Turkey’s Resilient Autocrat
In late February, after a huge earthquake devastated a large swath of his country, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faced one of the greatest challenges of his political career. With a presidential election three months away, the government’s response to the humanitarian disaster was feckless and chaotic. On top of that, Erdogan’s economic policies had caused runaway inflation and many of Turkey’s citizens were fed up with his strong-arm rule. And as Erdogan’s popularity tumbled, a newly formed alliance of six opposition parties, led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the chair of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), seemed surprisingly disciplined and organized. After 20 years in power, Erdogan was poised to lose control of Turkey.
Things look different now. Using his broad influence over Turkish media, Erdogan has effectively limited public debate of the earthquake, shifting the domestic discussion to Turkey’s industrial and military achievements under him. Meanwhile, a third-party candidate has entered the race, providing Erdogan with additional means to fracture the opposition. And a government reform to the way Parliament apportions seats could give the president’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) a considerable advantage in the coming vote. As the May 14 election approaches, it now seems likely that Erdogan may at least be able to force a runoff and that the AKP and its coalition partners might even hold the majority in Parliament.
As unexpected as it appears, Erdogan’s comeback is characteristic of a politician who has repeatedly shown his skill at using state resources to his advantage and at dividing or neutralizing his opponents. Recent electoral races in Turkey have unfairly favored Erdogan since he rammed through a switch to an executive-style presidential system in 2018: key bureaucrats openly support the ruling AKP and make state resources available to it, and supposedly independent bodies such as the Turkish electoral board and many Turkish courts take cues from the president. He has also used his influence over the corporate sector to augment his power, with pro-Erdogan businesses now controlling nearly 90 percent of the Turkish media. Meanwhile, he has relentlessly cracked down on key civil society activists and opposition politicians, from philanthropist and civil society organizer Osman Kavala to Selahattin Demirtas, the former chair of the pro-Kurdish-liberal Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), many of whom languish in jail.
In using the state to his advantage, Erdogan has deployed strategies used by fellow authoritarians such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to create an unfair playing field during the campaign season. By gaining broad influence over the judiciary, government bureaucracy, and the national media, these leaders have often been able to engineer favorable electoral outcomes regardless of the relative strength of the opposition. Erdogan’s resilience shows how difficult it can be to unseat an illiberal leader in an electoral contest, even one who enjoys little support.
THE SULTAN’S STRUGGLE
On paper, this year’s election presents formidable new challenges for Erdogan. For one thing, the Turkish economy has been in prolonged crisis. The Turkish currency has lost over 450 percent of its value in the last five years and inflation has climbed steadily, nearing 100 percent. In the past, steady economic growth has been crucial to Erdogan’s success. He has won nearly a dozen nationwide elections largely on his record of lifting voters out of poverty, improving access to services such as health care, and providing for economic prosperity and stability. Indeed, during Erdogan’s first decade in office, between 2003 and 2013, Turkey attracted record amounts of foreign direct investment, which helped fund his economic miracle and strengthen the AKP’s base. Even after the inflows of foreign direct investment dried up in the years following the government crackdown on the 2013 Gezi Park protests, Erdogan still managed to keep the economy going thanks to large inflows from global investors.
Since 2018, however, Erdogan’s vaunted economic record has eroded. By changing the constitution to an executive-style presidency, he essentially styled himself as Turkey’s new sultan, becoming head of state, head of government, head of the ruling party, head of the national police, and head of the military. In the process, he also took more direct control over the economy, and the central bank lost its independence, making foreign investors skittish. Moreover, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, his increasingly unorthodox economic policies have pitched the economy into turmoil. Convinced that interest rates drive inflation, he has kept Turkish rates low, driving inflation even faster, causing runaway food prices and pervasive financial insecurity. In other words, Erdogan’s power grab has pulled the carpet of economic growth and stability from under his feet—and with that, the large base that once supported him.
At the same time, the opposition is far more united than before. In previous elections, Erdogan could appeal to his nativist base by demonizing Turkey’s diverse political groups such as leftists, liberals, Kurds, and Alevis, among others. And since these groups were themselves fractured into various smaller and competing parties, they were not strong enough to counter this pressure. But in 2018, in response to the executive presidency, four opposition parties decided to join forces, with Kilicdaroglu as their leader. At first, this coalition, the Nation Alliance, did not have enormous impact, but in the run-up to the current campaign, two more parties joined it, creating a powerful front for change spanning nearly the entire spectrum of Turkish politics. In its election platform, the Nation Alliance has promised to end one-man rule, reintroduce and strengthen democratic norms and freedoms, and reestablish the rule of law. It also promises to move away from Erdogan’s coldly transactional foreign policy. If Kilicdaroglu wins the presidency, Ankara would align more closely with the transatlantic community, especially Europe. Kilicdaroglu has also pledged to reembrace economic orthodoxy and central bank independence. All these developments would likely trigger a new inflow of foreign capital, helping restart economic growth.
Along with the promise of a new Turkey under Kilicdaroglu, the faltering economy and the united opposition have given Erdogan the most difficult electoral test of his career. Yet he has developed strategies for countering these threats. At the moment, Kilicdaroglu is leading Erdogan by a razor-thin one- or two-point margin. Similarly, the opposition coalition is ahead of the pro-Erdogan bloc, known as the People’s Alliance, in the race to control Parliament. Yet Erdogan and his supporters now believe that they can deny the opposition a parliamentary majority and prevent Kilicdaroglu from securing an outright victory in the vote on May 14. And Erdogan is confident that if he can force a runoff in the presidential election, which would take place on May 28, he can win it.
MAKING TURKEY GREAT AGAIN
Erdogan’s greatest strength is his control of information. Given his overwhelming influence over the Turkish media and the fact that around 80 percent of the population is unable to read languages other than Turkish, shaping the message has become one of his most powerful tools for winning votes. Many people have gone to social media platforms in search of free news, and Erdogan has taken steps to rein those in, as well. In 2020, Parliament, under the control of the AKP and its ally, the ultra-Turkish-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP), passed a social media law that forces global platforms that want to operate in Turkey to open offices in the country, making them subject to sanctions and fines if they fail to respond to government directives to ban or limit content. Meanwhile, the few independent Turkish TV networks not controlled by pro-Erdogan businesses have been slapped with exorbitant fines and taken off air for days if they run content falling outside the approved government narrative.
Accordingly, news coverage has been highly selective. Inflation, which reached as high as 85.5 percent in 2022, has hardly been mentioned. Neither has the government’s disastrous response to the earthquake: more than 50,000 people died, some while buried under the rubble waiting for help that never arrived. Also absent are stories about the massive and growing corruption of the ruling elite, including the president and his family; the epidemic of femicide (including the death of a young woman who, while working as a nanny, died suspiciously in the home of an AKP parliamentarian); government human rights abuses; the jailing of journalists and politicians; and other potentially damaging revelations about the AKP and Erdogan. Instead, citizens are fed a continuous stream of news about Turkey’s growing status as a major international power, including stories about the country’s first domestically produced car, the recent discovery of natural gas deposits in the Black Sea, and the first Turkish helicopter-carrier naval vessel. Never mind bread-and-butter issues such as jobs and food prices or freedoms and liberties: citizens are told to embrace Erdogan because he is an amazing leader who is making Turkey great again.
Erdogan’s Turkey has received billions of dollars from Russia and Saudi Arabia.
There is an even darker side to Erdogan’s information warfare. His campaign insidiously targets the opposition with false allegations—especially the pro-Kurdish party, the HDP, which supports the Nation Alliance and its presidential candidate, Kilicdaroglu. Although the HDP is a peaceful political movement, pro-Erdogan media have been claiming that the HDP is the same as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terror-designated entity that has been fighting Turkey for decades, and that Kilicdaroglu is, ergo, “backed by terrorists.”
As for the economy, Erdogan has also been helped by growing ties to fellow autocrats, such as Russian President Vladmir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. During last year’s inflation crisis, Prince Mohammed transferred $5 billion to Turkey’s central bank to help keep the economy afloat. Russia’s state-owned corporation Rosatom provided a similar amount in July 2022 to finance a new nuclear plant in southern Turkey, the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Station; that transfer trickled across the economy, helping stabilize the currency. On April 27, Putin and Erdogan spoke by video link to mark the unveiling of the Russian-built plant, which has become a symbol of Turkey’s emergence as a “nuclear nation”—in other words, a great power on par with the nuclear giants of the world. Despite Russia’s own economic difficulties, Putin may also help his Turkish counterpart with cash transfers. For both Russia and Saudi Arabia, Erdogan is attractive because of his authoritarian tilt and his leaning away from the West. Putin considers the Turkish leader an ally who can help him undermine the U.S.-led liberal international order. The Saudi crown prince, too, has made it clear that he prefers dealing with a conservative autocrat to a democracy- and Europe-embracing Kilicdaroglu.
ME OR CHAOS
As he has done in the past, Erdogan is also using Turkey’s electoral system to his advantage. Crucially, in 2022, he pushed through a law that will increase the chances that the AKP and the People’s Alliance can maintain control of Parliament. In the Turkish electoral system, the presidential vote procedure is straightforward: a winner can be chosen by gaining more than 50 percent of the vote or, if no candidate achieves that, by winning a runoff between the top two first-round finishers. But the route to controlling Parliament is far more convoluted, owing to Turkey’s recent tradition of electoral alliances. In the past, seats were apportioned primarily based on aggregate votes, a system that favored the strongest alliance. Anticipating that the opposition’s alliance would be stronger than his own in the 2023 election, however, Erdogan succeeded in having the parliamentary electoral law changed. Now, instead of the largest alliance, the new law favors the largest party, which in Turkey’s multiparty system is still the AKP. Given how close the race is, this change could be enough to give Erdogan’s People’s Alliance an extra 10–20 seats—enough to win a parliamentary majority on May 14 even if Erdogan himself does not come out in front.
And Erdogan has another card to play in the presidential race itself. Shortly after the earthquake, Muharrem Ince, a defector from Kilicdaroglu’s party, entered the presidential race, posing a new challenge to the opposition. A center-left populist, Ince has been polling under ten percent and has no chance of winning, but his support comes mainly from voters who would otherwise vote for Kilicdaroglu. For Erdogan, Ince is a crucial asset, and the government has done what it can to augment the visibility of his campaign. Whereas Kilicdaroglu, the front-runner in the race, gets media time only when he is framed negatively as being insufficiently religious—in one such instance, pro-Erdogan media piled on him for posing for a picture while standing on an Islamic prayer rug with his shoes on, suggesting that he does not know or respect Islam—Ince has received extensive and mostly positive coverage from Erdogan-controlled media.
This attention has kept Ince in the spotlight, helping bleed the opposition. Although the connection is difficult to verify, pro-Erdogan media interests may also be fueling Ince’s outsize social media presence, working to amplify his profile at the expense of the opposition alliance. For example, coverage of Ince’s campaign has been pushed out by mysterious Twitter news accounts with no real Web presence outside of the platform. And the “Ince dance”—a dance move that the candidate performed at a political rally—has become a viral phenomenon on platforms such as TikTok, where Turkish youth, most of whom are voting for the first time, imitate it. A Turkish pollster observed that Ince’s limited campaign finances do not adequately account for his reach on social media. With Ince in the race, there is a strong chance that Kilicdaroglu will be unable to achieve a majority on May 14 and that the presidential election will go to a runoff on May 28 between him and Erdogan.
The threat of extremist violence could help Erdogan win a runoff election.
Indeed, Erdogan is likely aiming for such an outcome on May 14: an outright victory in Parliament and a runoff election for the presidency. In this scenario, while preparing for the runoff, Erdogan will tell the electorate that a split government would be a disaster for Turkey and that it must return him to the presidency to maintain stability. Erdogan’s “me or chaos” strategy has worked in the past: in 2015, when his AKP briefly lost control of Parliament in June, the country’s security forces lapsed into weakness during the so-called summer of hell, marked by PKK and Islamic State terror attacks, and the electorate quickly aligned behind Erdogan, giving his party a new legislative majority in the November election.
Although such attacks are unlikely during this election cycle, the possibility of renewed violence is real. Of particular concern is the recent alignment of the Free Cause Party, or HUDA-PAR, a hard-line Kurdish Islamist party, with Erdogan’s People’s Alliance. HUDA-PAR has links to Turkish Hezbollah, a violent political Islamist group that in the 1990s recruited among Turkey’s Kurdish community and fought the PKK while also executing conservative dissidents who refused to align with its austere ideology. HUDA-PAR, which never fully renounced its violent past and which promotes archaic social views, has only trivial appeal among the electorate. The faction gained just 0.3 percent support in the most recent 2018 parliamentary elections and adds little to the president’s campaign, except for the opportunity to create chaos if the presidential vote goes to a runoff.
Indeed, the possibility of new extremist violence could pose a direct threat to the cohesion of the opposition alliance. At present, Kilicdaroglu is supported by both the pro-Kurdish HDP and the Turkish nationalist Good Party (IYI), which is deeply wary of Kurdish militancy. Renewal of armed conflict involving the PKK and HUDA-PAR would certainly trigger deeper polarization between IYI and HDP, likely splitting the pro-Kilicdaroglu bloc and costing the opposition the presidency.
LAST CHANCE FOR DEMOCRACY
The Turkish presidential contest may be the most consequential election this year. Either Erdogan will lose, giving Turkey a chance of restoring full democracy, or he will win and likely remain in power for the rest of his life. If he does so, any remaining independent institutions, including courts that have not yet fallen into his grasp, think tanks, universities, news outlets, and the foreign ministry, are likely to completely lose their autonomy, with important ramifications for not only Turkey’s political system but also its foreign policy. To Putin’s great delight, although Turkey would probably remain in NATO, a reelected Erdogan could act more assertively as a spoiler, undermining alliance unity alongside Orban in Hungary.
It is still possible that Kilicdaroglu could deny Erdogan control of the chaos narrative and convince voters to abandon the sultan. The opposition leader has already shown that he will not follow the president’s path toward demonization and polarization. And it seems possible that he could come out ahead on May 14. But Erdogan has years of experience manipulating the political system to his advantage, and he has put in place a robust strategy for staying in power. Together with Orban, Erdogan invented populist authoritarianism in the early twenty-first century, and even as this model has since been copied by leaders elsewhere—including former U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—Erdogan remains its best practitioner. And unlike most of his counterparts, he has so far proved impossible to vote out of power.
For now, free elections in Turkey still matter, and this month’s election will likely be free and peaceful. If Erdogan is defeated, it will mark a significant shift in the status of nativist populism globally. Less certain is what future elections in Turkey will look like if Erdogan wins.
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