish work force at a time of high unemployment, who eventually wore out Turkish hospitality.

Erdogan, whose electoral base included an official 230,000 Syrians who have taken out Turkish nationality (government critics say the true figure is much higher) was much more circumspect about their immediate future. Most and probably almost all would have voted for him.

Kilicdaroglu campaigned hard and somewhat desperately on this issue before the second vote but Erdogan still won comfortably with 52.1 percent of the vote, Kilicdaroglu trailing behind with 47.8. Both have pledged to withdraw from Syria, ending Turkiye’s occupation of the northwest, but without setting a timetable.

As always, the Kurdish issue was kicked around. The CHP had the implicit support of the largely Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), whose leader Selahettin Demirtas has been imprisoned since 2016, and, according to Erdogan, in the immediate aftermath of the elections, will be staying there. During the campaign Erdogan swore that “my nation” would never accept a government that came to power with the support of Qandil, the northern Iraq mountain range near the Iranian border where the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) is based. This conflation of the PKK with the HDP and the CHP undoubtedly damaged Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan has his own Kurdish party, HUDA-PAR, a far-rightwing Islamic-Kurdish synthesis that won four seats.

What was incomprehensible to CHP voters was how Turks could vote for a government that had plunged them into economic misery and failed to respond quickly after the two massive earthquakes in February. In some devastated regions, and in freezing weather, the homeless were waiting days for government help to arrive via the Turkish Red Crescent (Kizilay) and the Disaster and Emergency Management Ministry (AFAD). Furthermore, no lessons seemed to have been learned from the 1999 quake that left at least 17,000 people dead. Buildings across the southeast collapsed as if built of sand, pointing to corruption between developers and government regulatory authorities.

A further question was asked about the earthquake property tax: where did all the billions of dollars collected for earthquake readiness go? On top of this was the state of the economy, with inflation currently running at about an official 45 per cent (compared to an official 85 per cent a few months ago, unofficially double that).

Erdogan insists that his ‘unorthodox’ economic policies (holding down interest rates) will eventually benefit the people but they are certainly not benefitting the current generation. Price increases for food and energy, in particular, are having a devastating effect, especially on low income families, in other words, the majority of the population. The decline in the purchasing power of the Turkish lira has been sharp. Between the mid-1990s and early this century it completely collapsed, trading 1.35 million to the $US by 2005, when it was revalued by chopping off six zeros. Since then it has fallen further, from 1.3 to the dollar in 2005 to 2.7 by 2015 and now – as of late May – to about 20 to the dollar, strengthening slightly after the elections but with a further continuing decline expected by economists.

Against this background, how could the people have voted the AKP government back into power? In Maras, one of the worst quake-affected provinces in the southeast, 71 per cent of the votes chose the AKP and support was strong elsewhere.

There are many questions that sociologists might eventually be able to answer. What they do point to is deep polarisation and a continuing kulturkampf over what might be called Turkiye’s soul, the spirit of the state founded by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) exactly a century ago and the state refashioned by Tayyip Erdogan over the past two decades. This is the greatest victory of his career, deeply symbolic on the centenary of the foundation of the republic.

The secular nature of the state is still guaranteed in the constitution but there is little to stop the state’s incremental re-Islamisation of society, except perhaps the people themselves. Electoral results indicate that almost as many Turks don’t like it as the number who do.

Through changes in the education system, through the disbursement of large percentages of the budget to the diyanet, the religious affairs directorate, through the encouragement of piety and the construction of mosques more important for what they symbolise rather than the number of people who might pray there (very few in some cases), through the transformation of Aya Sofia from a museum into a mosque, and through innumerable other measures, Erdogan has reconfigured society, moving the modern republic very strongly away from its secular roots. As all countries build on their past, those who don’t like this trend need to bear in mind Turkiye’s rich Ottoman and Muslim heritage: if this is what the Turkish people want, who is to say they shouldn’t have it?

It is not just religion, however, as close control and suppression of all those who challenge him have characterised Erdogan’s trajectory through Turkiye’s night sky, black with twinkling stars extinguished the moment they represent danger. Gezi Park in 2013 was one such occasion, the pending prosecution later that year for corruption of those in or close to the family circle another and the purges which followed the coup attempt of 2016, for which his one time ally, Fethullah Gulen, was blamed, yet another.

Journalists, publishers, artists and academics have all ended up in court and often in prison for writing or speaking out. Out of 180 countries, Turkiye has fallen from 149 in 2022 to 165 in 2023, according to the freedom of the press ranking by Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF). Freedom House gives Turkiye a mark of 32/100 and puts it in the category of “not free” insofar as human rights are concerned. This level of oppression is driving many young Turks, and many are gifted if not brilliant, to seek a future outside the country of their birth. The seal has now been set on the next five years for more of the same, a depressing outcome for those who want to get out but can’t.

In 2017, Turks voted 51.1 per cent to 48.6 per cent to change the political system from parliamentary to presidential. A cascade of complaints of ‘irregularities’ followed, including the inclusion of unstamped and thus officially unauthenticated ballot papers but Erdogan crossed the line first and for him that was all that counted. The change vastly increased his powers, and correspondingly diminished those of the parliament: he has taken pride in issuing 2755 decrees from the presidential palace, immediately inviting comparisons with the sultanic past. Had the CHP won, the parliamentary system would have been reinstituted.

The ‘west’ watches and calculates. It would have greatly preferred Kilicdaroglu. He would have been more malleable whereas Erdogan is hardly malleable at all. He gravitates between the ‘west’ and Russia or China, benefitting always from Turkiye’s geostrategic position. The ‘west’ might not want Erdogan but it does want and need Turkiye, and thus has to put up with its president and try to make the most out of the current situation. He will continue to play the EU and the US for what he can get out of them, and who can blame him, seeing this is just what they do.

In Turkiye the long struggle between the Atlanticists and the Eurasianists seems to be ending in victory for the latter. The EU has little appeal for Turks now. It lives in vassalage to the US, which itself seems to be thrashing around in the last days of empire. Polls show that most Turks regard the US as a troublemaking power which has repeatedly acted against Turkish interests and cannot be trusted.

Its global military arm, NATO, wants Sweden in its ranks but can’t have it without Turkish approval. In short, the ‘west’s’ problems are Turkiye’s opportunities and Erdogan can be relied on to make the most of them. Internally, no loosening of his grip on the Turkish state and society can be expected.

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