Global Courant 2023-05-11 10:00:00
Recep Tayyip Erdogan attends an election rally in Mardin, Turkiye on May 10
When Turks will go to the polls this weekend, they will not alone determine the future course of their country’s political development. They will decide whether Ankara can maintain its position as an essential hub of the Western alliance.
With Turkey’s economy collapsing and the country still struggling to cope with February’s devastating earthquake, opposition parties believe they have a rare chance to oust Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country’s authoritarian leader.
Once hailed as a pro-business modernizer who would forge closer ties with Europe – including Turkey’s entry into the EU – the 69-year-old Turkish president’s two decades in power has led to an increasingly autocratic approach to running things of his country. has taken on a distinctly Islamist outlook.
This has led to questions among Western leaders about Turkey’s continued reliability as a NATO ally.
Tensions first surfaced Ankara’s support for al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist groups during the Syrian Civil War, and increased as Erdoğan was blamed for causing the mass migration of Syrian refugees to southern Europe.
These were compounded when in 2017 Turkey signed a weapons deal with Moscow to buy Russia’s state-of-the-art S-400 anti-aircraft missile system, which was specifically designed to shoot down NATO fighter jets. The US responded by excluding Ankara from the F-35 stealth fighter program and imposing sanctions. More recently, Turkey has frustrated NATO leaders with its false objections to Sweden joining the alliance.
It is arguably only thanks to Turkey’s strategically vital position on NATO’s southeastern flank that it has managed to maintain its membership. Consequently, many NATO leaders, along with tens of millions of Turks, will desperately hope that Sunday’s presidential and parliamentary elections will result in Erdoğan’s removal from power.
The mood is certainly one of the biggest fighting Turkey has witnessed in recent years, with the latest polls indicating opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who is backed by a six-party alliance, has a slight advantage over Erdoğan. Support for Kılıçdaroğlu, a 74-year-old former accountant who heads the Republican People’s Party, continues to build on his commitment to dismantling the oppressive authoritarian system established by Erdoğan, as he and his allies in the Justice Party and Development (AKP) have done. to turn on destroying the secular constitutional framework founded by Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey.
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Kılıçdaroğlu’s pledge to abolish Erdoğan’s presidential system by restoring the powers of parliament and the office of prime minister and guaranteeing the independence of the judiciary and the press has particularly struck a chord with young Turks. Many of them long for relief from Turkey’s predicament — inflation is currently around 45 percent — and state-sponsored repression.
As Kılıçdaroğlu noted in a recent BBC interview: “The young people want democracy, they don’t want the police coming to their door early in the morning just because they tweet. I tell young people that they can criticize me freely. I will make sure they have this right.
Outside Turkey, Western leaders have expressed strong interest in Kılıçdaroğlu’s commitment to reasserting his country’s NATO credentials and restoring relations with the US. There has even been talk of reviving Ankara’s long-dormant bid to join the EU.
While Kılıçdaroğlu’s bid for power is one of the biggest challenges Erdoğan has faced since he first led the AKP to victory in 2002, the Turkish president nevertheless remains a formidable opponent. After all, this is a man who, during his early political career in the 1990s, was prepared to serve a prison sentence for holding his Islamic views.
Erdoğan has helped the AKP to multiple electoral victories and enjoys a number of advantages over its rivals, not least the vast powers he enjoys within the all-powerful presidential system he established following the 2017 constitutional referendum. This has resulted in the closure of most anti-government media outlets and the nationwide prosecution of civilians allegedly involved in the 2016 coup attempt against Erdoğan, resulting in the dismissal of tens of thousands of police, military, civil servants and judges. , with more than 95,000 people detained.
Erdoğan has also shown that he is a sore loser if the results are disappointing. When a political rival won the AKP’s election for mayor of Istanbul in 2019, Erdoğan claimed the result was set and ordered a rerun. And while he eventually accepted the result on that occasion, there are concerns he won’t be so kind if Sunday’s vote doesn’t go his way. Turkey’s interior minister has already laid the groundwork to challenge the outcome, claiming the opposition is part of a Western “attempted political coup”. It suggests that even if the opposition wins, there’s no guarantee we’ve seen Erdoğan’s back.
