Erdogan has Turkey’s next election in the bag; here’s why
Writer’s note : I wrote this article as an analysis in the buildup to the election in early June. I never got round to publishing, but seeing as my predictions were correct, I’ll post it anyways.
Turkey’s president of fifteen years, Recep Tayipp Erdogan has recently called a snap election. This, understandably, comes a surprise to many. An election wasn’t expected until the latter half of next year. But it seems Erdogan wants to increase his and his party’s hold on the Turkish government, and is willing to take the chance of losing the presidency to do so. Despite the opposition having high hopes, Erdogan’s advantage in the polls and his comfortable hold on his own party’s leadership almost assure that he will come out victorious once again in this month’s elections.
Firstly, Erdogan has a fairly sizeable advantage as far as the polls are concerned. Although the public, as per usual, is divided in two halves (Pro and Anti-Erdogan) this election season, Erdogan has the lead in almost every single poll. In polls regarding all six candidates, Erdogan has a large lead in every single one, ranging from a 17.6% lead in a poll conducted by REMRES to a 27.5% lead in one conducted by MAK. Muharrem Ince, the candidate selected by Turkey’s oldest party and largest opposition, the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), comes second, with around a quarter of respondents supporting his bid to become the 80 million-strong country’s leader. His next biggest opponent is Meral Aksener, the only female candidate. She is the founder and head of the “Good Party” (Iyi Partisi), a right-wing nationalist party that split from Turkey’s traditional bastion of her party’s ideology, the MHP after they forged an alliance with Erdogan and his party. She genrally trails behind Ince closely, and her share of support ranges from 12 to 21% of public opinion. And although his lead isn’t as clearly defined there, Erdogan still looks like he would have the upper hand if the vote came down to a run-off. Even in polls where voters are asked to choose between Erdogan and Ince, or Erdogan and Aksener, Erdogan has a small lead in almost all polls conducted, Aksener only claiming the Lion’s share of support in only one poll, by only one percent, whereas Ince is the less favoured candidate in every single poll that includes just him and Erdogan.
The polls themselves*
- These tables are from Wikipedia; I did not create them myself.
The tables bring me to my next point.
The close margin when one opposition candidate is polled against Erdogan but the incumbent president’s huge advantage when facing all six candidates exposes a huge reality that opposition supporters tend to ignore. The “Nation Alliance” that is Turkey’s opposition advertises the fact that it has support from all sides of the spectrum of Turkish politics, yet the only thing these parties have in common is that they want Erdogan out of office. Iyi, “The Good Party” is a party that lies on the right wing and is a strong supporter of Turkish nationalism. They are also a strong advocate for traditional values, a stark contrast to the CHP, whose party’s main objective has been instilling a Western-based model for the secular modernization of the country since its inception. Erdogan, on the other hand, has little to no real opposition to him coming from his own target group, and has a pretty solid support base. He still has the trust and support of the vast majority Turkey’s religous, and increasingly large and influential group in the Middle Eastern Republic. The only religious party in Turkey opposing Erdogan is Saadet headed by Temel Karamalloglu. In every poll conducted, he has achieved less than 5% of the vote, merely being a vain attempt by the opposition to win over Turkey’s most devout Muslims, who remain firmly committed to Erdogan. Furthermore, it seems as though Erdogan’s opposition, mainly the CHP, are too desperately trying to change their image to win groups that traditionally are their adversaries. Take Muharrem Ince, Erdogan’s biggest opponent, as an example. Despite him being a prominent nationalist, a group despised by Kurds across the country, and long considered insensitive to the country’s pious, he has drastically tried reshaping his and his party’s image ahead of the election. He is now promoting teaching Kurdish in government schools, and has declared that he has no intention to resurrect Turkey’s once-infamous headscarf ban. Regardless, the CHP is still viewed with contempt by Turks who identify more heavily with the Islamic religion, a party that they have felt shunned by since the inception of the Turkish Republic. This factor is also a constraint to letting Meral Aksener win the election. Up until the party’s split that was mentioned earlier in the article, Meral Aksener was a member of the MHP (Millyetci Hareket Partisi, Nationalist Movement Party) a right wing to far-right wing nationalist party that has long been accused of bearing Anti-Kurdish sentiments. The party also promotes Turkish-Islamic synthesis, a compromise between Pan-Turkic and Pan-Islamic Turkish nationalism that came about to appease both ends of that spectrum, an ideology that isn’t held in a very high esteem by Secular voters, who often take a hardline stance against Islam in daily life and government.
The political parties in Turkey all cater to groups in Turkish society that are now minorities, and with the advent of democracy in the country in the last two decades, one group isn’t more influential than the other, and it is the ballot of the citizen that decides who enters office in Turkey. Everyone knows it now; most citizens are more lenient towards figures like Erdogan than Ince. Erdogan has this election in the bag because Turkey’s long silent and unsung majority is now politically active, and it is for this reason political figures who share his stances and beliefs have been democratically hurled into office for the past 15 years.
