Erdogan Won by Exploiting Fear

Turkey’s opposition fought the good fight but found itself outgunned in the end. It was not only battling against an autocrat who tilted the battlefield heavily in his favor, but it was also in a fight against other countries’ strongmen, who came to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s aid by transferring billions of dollars to help shore up state coffers drained by preelection handouts. Pro-democracy forces tried to do everything that scholars who study autocracy suggest doing to beat strongmen at the ballot box, from forging a unified front and providing tangible solutions for the country’s pressing problems to running a positive campaign.

Turkey’s opposition fought the good fight but found itself outgunned in the end. It was not only battling against an autocrat who tilted the battlefield heavily in his favor, but it was also in a fight against other countries’ strongmen, who came to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s aid by transferring billions of dollars to help shore up state coffers drained by preelection handouts. Pro-democracy forces tried to do everything that scholars who study autocracy suggest doing to beat strongmen at the ballot box, from forging a unified front and providing tangible solutions for the country’s pressing problems to running a positive campaign.

Conditions in Turkey were ripe for change, too. Corruption under Erdogan had reached astronomical proportions. His mishandling of the economy and dogged pursuit of “unorthodox” monetary policy had led to triple-digit inflation and left the central bank with negative foreign reserves. Devastating earthquakes had hit the country in early February, and the government’s slow response increased the death toll to more than 50,000. Popular demand for change had never been stronger.

Yet those promising that change lost. What happened?

Part of the answer lies in the nature of elections in autocracies. They are not free or fair. In Erdogan’s Turkey, the playing field is heavily skewed against the opposition. Erdogan either jailed or intimidated his most popular opponents with court cases. He used state resources and control of the media to appeal to voters while his opponent’s attempts to get his message across were constantly hindered. For example, in the month of April, Erdogan got 32 hours of airtime on the state broadcaster, while his opponent got just 32 minutes. Turkey’s telecommunications authority banned the opposition’s presidential candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, from sending text messages to citizens, while government ministers bombarded citizens with them on a daily basis.

Some might explain the opposition’s loss by saying that a substantial portion of the Turkish electorate fell out of love with democracy. There is truth to that as well. Erdogan has used the country’s imperfect democracy to establish his one-man rule. The courts are packed with his loyalists, the media is largely controlled by him and his cronies, and repression has taken such a dramatic turn that even children stand trial for insulting Erdogan in their hundreds. Despite all of this, the majority of the Turkish electorate still voted for him. It is fair to conclude that there are millions of people in the country who put partisan interests over democratic concerns in the election on Sunday.

But there is a more compelling explanation for why people did not vote out a poorly performing autocrat. Populist authoritarian strongmen, such as Erdogan, persist in the face of unfavorable odds by exploiting their societies’ existential anxieties—even if, paradoxically, the strongman’s own policies caused the insecurity in the first place.

This flips on its head the scholarly consensus that autocrats must keep delivering to stay in power. Even when they perform poorly, autocrats can still muster majorities by triggering and exploiting people’s existential fears. They frame their opponents as incompetent, disorganized, out of touch, and outright dangerous, and appeal to people’s primordial desire for stability, security, and order. When people have concerns about their physical and economic security, the “authoritarian reflex” kicks in. Policy preferences and demands for greater freedoms take a back seat to a quest for stability. People rally around the strongman, who casts himself as the savior and promises to provide security at any cost. In the midst of uncertainty, people stick with the devil they know.

And Turkey certainly has no shortage of existential anxieties. The historical rift between Turks and Kurds has been exacerbated by the war in neighboring Syria. Kurdish gains there heightened Turks’ fear of an independent Kurdish state carved out of Turkish territory. Erdogan added fuel to the fire, heightening those fears, and rode the ensuing nationalist wave to consolidate his power. On the campaign trail, he used fake videos linking his opponent to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). He called them terrorists and made false claims that Kilicdaroglu would release the PKK’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, if he were elected. Although the PKK has not mounted large-scale attacks inside Turkey’s borders recently and has been weakened by Turkey’s military campaign in neighboring Iraq, Erdogan’s fearmongering heightened the anxieties of a society that believes it is already under assault by millions of refugees.

Anti-refugee sentiment runs high in today’s Turkey. A growing number of nationalists see refugees as an economic burden, a security threat, and a danger to the country’s ethnic makeup. Working-class Turkish citizens complain that Syrian refugees get aid from the government while they receive second-class treatment. Kurds resent the warm welcome Syrian refugees are getting from the Turkish government while they lack basic rights, such as access to public education in Kurdish. Others are anxious that Syrians drive up rental costs, undercut wages, and ride free on the Turkish taxpayers’ dime. It was Erdogan’s open border policy that led to the influx of refugees in the first place. Yet for many Turkish voters, only Erdogan can fix the problem.

In the region hit hard by the February earthquakes, growing anxieties drove voters to support the very man whose slow response, years of corruption, and policy of granting construction permits and amnesties to unsafe buildings contributed to their misery in the first place. At a time of radical uncertainty, many who lost their homes, loved ones, and communities backed an assertive leader who started rebuilding quickly and promised to finish reconstruction in a year rather than take a risk on an unknown entity. A longtime supporter of the opposition Republican People’s Party from Hatay, one of the towns worst hit by the earthquake, told me that he would vote for Erdogan even though he “hate[s] him.” “He is a dictator, and that is why he can make things happen fast,” he added. He asked that I not use his name because he fears government retribution.

Turkey’s economic problems are yet another source of anxiety. The country is facing a faltering economy with a collapsing currency and an extremely high rate of inflation. Millions of people live below the poverty line. A recent survey found that almost 70 percent of those polled had trouble paying for food. Even though these economic difficulties are of Erdogan’s making, enough people still trusted him to fix them instead of taking their chances with a leader whose party has not governed the country in decades. Millions of people who rely on government aid for their living were anxious that they might lose state benefits if Kilicdaroglu came to power, a message that Erdogan’s campaign pushed.

Erdogan capitalized on all of these anxieties. His resilience is the product of his ability to convince popular majorities in Turkey that he—and he alone—can fix the problems that he has created. The question is how long he can ride that tide of fear. The next five years under Erdogan will tell us the answer.