Opinion | A shadow of growing despotism lurks over Turkey’s elections
His sagging popularity ahead of Turkey’s May 14 elections attests to many Turks’ disillusionment with the highly personalized autocracy Mr. Erdogan has constructed, built on repression, the subjugation of dissenting views and once-independent institutions, and a deepening contempt for human rights and democratic norms. Mr. Erdogan’s colossal mismanagement of Turkey’s economy, one of the world’s 20 biggest, has eroded living standards, decimated the Turkish lira’s value and sent inflation soaring. Little wonder so many Turks are angry; his opponent, a colorless former bureaucrat, leads in the polls.
The elections are also a test of the capacity of democratic elections to throw off the yoke of his increasingly one-man rule in a country of 85 million people. The stakes could hardly be higher, first and foremost for Turks themselves, who might justifiably worry that authoritarianism would yield to dictatorship if Mr. Erdogan won another term, but also for Washington and its European allies.
The word “ally” in Turkey’s case comes with an asterisk. Mr. Erdogan, 69, governs a strategically key nation in NATO, with the alliance’s second-biggest military. He has fashioned a role for himself as a sort of middleman between NATO, to which he is bound by treaty, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he maintains ties that have undercut the Western alliance even as it is engaged in an indirect war to repel Russia’s ruinous aggression in Ukraine.
Under Mr. Erdogan, Turkey has supplied drones that have been crucial to Ukraine’s defense, blocked Russian warships from the Black Sea and helped broker a deal that lifted a Russian blockade of Ukrainian grain and other food exports. At the same time, Turkey is suspected of being a key conduit for goods transshipped to Moscow that have circumvented Western sanctions and bolstered Mr. Putin’s forces, including sensitive technology, electronics and vehicle components used by the military. He purchased an advanced Russian missile defense system over the bitter objections of Washington and other major allies, who warned it would undermine the bloc’s defense. And he has blocked Sweden’s aspiration to join NATO, despite support for Stockholm’s candidacy from nearly all the alliance’s other 30 member states.
His realpolitik double game, playing one side against the other in pursuit of elevating his stature as a geopolitical go-to man, is more than mischief-making. Mr. Erdogan has embraced positions that have subverted Western strategy and given Mr. Putin vastly more room to maneuver. In return, Russia has showered Turkey with billions of dollars’ worth of help, including a cash gusher from oligarchs seeking to evade sanctions. Mr. Erdogan has also benefited from financial backing from other authoritarian states, including China and Saudi Arabia.
The most profound and probably lasting damage has been domestic. A charismatic strongman, he has ruled by stoking divisions, including between religious and secular Muslims. He has jailed political opponents, journalists and others who have criticized him, and constricted the space for Turkey’s once-vibrant civil society to thrive — a campaign of repression that has intensified since a failed coup attempt in July 2016.
Turkish courts have become instruments for his retribution. Fabricated criminal charges are routinely used to silence dissent. Independent media organizations have been largely muzzled. In public, many Turks are afraid to speak their minds. The crime of disseminating “misleading information,” fuzzily defined, has recently been enshrined in law as a new instrument of Mr. Erdogan’s growing tyranny.
Institutions have buckled to his bullying. A prime example is Turkey’s central bank, which lowered interest rates at his behest, fueling inflation that exceeded 85 percent last year, according to official figures that probably underestimate the real rate. His interventions, informed by economic magical thinking, caused the Turkish currency to lose 80 percent of its value over five years.
Mr. Erdogan’s standing has been further damaged by the slow response to the devastating earthquake that crippled southern and central Turkey in February, killing at least 45,000 people and injuring twice as many. That failure, and the death toll exacerbated by the collapse of buildings that did not meet construction standards, was emblematic of the corruption and mismanagement that many Turks regard as characteristic of his rule.
Mr. Erdogan’s opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is a low-key former civil servant who represents a six-party coalition that has banded together in hopes of unseating Mr. Erdogan. In videos, often shot from his modest kitchen — a jarring contrast to the gaudy, 1,000-room palace that Mr. Erdogan has built for himself — Mr. Kilicdaroglu, 74, has pledged to serve a single term in which he would reunite Turkey’s increasingly fractious polity. He says he would do so by rolling back constitutional changes that Mr. Erdogan has used to consolidate power and by resurrecting the independence of the central bank, courts and diplomatic corps.
Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s Republican People’s Party, the main opposition faction, has lost elections for years to Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party. Understandably, many Turks regard Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s charisma deficit as less relevant than the promise he represents to restore the tolerance, pluralism, respect for human rights and economic common sense that have been so compromised by Erdoganism.
If Mr. Erdogan does not prevail in the May 14 vote, or in a possible runoff two weeks later, there are concerns he and his supporters might challenge the outcome. In a country where democracy has had a relatively firm foothold, those worries are a measure of how deeply the Turkish strongman has subverted norms — and the dangers posed by extending his autocratic rule.
