by Bobby Ghosh
Looks like we’ll have Recep Tayyip Erdogan to kick us around for a while yet. Sunday’s election has produced a runoff between him and opposition challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu, and results suggest that the president will go into the second round on May 28 feeling optimistic about his chances.
He will take great hope from the concurrent parliamentary elections, in which the ruling coalition led by his AK Party has retained its majority. And in the top-of-the-card contest, his opponent didn’t really land any serious blows.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu fell about 5% short of the majority required to prevent Erdogan from extending his rule into a third decade. The president missed the target by a fraction of a percentage point. In a runoff between the two leaders, the president will expect to get many of the votes that went to the third-ranked candidate, Sinan Ogan, whose ultra-nationalist platform hews much closer to that of the ruling coalition than to the mostly liberal opposition bloc.
Kilicdaroglu’s best hope — and it is slim — is for Ogan’s supporters to sit out the second round and for some of Erdogan’s base to let complacency get the better of them. But if anything, it is opposition supporters, disheartened by the outcome of Sunday’s vote, who will stay home on May 28.
Markets are already swooning on the prospect of five more years of Erdogan and his unorthodox monetary policies. It also bodes ill for the U.S. and Europe, which have endured years of rhetorical assault from the Turkish leader, as well as his propensity to throw a spanner into the NATO consensus against Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. A victorious Erdogan will feel vindicated in his economic and foreign policy positions, making him even less amenable to compromise.
If he pulls it off, this victory will be the most remarkable of Erdogan’s long career, coming against the most serious challenges he has ever faced. Ahead of Sunday’s vote, many polls showed him trailing Kilicdaroglu. Turks were thought to have tired of their leader after 20 years, not least because of the dire consequences of his economic mismanagement. The opposition had for the most part united behind a single candidate, consolidating the anti-incumbent vote. And there was widespread anger at the government’s poor response to the twin earthquakes that devastated southeastern Turkey in February.
In the run-up to the elections, Erdogan showed unwonted signs of panic. He announced a slew of handouts to appease voters, attacked the opposition as soft on terrorism and accused the West of plotting against him. He also talked up his stature as a world leader, someone who has raised Turkey’s international prestige.
Kilicdaroglu, who entered the contest with a charisma deficit, had hoped to make up for it by marshalling a rare display of opposition unity and promising a return to parliamentary democracy. (Erdogan engineered a switch to a presidential form of government through a 2017 referendum.) He was also counting for the economic malaise to undermine Erdogan’s appeal.
But these factors were insufficient: Proportionally, Kilicdaroglu fell well short of the combined tally of opposition presidential candidates in 2018. The opposition ranks will face much soul-searching over this failure in the days ahead. When they parse the parliamentary votes, there will be angst over the gains that nationalist parties made, suggesting a rightward lurch for Turkish politics in general.
Erdogan, not known for introspection, will likely double down on his policies. This means low interest rates, despite high inflation. It also means Turkey will continue to drift away from the West. (Sweden shouldn’t hold its breath about a speedy accession to NATO.)
Turks, as much of the world, should assume the brace position.
