U.S. Ambassador to Turkiye Jeffry Flake speaking in Washington D.C., United States on May 3, 2023.
Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
The U.S. is still holding out hope that Sweden will join NATO by July in spite of Turkey’s apprehensions, Ambassador to Ankara Jeffry Flake said.
“We hope Sweden can become a member of NATO soon,” Flake told CNBC’s Dan Murphy Friday, adding that Sweden has taken a number of measures to address Turkey’s security concerns.
“We fully expect and hope that by the time Vilnius comes … that Sweden will be a member.”
Earlier this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had on Wednesday rebuffed mounting international pressure to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership bid before the defense alliance convenes for the 2023 Vilnius summit of July 11-12.
Officials from Sweden, Turkey, Finland and NATO had convened in Ankara with hopes of easing Turkey’s objections.
Ankara’s objections are complex, but center mainly on Sweden’s support for Kurdish groups that Turkey considers to be terrorists, and on weapons embargoes that both Sweden and Finland, along with other EU countries, put on Turkey for targeting Kurdish militias in Syria.
Erdogan also wants Sweden to crack down on protests against his government. For months, Sweden’s capital has seen protests built up against Turkey, which at the start of the year led to the heavily criticised burning of the holy Muslim book Quran by some demonstrators.
“In order for us to comply with these expectations, first of all, Sweden must do its part,” Erdogan said.
Prior to the recent elections in May, Turkey’s presidential spokesperson in March said that Ankara has “left the door open” to Stockholm’s bid to be a part of the military alliance “if it shows will and determination.”
On Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden met with NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, emphasizing their “shared desire to welcome Sweden to the Alliance as soon as possible,” a White House statement said.
“Obviously, our relationship is grounded in NATO. I think it will continue to be so,” Flake said of U.S.-Turkey relations, underscoring both parties’ security and commercial partnership.
“On the commercial side, we[‘ve] got a healthy amount of balance trade, about 33 billion as of last year. That’s increasing every year,” he said.
The Turkish leader has previously criticized Flake for paying a visit to Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the presidential candidate of the opposition alliance that Erdogan beat in recent elections. Flake on Friday characterized his relationship with Erdogan as being “in a good place.”
He added, “Sometimes it’s a challenging relationship. That is true, but we have a good security and commercial and people relationship with Turkey.”
—CNBC’s Natasha Turak contributed to this article.
Turkey’s President and leader of the Justice and Development (AK) Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech during his partys group meeting at the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) in Ankara, on May 18, 2022.
Adem Altan | AFP | Getty Images
Turkey’s Election Board on Sunday confirmed that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won Turkey’s 2023 presidential election, extending his rule into its third decade in power after facing the tightest race of his career.
Erdogan won Turkey’s presidency in a runoff election with 52.14% of the votes, the High Election Board head Ahmet Yener said, making the results official.
With 99.43% of ballot boxes opened, Erdogan’s rival Kilicdaroglu received 47.86% of the votes, Yener said. With a gap of more than 2 million votes between candidates, the rest of the uncounted votes will not change the result, he added.
Earlier Sunday, Turkish public broadcaster TRT had called the presidential election for incumbent Erdogan.
Analysts saw the 69-year-old Erdogan’s victory as all but in the bag after the first vote on May 14, which saw him come out five percentage points ahead of his rival, in a giant blow to the opposition.
Kilicdaroglu and his party CHP had pledged change, economic improvement, the salvaging of democratic norms and closer ties with the West — something many expected to take them to victory, especially as years of Erdogan’s economic policies helped create a cost-of-living crisis in Turkey. But in the end, it wasn’t enough.
The AK Party leader’s popularity remains alive and well, even despite public anger at a slow government response following a series of devastating earthquakes in February that killed more than 50,000 people.
Many in Turkey — and the Muslim world more widely — see Erdogan as a protector of faithful Muslims who elevates Turkey globally and pushes back against the West, despite being a longtime Western ally.
By contrast Kilicdaroglu’s party, the CHP, strives for the fiercely secular model of leadership first established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state. It’s known for being historically more hostile to practicing Muslims, who form an enormous part of the Turkish electorate, although the CHP under Kilicdaroglu has softened its stance and was even joined by former Islamist party members.
Erdogan served as Turkey’s prime minister from 2003 to 2014 and president from 2014 onward. He came to prominence as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, and was celebrated in the first decade of the new millennium for transforming Turkey’s economy into an emerging market powerhouse.
Recent years, however, have been far less rosy for the religiously conservative leader, whose own economic policies have contributed to inflation surpassing 80% in 2022 and Turkey’s currency, the lira, losing some 77% of its value against the dollar over the last five years.
International and domestic voices alike also sound the alarm that Turkey’s democracy under Erdogan is looking less democratic by the day.
The frequent arrests of journalists, forced closures of many independent media outlets and heavy crackdowns on past protest movements — as well as a 2017 constitutional referendum that vastly expanded Erdogan’s presidential powers — signal what many say is a slide toward autocracy.
The Turkish president rejects the criticisms. But with a fresh mandate to lead and previous reforms consolidating presidential power, very little stands in the way of a stronger Erdogan than ever before.
People walk past an election campaign poster for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 25, 2023 in Istanbul, Turkey. The country is holding its first presidential runoff election after neither candidate earned more than 50% of the vote in the May 14 election.
Chris Mcgrath | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Millions of Turks are casting their ballots Sunday for the second time in two weeks to decide the outcome of what has been the closest presidential race in Turkey’s history.
The powerful incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 69, faced off against opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu in what many described as a the most serious fight of Erdogan’s political life and a potential death blow to his 20-year reign. But the initial round of voting – which saw a tremendous turnout of 86.2% – proved a disappointment for the opposition, with the 74-year-old Kilicdaroglu trailing by roughly 5 percentage points.
Still, no candidate surpassed the 50% threshold required to win; and with Erdogan at 49.5% and Kilicdaroglu at 44.7%, a runoff election was set for two weeks after the first vote on May 14. The winner will preside over a divided country in flux, a cost-of-living crisis, complex security issues, and – as the second-largest military in NATO and a key mediator between Ukraine and Russia – an increasingly crucial role in global geopolitics.
Country analysts are all but certain of an Erdogan victory.
“We expect Turkey’s President Erdogan to extend his rule into its third decade at the run-off election on 28 May, with our judgment-based forecast assigning him an 87% chance of victory,” Hamish Kinnear, senior MENA analyst at risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft, wrote in a research note.
In the span of two short weeks, some of the candidates’ campaign messaging has changed dramatically, and both contenders have doubled down on malicious accusations, hard-core nationalism, and scapegoating.
Kilicdaroglu, known for his more conciliatory, soft-spoken demeanor, made a stunning lurch toward xenophobia and fear-mongering as part of his runoff campaign strategy, tapping into widespread Turkish discontent toward the country’s more than 4 million refugees.
He promised to “send all refugees home” if elected, and accused Erdogan of flooding the country with them. He also claimed that Turkey’s cities would be at the mercy of criminal gangs and refugee mafias if Erdogan were to stay in power. The vast majority of refugees in Turkey are from neighboring war-torn Syria.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the 74-year-old leader of the center-left, pro-secular Republican People’s Party, or CHP, delivers a press conference in Ankara on May 15, 2023.
Bulent Kilic | Afp | Getty Images
Previously, Erdogan’s top rival had been running on a platform of reclaiming economic stability, democratic values and better relations with Europe and NATO.
Kilicdaroglu’s new strategy appeared to be in response to the fact that a third party hardline nationalist candidate, Sinan Ogan, won just over 5% of the vote on May 14, essentially making him a kingmaker. Whoever Ogan endorsed would likely gain a potentially decisive portion of his voters – and despite Kilicdaroglu cranking up the nationalist and anti-refugee rhetoric, Ogan ultimately endorsed Erdogan.
“Kilicdaroglu has adopted a harder line on immigration and security ahead of the run-off … is unlikely to be enough,” Kinnear said.
Erdogan’s supporters, meanwhile, circulated numerous fake posters and videos aimed to look like Kilicdaroglu’s party, the CHP, supported Kurdish militant groups that Ankara classifies as terrorists.
In a surprise twist, a far-right wing, anti-migrant party called Victory Party threw its support behind Kilicdaroglu on Wednesday, due to his pledge to return refugees to Syria — splitting right-wing groups between the two presidential contenders.
“Now we have two anti-refugee political leaders supporting the rival candidates,” Ragip Soylu, Turkey bureau chief at Middle East Eye, pointed out in a Twitter post.
Erdogan’s continued and seemingly unshakeable popularity comes despite several years of economic deterioration in the country of 85 million.
Turkey’s lira lost roughly 80% of its value against the dollar in five years and the country’s inflation rate is around 50%, thanks in large part to the president’s unorthodox economic policy of lowering interest rates despite already high inflation.
And a series of devastating earthquakes in February killed more than 50,000 people, a tragedy made worse by a slow government response and reports of widespread corruption that allowed construction companies to skirt earthquake safety regulations for buildings.
People carry a bodybag as local residents wait for their relatives to be pulled out from the rubble of collapsed buildings in Hatay, on February 14, 2023, after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck the country’s south-east.
Bulent Kilic | Afp | Getty Images
But Erdogan appears largely politically untouched; he still won the most votes in Turkey’s eastern earthquake-hit provinces, which are overwhelmingly Islamically conservative. Additionally, his powerful AK Party won the majority in Turkey’s Parliament, meaning his opponent would have far less power as president.
“Erdogan wasted no time in calling on voters to back him to avoid a destabilizing split between the parliament and president,” Kinnear said. Kilicdaroglu, meanwhile, has appealed to the 8 million Gen Z and Kurdish voters who did not vote in the first round to come out and back him.
With the incumbent’s victory looking ever more secure, analysts aren’t holding their breaths for a return to economic normality. Already Turkey’s central bank is aggressively imposing new regulations to stifle local lira purchases of foreign currency, in an effort to prevent further falling of the lira. The currency dipped to its lowest level against the dollar in six months after the first round of voting, when Erdogan’s lead became clear.
“Investors shouldn’t expect a fundamental shift to Turkey’s unorthodox approach to economic policymaking anytime soon. Erdogan’s belief that lower interest rates lead to lower inflation, which influences monetary policy, will continue to spook the markets,” Kinnear wrote.
Amid speculation on the lira’s direction after the vote, Timothy Ash, emerging markets strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, said that the only question now is “how weak the lira goes and how, without the ability to use higher interest rates, the CBRT (Turkish central bank) can prevent a devaluation-inflation spiral again.”
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is set for another five years as Turkey’s president after winning a divisive election that at one point seemed to threaten his hold on power.
The 69-year-old, who has dominated his country’s politics for two decades, was on track to win the runoff vote by 52 percent to 48 percent, with more than 99 percent of ballot boxes counted, beating opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, according to preliminary official results from Turkey’s Supreme Election Council.
In the first round of voting on May 14, the president also came out on top, defying the polls, but fell short of an outright majority, which triggered the runoff vote.
Erdoğan declared victory in front of his residence in Istanbul, singing his campaign song before his speech. “I thank our nation, which gave us the responsibility of governing again for the next five years,” he said.
“We have opened the door of Turkey’s century without compromising our democracy, development and our objectives,” he added.
Erdoğan also called on his supporters to take Istanbul back in the next local elections in 2024. His AK Party lost the city to the opposition in the 2019.
The triumphant president continued his campaign tactic of targeting LGBTQ+ people. “Can LGBT infiltrate AK Party or other members of the People’s Alliance [the broader coalition backing Erdoğan]? Family is sacred to us,” he said.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and French leader Emmanuel Macron were among the first world leaders to congratulate Erdoğan on his victory. Both leaders emphasized working together on world affairs. The government of Qatar and Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, also congratulated the re-elected president.
Erdoğan’s victory follows a campaign in which he accused his rival of being linked to terrorism and argued that the country faced chaos if the six-party opposition alliance came to power.
He has ruled Turkey since 2003, first as prime minister and then as president, and the election has been widely seen as a defining moment for the country.
Erdoğan’s supporters say he has made the country stronger, but his critics argue that his authoritarian approach to power is fatally undermining Turkey’s democracy.
Kılıçdaroğlu said it had been “the most unfair election process in years” in his own post-election speech.
“All the resources of the state have been mobilized for one political party. They have been spread at the feet of one man,” he said.
The opposition candidate gave no indication that he was planning to resign, adding that the struggle would go on.
Erdogan taunted his rival, saying: “Bye, bye, bye Kemal.”
By contrast with earlier elections in which the president and his Islamist-oriented AK party easily beat their secular rivals, Erdoğan headed into this May’s contest behind in the polls.
His reelection campaign had to contend with economic problems such as painfully high inflation — currently 43 percent — and a weak currency, as well as the legacy of February’s devastating earthquake. At least 50,000 died in the disaster and the government was criticized for poor construction standards and its own slow response.
But Erdoğan’s first round performance on May 14 put him five percentage points ahead of Kılıçdaroğlu and just a few hundred thousand votes short of an absolute majority.
The opposition candidate then shifted to a more nationalist stance, promising to deport millions of Syrians and Afghans, but that move proved ultimately unsuccessful. Sinan Oğan, the nationalist candidate who won 5 percent in the first round then endorsed Erdoğan, not Kılıçdaroğlu.
Political analysts say Erdoğan’s victory highlights the polarization in Turkish society, particularly divisions between Islamists and secularists. While much of Turkey’s coastline, the big cities and the largely Kurdish southeast voted for Kılıçdaroğlu, the heartlands strongly favored Erdoğan.
Opposition supporters also argue that the election reflected Erdoğan’s grip on power, including his near-total influence on the country’s media, which is largely controlled by groups friendly toward the governing party.
After Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy was backed by Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, Erdoğan accused his rival of being in league with Kurdish terrorists, showing a doctored video in the closing days of the campaign to make his case.
This article has been updated to include reaction from Erdoğan.
A person holds a ballot at a polling station in Ankara on May 14, 2023, for parliamentary and presidental elections in Turkey.
Adem Altan | Afp | Getty Images
Millions of Turks are headed to the polls Sunday in what is set to be Turkey’s most consequential election in two decades, and one whose results will have implications far beyond its own borders.
The country of 85 million holds both its presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14. For the presidency — which is expected to be close — if no candidate wins more than 50%, the vote goes to a run-off two weeks later.
Incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing his toughest test yet after two decades in power, grappling with public anger over worsening economic conditions and the slow government response to a series of devastating earthquakes in February that killed more than 50,000 people.
His primary opponent, 74-year-old Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), is running as a unity candidate representing six different parties that all want to see Erdogan out of power.
In a possibly game-changing development, one of the four presidential candidates, Muharrem Ince, pulled out of the race Thursday. A former CHP member, he had been under heavy criticism for splitting the opposition vote in a way that would hurt Kilicdaroglu’s chances.
Now, with Ince out of the race, his votes may go to Erdogan’s top challenger Kilicdaroglu, helping him tremendously and spelling more trouble for the 69-year-old Erdogan.
Another crucial factor will be turnout: More than 5 million young Turks will be voting for the first time, and the greater the youth turnout, the better for the challenger candidate and the worse for the incumbent, election analysts say.
Campaign posters of the 13th Presidential candidate and Republican People’s Party (CHP) Chairman Kemal Kiliçdaroglu (L) and the President of the Republic of Turkey and Justice Development Party (AKP) President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) are seen displayed.
With such a high-stakes contest, many inside and out of the country are asking whether Erdogan may dispute the result if he does not win.
“The most likely tactics that he’s going to use to try to tip the vote will be to use influence in the electoral board (the YSK), courts, and media to build a narrative that either elections should be re-run or that they are illegitimate,” said Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at Rane. Erdogan did this in 2019 when his party narrowly lost the Istanbul mayoral race, only to lose again by a greater margin after demanding a re-run.
Some even fear violence and instability if the result is disputed, which would bring more volatility to Turkey’s already damaged economy. Turkish and foreign analysts and rights activists have for years been sounding the alarm over increasingly autocratic governance coming from Erdogan’s administration.
CNBC has reached out to the Turkish Presidency’s office for comment.
The election’s outcome and its impact on stability in the country, which sits as a crossroads between Europe and Asia and is home to NATO’s second-largest military, is of paramount importance both domestically and internationally.
“There is so much at stake for President Erdogan and his AKP (Justice and Development Party) for the first time, as his 20-year rule over Türkiye may come to an end given the unified opposition has managed to maintain a strong alliance and stay on a hope-building positive campaign,” said Hakan Akbas, managing director of consulting firm Strategic Advisory Services based between Istanbul and Washington.
This is similar, he noted, to “what Istanbul Mayor Emrak Imamoglu did to win twice against Erdogan’s AKP candidate in the mayoral election in 2019.”
Imamoglu, a popular figure who was widely expected to run for the presidency as a formidable opponent to Erdogan, was in December sentenced to nearly three years in prison and barred from politics for what a court described as insulting the judges of the Supreme Election Council (YSK). Imamoglu and his supporters say the charges are purely political and were influenced by Erdogan and his party to sabotage his political ambitions.
Turkish President and Leader of the Justice and Development (AK) Party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks as he and his wife Emine Erdogan attend an election rally in Mardin, Turkiye on May 10, 2023.
Turkish Presidency | Handout | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Politically, Turkey is highly divided, with candidates using polarizing and fear-mongering messages in an attempt to galvanize voters. But for most Turkish citizens, economy is top of mind as the country stares down a cost-of-living crisis with the official inflation figure hovering around 50% and a currency that has lost 77% of its value against the dollar in five years.
“The next president of Türkiye will face the challenge of restoring economic stability and state institutions such as the central bank, treasury, and wealth fund and rebuild investor confidence,” Akbas told CNBC.
“The country suffers from historically low FX reserves, widening current account deficit, artificially overvalued local currency, undisciplined fiscal balance and persistent, high inflation.”
Even if Erdogan wins, Akbas said, “after years of low interest rate policies that have contributed to high inflation and currency devaluation, he would likely need to adjust his economic policy to address the current economic crisis and attract investment.”
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.
CNN
—
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main opposition candidate in Turkey’s presidential election, is decidedly calm and mild-mannered in his bid to end the two-decade rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Much of his campaign messaging has been delivered from his quintessentially Turkish middle-class home and posted on Twitter, in videos that some observers have called his “kitchen diaries.”
Seated, often with tea in an “ince belli”, a Turkish teacup, he lays out his key campaign promises, announces members of his potential coalition, and sometimes just speaks candidly to the people, virtually welcoming the public into his home.
Such gestures are in stark contrast to the elitist image he and his party once had. Analysts say the desire to appeal to today’s voters has seen the presidential candidate undergo an image makeover over the years. His messages now target Turkey’s middle class and the downtrodden, the very constituency that Erdogan has always championed.
But Erdogan is now seen by his critics as being responsible for the economic turmoil the country is facing, largely due to his inability to control runaway inflation, an issue that polls have said is high on the agenda of voters who go to the ballot box on Sunday. Inflation in the country was at 43% in April, down from its peak of 85% last October.
For Erdogan’s opponents, that’s fodder for campaigns against him.
Promising to fix Turkey’s faltering economy has been a cornerstone of Kilicdaroglu’s campaign. In a video posted on Twitter on Friday, he stood in the kitchen and held up staples like bread, eggs, and yogurt, reminding viewers how much their price had soared in a year. In a separate four-second clip, he says: “Today, if you are poorer than yesterday, the only reason is Erdogan.”
Gulfem Saydan Sanver, a political communication expert who works with several politicians in Kilicdaroglu’s center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), said the kitchen has become a “symbol” of the candidate, “that he is living in a humble (life), and he is dealing with daily life problems of the ordinary Turkish citizens.”
“(He) wanted to show that Erdogan is the one who has forgotten about the problems of the lower income families,” she said.
His use of Twitter to reach the electorate may not have been out of choice, however. The majority of mainstream media outlets in the country are controlled by government loyalists, prompting the opposition to lean heavily into social media messaging.
When he took control of the CHP in 2010, Kilicdaroglu had an image problem, experts say. His party was staunchly secular and fiercely nationalistic. Today, however, it has unified disparate political players, is trying to court the Kurdish vote and has even welcomed defectors from Erdogan’s Islamist-leaning Ak Party.
According to some of those who’ve known him, the career bureaucrat turned politician was seen as elitist and disconnected from the working class as he took control of the party, much as the CHP itself was perceived. Erdogan’s government capitalized on that.
“The government used very much the people-versus-elite distinction… in order to discredit the opposition by showing them as part of some kind of power elite,” said Murat Somer, a political science professor at Koc University in Istanbul. That created a “very hard, ossified, negative image that the opposition could not get rid of,” he told CNN.
The home videos would have been hard to imagine in the early days of his political career since his natural inclination is to keep his private life to himself, said Mehmet Karli, CHP member and longtime adviser to Kilicdaroglu.
“He has come to understand over the course of (his) … political life that private and public are very much intermeshed, especially if one is leading a movement,” he told CNN.
But the soft-spoken demeanor portrayed from his home could have downsides.
Sanver said the kitchen videos had the potential to come off as too soft for some of the tougher foreign policy issues in Turkey – including ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the United States.
Erdogan has been able to leverage personal relationships and has shown effective leadership in one of the world’s most intractable issues. Alongside the United Nations, he managed to broker a deal on grain exports between Ukraine and Russia, helping prevent a global food crisis.
“It’s one of the critiques I had,” Sanver, who has met with Kilicdaroglu throughout his campaign, told CNN. “He needs to look strong because Erdogan is also very strong.”
Delivering some addresses from his office may have helped establish a more serious persona while showing he’s still a different leader than Erdogan, she said.
In a country where ethnic and religious identity often plays a part in the public discourse and is exploited by some politicians, Kilicdaroglu has moved swiftly to deprive his opponents of ammunition.
In a video posted on Twitter from his office last month, he declared to the electorate that he belongs to the Alevi sect, a minority faith group from the east of Turkey that has for years complained about persecution in the majority Sunni Muslim country. The video was watched 36 million times.
“We will no longer talk about identities; we will talk about achievements,” he said. “We will no longer talk about divisions and differences; we will speak of our commonality and our common dreams. Will you join this campaign for this change?”
In the run-up to Sunday’s too-close-to-call election, he has ramped up his poisonous invective against homosexuality, as he seeks to shore up his conservative Islamist base. Almost every other speech from the campaign trail accuses the opposition of undermining family values and of being in the thrall of improbably powerful LGBTQ+ networks — sometimes with hints they are run by paymasters abroad.
“The AK Party has never been an LGBT supporter,” Erdoğan roared at a recent Istanbul rally, referring to his governing party. “We believe in the sanctity of the family. Family is sacred.”
Adding a menacing note, he followed up with: “So are we ready to bury these LGBT supporters in the ballot box?”
To some extent, the homophobic focus of the campaign is easily explicable. Increasingly deserted by his early supporters, Erdoğan is having to form coalition partnerships with more extreme Islamists in this year’s elections.
But even so, his language smacks of a fixation, and an attempt to divert attention from the country’s most pressing ailments — including a snowballing cost of living crisis and scorching inflation.
Diversionary tactics
Fulden Ergen, editor of Velvele.Net, an online debate platform for LGBTQ+ rights, said she was taken aback by the ubiquity of Erdoğan’s propaganda against the LGBTQ+ community in this year’s campaign.
She reckoned the attacks were an attempt to mask how few answers to Turkey’s profound problems the AK Party now has.
“I was not expecting them to be this devoid of policies and just talking about LGBTI,” she said. “The alliance does not have much to give people anymore,” she added, referring to the conservative coalition backing the president. “They don’t know how to deal with the economic crisis. They have no policies left, I see this campaign as a defeat.”
Though he may be running out of ideas, Erdoğan could still win. And that is now a serious concern to LGBTQ+ people.
Life is already tough, and could get significantly worse. LGBTQ+ flags are banned, gatherings are arbitrarily blocked by the government and participants in pride parades are regularly attacked or detained by police. The fear is that their organizations could now be made illegal, and — in the worst case scenario — that laws to protect families could be extended to outlaw homosexuality itself.
Activists say that if Erdoğan stays in power, violence could follow his hate speech.
An anti-LGBTQ+ rally in Istanbul in 2022 | Chris McGrath/Getty Images
One of the dangers is that his government could use security laws to crack down on homosexual relations — casting them as part of a foreign conspiracy. The government is playing on perceptions that “people don’t believe LGBTI can be from Turkey,” Ergen said.
One of the biggest setbacks for women and LGBTQ+ people has been Turkey’s 2021 withdrawal from the — ironically named — Istanbul Convention, which is intended to prevent, prosecute and eliminate violence against women and promote gender equality.
Domestic violence is a severe problem that kills at least one woman every day in Turkey. According to data from the Monument Counter, a website that commemorates women who lost their lives to domestic violence, 824 women have been killed in just the past two years.
Gender parity is another failing across the country’s political spectrum. According to the country’s Women’s Platform for Equality, a rights group that has been tracing the candidates on the various parties’ electoral lists, a mere 117 female deputies are set to be elected to Turkey’s 600-seat parliament.
‘I have seen many Erdoğans in my life’
Zeynep Esmeray Özadikti, who has been an activist for trans rights for 30 years, looks set to be an exception to that trend. She is a candidate for the Workers’ Party of Turkey and the first openly trans woman with a good chance of making it to parliament.
In a café in Kurtuluş, a neighborhood in Istanbul where there are significant numbers of trans voters, Esmeray told POLITICO that, if elected, she would fight for the rights of LGBTQ+ people against discrimination, hate crimes and violence. “I am getting very positive feedback from the streets,” she said. “If we can judge it by looking at the streets then I’ll definitely be getting into the parliament.”
If Erdoğan stays in power, Esmeray believes he will take the country in a more religiously conservative direction, even aiming for Sharia law.
Ergen, the Velvele.net editor, echoed Esmeray’s line of thought. She feared that Article 10 in Turkey’s constitution — a part of the national charter that gives some vague protection to gender equality — might be doctored, paving the way to the possible criminalization of homosexuality.
“This is my biggest fear,” she says. “If they win, they are going to do it.”
Still, the fear of Erdoğan does not mean the LGBTQ+ community feels completely protected by the opposition, whose candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is leading in the polls ahead of Sunday’s first round vote.
Ergen thinks the right-wing parties within the wide-ranging opposition alliance could also lobby to make life harder for LGBTQ+ groups.
Kılıçdaroğlu himself is fairly guarded in his LGBTQ+ remarks, knowing that the government could easily turn the subject against him.
To Erdoğan, Turkey’s LGBTQ+ community represents “deviant structures” | Burak Kara/Getty Images
He is, however, committed to a trajectory toward EU norms. When asked for his stance by POLITICO, he said: “We defend all human rights. It is our common duty to defend human rights. Democracy demands it. You cannot alienate people based on their beliefs, identities and lifestyles, you have to respect everyone.”
Both Esmeray and Ergen believed the priority should be for Turkey to return the Istanbul Convention to reinforce some basic freedoms.
And both reckoned Turkey’s population was ahead of its politicians.
“I am more optimistic about people, not political parties,” said Ergen, who based her hopes on the breadth of civil society activities in Turkey.
Esmeray added: “I have seen many Erdoğans in my life. If he wins, we will continue fighting. If it comes to that, I will face him and tell him to kill me.”
ISTANBUL — Two of Turkey’s most senior opposition politicians, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, cried foul over the way the state-run Anadolu news agency was reporting results of Turkey’s election on Sunday night, saying it was giving a distortedly high early count to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In its results based on 30 percent of ballots counted at 7.30 p.m., Anadolu reported that Erdoğan was racing ahead with 54 percent of the vote, while his challenger for the presidency Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu had only 40 percent. By 11 p.m. the margin had narrowed to 49.9 percent versus 44.3 percent, with 89 percent of the vote counted. Both camps predicted they would win, though a second-round on May 28 started to look possible as neither candidate was on track to secure the more than 50 percent required to claim the presidency outright.
Anadolu’s early numbers are highly contentious because they are widely used as the feed for live election coverage on TV. The opposition argues the state agency is deliberately releasing data from electoral districts in favor of Erdoğan and his AK party first — and holding back numbers on opposition ballots — so that election observers might lose heart and not wait for every last vote to be counted.
For this reason, the opposition is insisting that its election observers must stay in place until all the ballots are counted to prevent any manipulation. The two mayors said Anadolu had used the same strategy in the mayoral elections of 2019, initially saying the votes were on course for big AK party wins, while the opposition eventually took Istanbul and Ankara in late counting.
Adding to the confusion, the Supreme Election Council said at about 10.30 p.m. only 47 percent of votes had been official processed, while Anadolu was giving data based on almost 90 percent of votes. At around the same time, dozens of trucks with blaring horns and AK party flags roared through central Istanbul, seemingly celebrating although Erdoğan was dropping beneath the 50 percent required to win the presidency outright, making a second round on May 28 the most likely option.
İmamoğlu said AK party observers were also contesting the counts at polling stations where the opposition is traditionally strong, and opposition activists urged their members to head to the schools where the votes were held to stop intimidation of their observers. Yunus Başaran, a candidate for the Workers’ Party of Turkey from the southern coastal city of Antalya, said that some ballot boxes had been counted seven times. “This time they’ve found this path,” he said. Journalist Nevșin Mengü tweeted she had information that in the Ankara neighborhood of Çankaya — a traditional opposition bastion — one ballot box had been counted 11 times.
Slamming the public announcement of the results as a “fiction,” opposition leader Kılıçdaroğlu called on his teams to stay vigilant. “We will not sleep tonight,” he said. Erdoğan made the same call: “I ask all of my litigants and colleagues to stay at the ballot boxes, no matter what, until the results are officially finalized.”
The main opposition party, the CHP, said data from its election observers suggested it was winning as results from its strong holds . “We are ahead,” Kılıçdaroğlu tweeted amid the controversy over the vote count.
“I urge citizens not to rely on the [Anadolu agency’s] results. When we look at the ratios, we believe that Kılıçdaroğlu will be comfortably declared as the president of the country, but it’s too early to say when we look at the data,” İmamoğlu told reporters in Istanbul.
Yavaş said: “Let’s keep our morale high.”
Ömer Çelik, spokesperson for the AK party, defended the Anadolu agency and told the mayors that their remarks were “not very becoming.”
“There’s no need to be suspicious,” he said. “They can look at other channels, but our president is winning by a large margin.”
Other political analysts noted early results can favorErdoğan because small conservative constituencies can report their results relatively quickly.
Sinan Ülgen, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, said the situation mirrored the local election night in 2019 and estimated Kılıçdaroğlu would get more votes toward the end of the vote.
“I think Kılıçdaroğlu is going to finish the race ahead of Erdoğan, but maybe not get 50 percent,” he told POLITICO.
It’s now easy to forget that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was once hailed as the paragon of a “Muslim democrat,” who could serve as a model to the entire Islamic world.
In the early 2000s, hopes ran high about the charismatic, lanky, former football striker, who received only one red card in his playing career, unsurprisingly for giving an earful to a referee. The man from the working-class Istanbul neighborhood of Kasımpaşa promised something new: Finally, there was a master-juggler, who could balance Islamism, parliamentary democracy, progressive welfare, NATO membership and EU-oriented reforms.
That optimism feels a world away now, as Turkey heads into crunch elections on May 14 marked by debate over the centralization of powers under an increasingly authoritarian and divisive leader — dubbed the reis, or captain. Prominent opponents are in jail, the media and judiciary are largely under Erdoğan’s thrall and the kid from Kasımpaşa now rules 85 million people from a monumental 1,150-room presidential complex he built, commonly referred to as the Saray, meaning palace.
Little wonder, then, that the opposition is focusing its campaign on undoing the “one-man regime.” The six-party opposition bloc is vowing to take a pick-ax to the all-powerful presidential system Erdoğan introduced in 2017 and to shift to a new type of pluralist parliamentary democracy. (POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts the contest on a knife edge, meaning there will probably be a second round in the presidential vote on May 28.)
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the opposition leader challenging Erdoğan for the top job, describes the restoration of Turkish democracy as the “first pillar” of the election race. “In a manner that contradicts its own history … our veteran parliament’s legislative power has been consigned to the grip of the one-man regime,” Kılıçdaroğlu, an avuncular, soft-spoken former bureaucrat, said in a speech on April 23 commemorating the founding of parliament.
Know your onions
But is this talk of democratic restoration seizing the imagination in an election that is, quite literally, about the price of onions and cucumbers?
Turkey’s brutal cost of living crisis is the No. 1 electoral battleground. Kılıçdaroğlu hit a nerve when, onion in hand, he delivered a warning from his modest kitchen — no Saray for Mr. Kemal — that the cost of a kilo of onions would spike to 100 lira (€4.67) from 30 lira now, if the president stays in power.
Stung, Erdoğan insisted his government had solved Turkey’s food affordability problems, saying: “In this country, there is no onion problem, no potato problem, no cucumber problem.” But most Turks know Kılıçdaroğlu’s arithmetic is not outlandish; he is an accountant by training, after all. Annual inflation hit a record high of 85.5 percent last October, and ran at just over 50 percent in March. The Turkish lira has plunged to 19.4 to the dollar from about 6 to the dollar in early 2020.
In contrast to those bread-and-butter campaign issues, the main thrust of the opposition’s manifesto for switching power away from the presidency sounds legalistic. There are provisions to end the president’s effective veto power, ensure a non-partisan presidency and impose a one-term limit. Parliament will be strengthened by measures ranging from a lower threshold for a party to enter the assembly to greater use of independent experts in committees.
Important reforms, certainly, but will they strike a chord with voters? They could well do. İlke Toygür, professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, observed that while constitutional reforms might not be the “daily conversation,” the big themes of one-man rule and Turkey’s historical attachment to parliament did resonate.
One-man rule, for example, is widely linked to mismanagement of the economy and skyrocketing prices, she noted. Erdoğan has been lambasted for pouring fuel onto the inflationary fire by advocating for slashing interest rates — a stance euphemistically described as “unorthodox.”
“If you link everything to each other and link the one-man rule to the cost of living crisis, to the democracy crisis, and to all the problems in foreign policy, then you are defining this system and you are providing an alternative,” she said.
Toygür also stressed parliament played a crucial role in creating Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s independent Turkish republic a century ago, and that still counted. “Parliament has a very strong symbolic value in Turkey,” she said, adding that voters appreciated teams in decision-making, something that Kılıçdaroğlu is playing up. “One of the biggest complaints now is that people lost their links to decision-making candidates.”
In stark contrast to the image of Erdoğan as the lone almighty reis, Kılıçdaroğlu portrays himself as building consensus, ready to draw on a broad pool of talent. In videos, he shows himself discussing earthquake-resistant construction, education and nutrition with high-profile mayors, Mansur Yavaș from Ankara and Ekrem İmamoğlu from Istanbul, his vice-presidents in the wings.
What’s more, Kılıçdaroğlu has pushed this vision of himself as an inclusive leader to a dramatic new level by publicly declaring himself to be an Alevi, a member of Turkey’s main religious minority that long suffered discrimination. His Twitter declaration on his identity, in which he called on young Turks to uproot the country’s “divisive system,” went viral. It’s a risky gambit against a populist president from the Sunni mainstream, but the message is clear: Kılıçdaroğlu is styling himself as the pluralist antidote to Erdoğan’s polarizing politics. The humble 74-year-old may be a bit dull after the caustic current leader, but the opposition’s gamble is that’s what Turkey needs.
Power to the president
Most observers looking back to identify a turning point where Erdoğan decided to centralize power around himself select the Gezi Park protests of 2013, when an unusually socially diverse band of demonstrators sought to stop a green space in Istanbul from being bulldozed for a shopping mall.
The protests — eventually smashed with tear gas and water cannon — swelled into a nationwide roar against Erdoğan’s cronyism and strongman style. Demir Murat Seyrek, adjunct professor at the Brussels School of Governance, said it was the first time Erdoğan felt “the threat was against him” rather than the ruling AK party.
Turkish President and People’s Alliance’s presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan | Adem Atlan/AFP via Getty Images
The final straw was an attempted coup in 2016 — the facts of which remain opaque — that pushed Erdoğan to hold a referendum in April 2017 on shifting to a presidential system. He won by the narrowest of margins (51.4 percent) and the opposition still disputes the result, not least because the vote was held during a post-coup state of emergency.
Seyrek noted the irony that the presidential system also had downsides for Erdoğan, particularly as he requires 50 percent of votes (+1) to stay in office. Now deserted by bigwigs from his AK party’s early days — former President Abdullah Gül and former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu have turned against him — he has to find increasingly extreme partners for his coalition to make up the numbers. “Each time, he wins by losing political power to other parties. He is winning by sharing power with more and more people,” he remarked.
A hardened political brawler, Erdoğan is punching back hard against the accusations that he’s the man undermining Turkish democracy.
As he has done for years, Erdoğan is turning the tables and casts himself as the voice of the majority, underlining Islamic propriety and family values, while saying his adversaries are in hock to terrorists, the imperialist West, murky international high-finance and LGBTQ+ organizations. Mainstream rival parties are dismissed as fascists and perverts, and he predicts his voters will “burst” the ballot boxes with their tide of support on May 14.
In an episode typical of Erdoğan’s combative instincts, he scented blood when Kılıçdaroğlu was photographed stepping on a prayer rug in his shoes at the end of March. Although his rival apologized for this unwitting accident, the president whipped up a crowd to boo him, accusing Kılıçdaroğlu of taking his instructions from Fethullah Gülen, the U.S.-based preacher and former AK party ally, whom Erdoğan now accuses of inciting the failed coup in 2016.
Clutching a prayer rug himself, Erdoğan intoned through his microphone: “This prayer rug is not for standing on with shoes. God willing, we’ll be able to perform the prayer of thanks on this prayer rug on May 15.”
Opposition politicians know full well they can easily be typecast by Erdoğan as reactionary voices of an old elite. That’s why they are being careful not to describe their proposed constitutional overhaul of the presidency as turning back the clock to some fictional glory days, but rather as creating something new: What the opposition manifesto calls “a truly pluralistic democracy” that “has never been possible” before.
Free but not fair?
Given the fears about Erdoğan’s lurch toward authoritarianism, speculation is intense over how fair the elections will be, and whether Erdoğan can rig them. Indeed, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu only fanned the concerns that the government could crack down on the democratic process by describing May 14 as an attempted “political coup” by the West — hardly words to be taken lightly given Turkey’s history of putsches.
With the full resources of the state and pliant media at his disposal, the president can certainly command disproportionate influence. In only the past few days, for example, Erdoğan has been able to offer free Black Sea gas as a pre-election perk.
But Seyrek at the Brussels School of Governance stressed that voting itself in Turkey should never be compared with Russia or Belarus. He argued the vote in each polling station would be closely monitored by all the political parties and other civilian observers. “I still feel in Turkey, what you can do against the result of elections is quite limited,” he said.
The consensus is that Erdoğan will be unable to fix the result in the case of a significant defeat. The greater danger, as noted by several analysts, is that he could attempt some high-risk stratagem in case of a tight result, demanding a recount or calling a state of emergency in case of some diversionary “incident.” That would, however, only inflame the country’s febrile politics just as Ankara needs stability to attract foreign investors and resuscitate the economy.
The more surreal idea — but not an implausible one now — is that Erdoğan could tactically see the time is ripe to lead the opposition and attack Kılıçdaroğlu’s new government. The new president would be highly vulnerable to Erdoğan’s vitriolic rhetoric as he tries to hold together a fissiparous coalition in the teeth of an economic crisis. Paradoxically, though, Seyrek noted that the AK party members in opposition could even support reforms to shake up the presidency and ensure media freedoms, as that would be in their interest. That could prove important as constitutional change would need a hefty parliamentary majority.
Or would Erdoğan simply take umbrage in defeat and quit the country?
Seyrek found that inconceivable.
“In his mind, he is a second Atatürk, he would rather die than escape.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are hoping to remain at the head of the table in what, according to recent polls, is expected to be the closest race in the country’s recent electoral history.
After two decades in power, a win for Erdoğan would consolidate his vision of the future of the country, as well as the presidential system he ushered in.
Meanwhile, the main opposition coalition is made up of an eclectic mix of six political parties. First and foremost, a win for them would mean a return to a parliamentary system of governance.
Looming concerns include how exactly voting will take place in the earthquake zone, how voting will be monitored, and whether Erdoğan would concede and step down if he loses.
Here’s what you need to know.
How does it all work?
Around 61 million voters from across Turkey’s 87 electoral districts will head to the polls on Sunday, May 14.
Meanwhile, some 3.4 million eligible overseas voters — 1.5 million of them in Germany alone — will likely have already cast their ballots.
Polling stations — which are set up in public schools — open at 8 a.m. on election day and close at 5 p.m. At 9 p.m. media can start reporting, and unofficial results are expected to start trickling in around midnight.
As a clearer picture emerges early Monday morning, there could be a victory announcement if one candidate has clearly won — although official results from the country’s Supreme Election Council (YSK) could take a few days.
If no presidential candidate receives over 50 percent of the votes, however, a second round will be held between the two top candidates on Sunday, May 28. If that happens, overseas voting will be held from May 20 to 24.
What’s on the ballot?
The country’s parliamentary and presidential elections take place at the same time, with voters receiving two separate ballots.
There are four candidates on the presidential ballot, who have either been nominated by a party that passed the 5 percent threshold in the previous parliamentary election or secured 100,000 signatures from voters. However, only three of them will actually be running, as one of them — Muharrem İnce — withdrew after ballots were printed, just three days before the election.
The selection for the country’s 600-seat Grand National Assembly is a more complicated affair. The YSK has allowed 26 political parties and 151 local independent candidates to run — though not all parties are running in every province. For parties to enter parliament, they have to pass a 7 percent electoral threshold — or be part of an alliance that does. There is no such limit for independent candidates.
What exactly does such a crowded ballot look like? An unwieldy meter-long sheet of paper!
Who’s running for parliament?
Of the 26 parties and five alliances on the ballot, here are the major players:
The People’s Alliance: Representing the current parliamentary majority, the alliance consists of the ruling conservative AKP, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the Islamist and ultranationalist Great Unity Party, and the Islamist New Welfare Party — with all four parties appearing on the ballot.
However, many of the AKP’s other former partners have deserted it of late, leading the alliance to turn to smaller parties for help — including the Free Cause Party, which is associated with the Kurdish Hizbullah.
The Nation Alliance: Also known as the “Table of Six,” the main opposition alliance brings together a disparate array of ideologies, all focused on bringing back the country’s parliamentary system, as well as pledges to swiftly reduce inflation, increase per capita income, return Syrian and Afghan refugees back to their countries, and resume talks on EU membership.
The alliance features the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), the hard-right nationalist splinter Good Party (İYİ), the center-right Democracy and Progress Party, and the Future Party — both led by AKP defectors — as well as the Democrat Party and the Felicity Party. While the Good Party will be appearing on the ballot, all other coalition members will be running under the CHP banner.
The Labor and Freedom Alliance: This left-leaning alliance technically consists of the Green Left Party (YSP) and the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TIP). However, the YSP itself boasts candidates from four different parties, including the pro-Kurdish Democratic People’s Party (HDP) — the third-largest opposition party in the country. The HDP isn’t running candidates for parliament under its own name due to a pending court case that could see it shut down.
Who’s running for president?
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: The joint candidate of the People’s Alliance, Erdoğan’s campaign has emphasized his vision for the “Century of Turkey,” showcasing projects realized throughout his years in power, as well as plans to rebuild areas affected by the earthquakes. If he wins, this would be Erdoğan’s third term, which technically goes against Turkey’s constitution. However, a YSK ruling stated that his first term could be counted as starting in 2018 (when the new presidential system came in) rather than when he actually took office in 2014. That means he can run again.
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu: The joint candidate of the Nation Alliance, the head of the CHP is Erdoğan’s main rival. Kılıçdaroğlu has received open backing from the HDP — as well as the rest of the Labor and Freedom Alliance — and is running on a platform of justice and accountability, promising to reverse many of Erdoğan’s policies, his consolidation of power under the presidency, and bring “spring” to the country. Though often characterized as mild-mannered, the former bureaucrat has also been known to dial up the rhetoric when criticizing Erdoğan’s “one-man rule.”
Sinan Oğan: A former MHP member, the final candidate is a nationalist nominee from the right-wing Ancestral Alliance. Though he is unlikely to win, Oğan can divert some of the nationalist vote, particularly from those who find the Good Party to have shifted too close to the center and the MHP too far to the right. Oğan is also in support of returning the country to a parliamentary system.
How are the votes counted?
According to the YSK, once polls close, the counting of votes in every single ballot box is supervised by a four-to-seven-person committee. Registered volunteers and citizens are also allowed to observe.
Each individual ballot is then opened, shown to the committee and then read aloud. As you can imagine, this takes a long time. Once everyone is happy, it’s off to the local district’s electoral council accompanied by security forces.
The votes are then entered into the YSK’s online system in front of party representatives. And the official count is later verified by political parties and volunteer organizations.
Will voters show up?
Turkey usually boasts high voter turnout, and this year is projected to be one of its highest yet, with a recent poll suggesting it could be around 84 percent. There will also be close to 5 million first-time voters, and overseas voting has seen higher participation than in recent years.
Of course, one of the biggest concerns is how the elections will be held in the earthquake zone — formerly home to 14 percent of the country’s registered voters and once an AKP stronghold. Of the millions that have left the region since the disaster, only a fraction were able to move their voter registrations in time, according to the YSK.
Those who missed the tight deadline will now have to return to the region to vote, and special polling centers will be set up where public buildings are no longer standing. In order to help aid those in need and boost turnout, campaigns will be running buses to the region, and civil society organizations have started Askıda Bilet — ticket on the hook — a campaign collecting donations to buy bus tickets to the region. However, most votes in the region likely won’t be cast.
