The quest to defeat Erdogan
For the past three years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken his nation on a seemingly endless political roller-coaster ride. Under the auspices of his government, the country has seen two parliamentary electionsand a controversial referendum that vested wider powers in Turkey's presidency. Meanwhile, the purges he commenced after a failed coup attempt in 2016 are still roiling the country.
The next big event comes June 24, when Turks will vote for their next president and parliament. For Erdogan and his opponents, the stakes are as high as ever. If he wins, Erdogan will assume the Turkish presidency's expanded executive powers, granted by the bitterly fought referendum in 2017.
After a decade and a half in power, Erdogan has become the most consequential Turkish politician since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. But his critics fear the death of Turkey's enfeebled democracy and the strengthening of an overt authoritarian. A growing body of analysts cast Turkey under Erdogan as a prime example of how democracies can backslide and how ostensibly liberal politics can give way to toxic majoritarianism.
Erdogan is a canny political operator, and he has preserved his rule by mobilizing a divisive yet effective brand of religious nationalism. He has trained his ire on a vast web of supposed enemies abroad, from obstreperous Western governments to a Kurdish separatist terrorist group to a geriatric cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania. But although he once could campaign on a track record of economic prosperity and development, the Turkish economy is teetering dramatically.
“Years of irresponsible policies have overheated the Turkish economy. High inflation rates and current account deficits are going to prove sticky,” Atilla Yesilada, an analyst with Istanbul-based Global Source Partners, said to The Washington Post. “I think we are at the end of our rope.”
“Opposition leaders have also cited encouraging poll numbers that they say reflect voter fatigue with the president after a tumultuous few years in Turkey marked by growing tensions with some of the country’s NATO allies and intensifying social polarization at home,” wrote The Post's Istanbul bureau chief, Kareem Fahim. “The results suggest a possible opposition victory — if not in the presidential race, then in the parliament, where they hope to roll back the majority held by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP.”
Erdogan's challengers are stronger this year, thanks both to the political winds and the emergence of an opposition alliancethat includes not only leftists, religious minorities and secularists, but also right-wing nationalists and pious Muslims.
Erdogan's main opponent in the presidential race is Muharrem Ince of the Republican People's Party, a centrist party once associated with decades of stifling secularism as well as the repression of ethnic minorities carried out by the Turkish state. Ince, a former schoolteacher, has worked assiduously to dispel this image and champion a more inclusive future.
The challengers say that Erdogan is hobbling the country by sparring with the European Union and NATO, and making moves that tanked the Turkish currency. "The policies that Erdogan or his government are following do not help Turkey stand up on her own feet in almost all aspects and policies, whether economic or foreign policies,” Islamist presidential candidate Temel Karamollaoglu said to the Guardian. “His method of approach, the discourse, causes polarization in Turkey.”
But there are limits to the time-for-change argument. “The opposition’s main message is, enough is enough. You have been in power too long, you represent the past,” Omer Taspinar of the Brookings Institute said to Fahim, suggesting that Erdogan is likely to overcome the opposition. “Maybe that would work if he was 80 years old. Erdogan is still a force to reckon with, despite his vulnerabilities. He has done well for the middle class.”
As in earlier elections in 2015, all eyes are on the Kurdish vote. Kurds represent about 20 percent of the country's population; Erdogan, who moved to liberalize restrictions on Kurdish cultural rights, once drew tremendous backing from religiously-minded Kurdish voters. But the resumption of conflict with Kurdish militant groups in Turkey, Syria and Iraq has weakened that support, as has his government's persecution of the Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, a left-wing, pro-Kurdish party that Ankara accuses of collusion with outlawed Kurdish militants.
If the HDP can win more than 10 percent of the national vote required to gain seats in Turkey's parliament — as it did in June 2015 — Erdogan's AKP will struggle to win a majority. The HDP's charismatic leader, Selahattin Demirtas, has been thrown in jail on terrorism-related charges he and his supporters flatly reject. He is running for president behind bars.
“The Kurds are a reality, and in every country in the Middle East, in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, they are on the front lines for the struggle of democracy,” Demirtas told me in an interview in 2016, before he was sent to prison. “There's a fundamental ideological conflict between the Kurds and Erdogan, who has a Turkish Islamist ideology.”
Naturally, there are widespread fears that Erdogan and the AKP will attempt to fix or suppress the vote in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast to secure the outcome they need. The president's opponents were convinced that foul play guaranteed his slender referendum win last year. “We feel that, in order to get 10 per cent of the recorded vote, we actually need to get 15 per cent,” Mehmet Serif Camci, an HDP leader in Diyarbakir, said to the Financial Times.
“I think he will win following a completely unfair campaign, and may even rig to this end — both would be firsts in Turkey’s 70-year democratic history,” Soner Cagaptay, the author of a book on Erdogan's turbulent rule, said to Today's WorldView. “But at the same time he will become even more authoritarian, knowing that a majority does not support him anymore.”
• For a more thorough primer on Sunday’s election, check out the three-part series published by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. Here’s their prognosis for what may happen if it appears the election has been won fraudulently by Erdogan and the AKP:
“There is ample reason to fear fraud, whether widespread voter suppression in the southeast or manipulated returns. Many in Turkey have concluded that whatever happens, Erdogan will not allow himself to lose, and that the results of the first round of the election could simply provide a yardstick for how much rigging was needed to ensure victory in the second round. In the case of a blatantly fraudulent election, the political fallout would largely differ from that of a more legitimate win in relation to the opposition’s reaction. The question remains how empowered the opposition would feel to challenge Erdogan after he announced victory.
"In the lead-up to the election, the opposition has undertaken a joint effort to deploy poll monitors across the country and provide them with the technology to rapidly communicate vote counts or suspicious activity. Were evidence of irregularities to emerge after the vote, Ince has already announced he will show up in front of the office of the Supreme Electoral Council in Ankara and call on his supporters to join him.
"Would the opposition then consider further steps like boycotting parliament or launching more sustained public protests? If a sense of resignation prevailed, and the opposition avoided any further action, then the results of a stolen election would be little different from the results of a legitimate one.”
• Attention in the United States is focused on the Trump administration’s decision to forcibly separate more than 2,300 migrant children from their families on the border since April. Trump continued falsely insisting that Democrats are to blame for the policy, which is entirely the creation of his own administration. From my colleagues:
"Contrary to Trump’s claims, the separations largely stem from a 'zero-tolerance' policy announced with fanfare last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As more families are stopped for illegally crossing the border, adults are taken to detention facilities that are effectively jails, and children are sent elsewhere.
"The White House also has interpreted a 1997 legal agreement and a 2008 bipartisan anti-human-trafficking bill as requiring the separation of families — a position not taken by the George W. Bush or Obama administrations…
"Democrats argue that Trump is trying to use a manufactured crisis to gain leverage in ongoing deliberations in Congress over immigration to secure funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall that was a marquee campaign promise.”
• The investigative journalism website ProPublica obtained audio from one of the U.S. border facilities where at least 10 children can be heard screaming and sobbing in fear. It’s harrowing to listen to, but you should.
• Trump and his team, though, say their illegal entry into America constitutes a national-security threat. On Monday, he tweeted that he didn’t want a European-style migrant crisis in the United States and seemed to gloat about the political spat over migration in Germany endangering Chancellor Angela Merkel’s already-tenuous coalition government. (More on that below.) But, as my colleague Adam Taylor noted, Trump’s insistence that increased migration in Germany has led to rising crime is plainly false:
“Notably, Merkel's biggest challenger on immigration policy is on record as saying just last month that crime in Germany was the lowest it had been in decades.
"Interior Minister Horst Seehofer had released new crime figures in May that pointed to an overall decline in Germany during the past year. The figures showed that 5.76 million crimes were reported in 2017 — a drop of 5 percent from 2016 and the lowest number since 1992. Given the increases in Germany's population, Seehofer told reporters in Berlin, this meant that Germany's reported crime rate was at the lowest it had been for three decades…
"Trump has a history of tweeting inaccurate statements about crime and immigration in Europe. However, it may not be surprising that Trump sees crime rising in Germany when in fact it appears to be falling — a considerable number of Germans feel the same way. One poll conducted in April, for example, found that 41 percent of the country felt that they were less safe in public spaces than five years ago. Fifty-one percent, however, felt nothing had changed.”
www.fotavgeia.blogspot.com
For the past three years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken his nation on a seemingly endless political roller-coaster ride. Under the auspices of his government, the country has seen two parliamentary electionsand a controversial referendum that vested wider powers in Turkey's presidency. Meanwhile, the purges he commenced after a failed coup attempt in 2016 are still roiling the country.
The next big event comes June 24, when Turks will vote for their next president and parliament. For Erdogan and his opponents, the stakes are as high as ever. If he wins, Erdogan will assume the Turkish presidency's expanded executive powers, granted by the bitterly fought referendum in 2017.
After a decade and a half in power, Erdogan has become the most consequential Turkish politician since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. But his critics fear the death of Turkey's enfeebled democracy and the strengthening of an overt authoritarian. A growing body of analysts cast Turkey under Erdogan as a prime example of how democracies can backslide and how ostensibly liberal politics can give way to toxic majoritarianism.
Erdogan is a canny political operator, and he has preserved his rule by mobilizing a divisive yet effective brand of religious nationalism. He has trained his ire on a vast web of supposed enemies abroad, from obstreperous Western governments to a Kurdish separatist terrorist group to a geriatric cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania. But although he once could campaign on a track record of economic prosperity and development, the Turkish economy is teetering dramatically.
“Years of irresponsible policies have overheated the Turkish economy. High inflation rates and current account deficits are going to prove sticky,” Atilla Yesilada, an analyst with Istanbul-based Global Source Partners, said to The Washington Post. “I think we are at the end of our rope.”
“Opposition leaders have also cited encouraging poll numbers that they say reflect voter fatigue with the president after a tumultuous few years in Turkey marked by growing tensions with some of the country’s NATO allies and intensifying social polarization at home,” wrote The Post's Istanbul bureau chief, Kareem Fahim. “The results suggest a possible opposition victory — if not in the presidential race, then in the parliament, where they hope to roll back the majority held by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP.”
Erdogan's challengers are stronger this year, thanks both to the political winds and the emergence of an opposition alliancethat includes not only leftists, religious minorities and secularists, but also right-wing nationalists and pious Muslims.
Erdogan's main opponent in the presidential race is Muharrem Ince of the Republican People's Party, a centrist party once associated with decades of stifling secularism as well as the repression of ethnic minorities carried out by the Turkish state. Ince, a former schoolteacher, has worked assiduously to dispel this image and champion a more inclusive future.
The challengers say that Erdogan is hobbling the country by sparring with the European Union and NATO, and making moves that tanked the Turkish currency. "The policies that Erdogan or his government are following do not help Turkey stand up on her own feet in almost all aspects and policies, whether economic or foreign policies,” Islamist presidential candidate Temel Karamollaoglu said to the Guardian. “His method of approach, the discourse, causes polarization in Turkey.”
But there are limits to the time-for-change argument. “The opposition’s main message is, enough is enough. You have been in power too long, you represent the past,” Omer Taspinar of the Brookings Institute said to Fahim, suggesting that Erdogan is likely to overcome the opposition. “Maybe that would work if he was 80 years old. Erdogan is still a force to reckon with, despite his vulnerabilities. He has done well for the middle class.”
As in earlier elections in 2015, all eyes are on the Kurdish vote. Kurds represent about 20 percent of the country's population; Erdogan, who moved to liberalize restrictions on Kurdish cultural rights, once drew tremendous backing from religiously-minded Kurdish voters. But the resumption of conflict with Kurdish militant groups in Turkey, Syria and Iraq has weakened that support, as has his government's persecution of the Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, a left-wing, pro-Kurdish party that Ankara accuses of collusion with outlawed Kurdish militants.
If the HDP can win more than 10 percent of the national vote required to gain seats in Turkey's parliament — as it did in June 2015 — Erdogan's AKP will struggle to win a majority. The HDP's charismatic leader, Selahattin Demirtas, has been thrown in jail on terrorism-related charges he and his supporters flatly reject. He is running for president behind bars.
“The Kurds are a reality, and in every country in the Middle East, in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, they are on the front lines for the struggle of democracy,” Demirtas told me in an interview in 2016, before he was sent to prison. “There's a fundamental ideological conflict between the Kurds and Erdogan, who has a Turkish Islamist ideology.”
Naturally, there are widespread fears that Erdogan and the AKP will attempt to fix or suppress the vote in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast to secure the outcome they need. The president's opponents were convinced that foul play guaranteed his slender referendum win last year. “We feel that, in order to get 10 per cent of the recorded vote, we actually need to get 15 per cent,” Mehmet Serif Camci, an HDP leader in Diyarbakir, said to the Financial Times.
“I think he will win following a completely unfair campaign, and may even rig to this end — both would be firsts in Turkey’s 70-year democratic history,” Soner Cagaptay, the author of a book on Erdogan's turbulent rule, said to Today's WorldView. “But at the same time he will become even more authoritarian, knowing that a majority does not support him anymore.”
• For a more thorough primer on Sunday’s election, check out the three-part series published by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. Here’s their prognosis for what may happen if it appears the election has been won fraudulently by Erdogan and the AKP:
“There is ample reason to fear fraud, whether widespread voter suppression in the southeast or manipulated returns. Many in Turkey have concluded that whatever happens, Erdogan will not allow himself to lose, and that the results of the first round of the election could simply provide a yardstick for how much rigging was needed to ensure victory in the second round. In the case of a blatantly fraudulent election, the political fallout would largely differ from that of a more legitimate win in relation to the opposition’s reaction. The question remains how empowered the opposition would feel to challenge Erdogan after he announced victory.
"In the lead-up to the election, the opposition has undertaken a joint effort to deploy poll monitors across the country and provide them with the technology to rapidly communicate vote counts or suspicious activity. Were evidence of irregularities to emerge after the vote, Ince has already announced he will show up in front of the office of the Supreme Electoral Council in Ankara and call on his supporters to join him.
"Would the opposition then consider further steps like boycotting parliament or launching more sustained public protests? If a sense of resignation prevailed, and the opposition avoided any further action, then the results of a stolen election would be little different from the results of a legitimate one.”
• Attention in the United States is focused on the Trump administration’s decision to forcibly separate more than 2,300 migrant children from their families on the border since April. Trump continued falsely insisting that Democrats are to blame for the policy, which is entirely the creation of his own administration. From my colleagues:
"Contrary to Trump’s claims, the separations largely stem from a 'zero-tolerance' policy announced with fanfare last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As more families are stopped for illegally crossing the border, adults are taken to detention facilities that are effectively jails, and children are sent elsewhere.
"The White House also has interpreted a 1997 legal agreement and a 2008 bipartisan anti-human-trafficking bill as requiring the separation of families — a position not taken by the George W. Bush or Obama administrations…
"Democrats argue that Trump is trying to use a manufactured crisis to gain leverage in ongoing deliberations in Congress over immigration to secure funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall that was a marquee campaign promise.”
• The investigative journalism website ProPublica obtained audio from one of the U.S. border facilities where at least 10 children can be heard screaming and sobbing in fear. It’s harrowing to listen to, but you should.
• Trump and his team, though, say their illegal entry into America constitutes a national-security threat. On Monday, he tweeted that he didn’t want a European-style migrant crisis in the United States and seemed to gloat about the political spat over migration in Germany endangering Chancellor Angela Merkel’s already-tenuous coalition government. (More on that below.) But, as my colleague Adam Taylor noted, Trump’s insistence that increased migration in Germany has led to rising crime is plainly false:
“Notably, Merkel's biggest challenger on immigration policy is on record as saying just last month that crime in Germany was the lowest it had been in decades.
"Interior Minister Horst Seehofer had released new crime figures in May that pointed to an overall decline in Germany during the past year. The figures showed that 5.76 million crimes were reported in 2017 — a drop of 5 percent from 2016 and the lowest number since 1992. Given the increases in Germany's population, Seehofer told reporters in Berlin, this meant that Germany's reported crime rate was at the lowest it had been for three decades…
"Trump has a history of tweeting inaccurate statements about crime and immigration in Europe. However, it may not be surprising that Trump sees crime rising in Germany when in fact it appears to be falling — a considerable number of Germans feel the same way. One poll conducted in April, for example, found that 41 percent of the country felt that they were less safe in public spaces than five years ago. Fifty-one percent, however, felt nothing had changed.”
www.fotavgeia.blogspot.com
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