TURKEY’S VOTERS SEND ERDOGAN A CLEAR MESSAGE OF DISSATISFACTION
A Political Quake in Turkey as Erdogan’s Party Loses in His Home Base of Support: Carlotta Gall, New York Times, Apr. 1, 2019 — Step by step over the years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey sought to ensure nobody could challenge him.
Turkey’s Election– Wins and Illusions: W. Robert Pearson, Middle East Institute, Mar. 27, 2019 — Turkey’s municipal elections on March 31 are in fact not local but a national referendum on the continued rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
After an Opposition Election Victory, Erdoğan Faces Hard Choices: Nate Schenkkan, Freedom House, Apr. 1, 2019 — After local elections on Sunday, Turkey’s beleaguered opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) declared victory in key contests in the capital, Ankara, and the country’s largest city, Istanbul. While most observers had expected Ankara to fall to the opposition, and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) appeared to have already conceded its loss, Istanbul was a shock.
Israel-Bashing Season Re-Opens in Turkey: Burak Bekdil, Gatestone, Mar. 27, 2019 — Another round of Turkish elections and another wave of Israel-bashing at election rallies. This has become a pattern since 2009 and Turks have not shown any sign of frustration: They simply love it.
On Topic Links
Responding to Turkey’s Purchase of Russia’s S-400 Missile System: Max Hoffman, Center for American Progress, March 21, 2019 — The United States and Turkey have been at odds for at least six years, driven by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s descent into autocracy; his assertive brand of Turkish nationalism and anti-American rhetoric; and repeated clashes between the two nations over how to handle the Syrian civil war.
U.S. Sends Message To Turkey, Halts F-35 Equipment Shipments- Report: Jerusalem Post, Apr. 1, 2019 — The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey, sources familiar with the situation said, marking the first concrete U.S. step to block delivery of the jet to the NATO ally in light of Ankara’s planned purchase of a Russian missile defense system.
Erdogan’s AKP Down But not Out After Local Vote: Globe Post Turkey, Apr. 1, 2019 — After a frenetic campaign with multiple daily rallies across Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ‘s AKP lost the major cities including Istanbul in Sunday’s local elections, leaving the ruling party damaged but not beyond repair, analysts said.
What’s Behind Turkey’s Lira Crisis? Euronews Answers: Euronews. Aug. 13, 2018, Video– The Turkish government has announced an action plan as the country’s currency continues to slide, and an escalating row with the US threatens a full-blown economic crisis.
A POLITICAL QUAKE IN TURKEY AS ERDOGAN’S PARTY LOSES IN HIS HOME BASE OF SUPPORT
Carlotta Gall
New York Times, Apr. 1, 2019
Step by step over the years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey sought to ensure nobody could challenge him. He marginalized adversaries. He purged the army, the police and the courts. He cowed the press. He strengthened his powers in the Constitution. And he promised Turks a bright economic future.
So, it was a huge surprise when the outcome of weekend municipal voting showed on Monday that Mr. Erdogan’s party had not only lost control of Ankara, the political center, but maybe Istanbul, the country’s commercial center, his home city and longstanding core of support.
Even if the results were not final, they amounted to the most momentous political earthquake to shake Mr. Erdogan in nearly two decades of basically uncontested control at the helm of Turkey, a NATO ally and critical linchpin of stability in the region.
What was different this time was the rapidly tanking economy and a highly disciplined opposition. It deployed monitors to not only scrutinize the vote tallies but also sleep on sacks of sealed counted ballots to guard against possible tampering by members of Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP. “We think they were not able to rig the election,” said Ilayda Kocoglu, 28, vice president of the Istanbul branch of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, who slept on some sacks herself. “They were not expecting us to be that organized, or that resolved.”
The results do not mean that Mr. Erdogan, whose term as president lasts for four more years, will change his behavior, which includes promoting Islamic religious values over secularism, closer ties to Russia and chillier relations with NATO. But the election showed Mr. Erdogan has weaknesses. “It’s a catastrophe for him,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “We now know he is not invincible.”
Turkey’s weakened economy, which had rapidly expanded for years under Mr. Erdogan, was at the top of voters’ concerns, despite Mr. Erdogan’s exhortations that the problems are not of his making. The country tumbled into a recession in March. Unemployment exceeds 10 percent, and up to 30 percent among young people. The Turkish lira lost 28 percent of its value in 2018 and continues to weaken. Inflation has reached 20 percent.
Ms. Kocoglu said she and her colleagues understood within an hour of the closing of polls Sunday night that they were watching Turkey’s most momentous change since Mr. Erdogan took power. Even the most remote areas of the Istanbul metropolitan area showed a defeat for Mr. Erdogan’s mayoral candidate. As of Monday night, results from the High Election Council had still not been fully released and Mr. Erdogan’s party had not conceded defeat in Istanbul. But the tally showed the opposition candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, ahead with 99 percent of the votes counted.
At a latenight news briefing in Istanbul, Mr. Imamoglu said he was trusting in Turkey’s institutions more than the AKP to confirm his victory. “I don’t expect this from the party,” he said. “For years to come AKP will not accept my win.”
Opposition mayors in Turkey’s two most important cities give the Republican People’s Party high-profile opportunities to show how it can govern effectively, with control of municipal services from garbage collection to mass transit. And Mr. Imamoglu has promised that as mayor of Istanbul, he would audit the books, a prospect that could create new problems for the AKP should he uncover evidence of corruption under the ruling party’s watch… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
TURKEY’S ELECTION – WINS AND ILLUSIONS
W. Robert Pearson
Middle East Institute, Mar. 27, 2019
Turkey’s municipal elections on March 31 are in fact not local but a national referendum on the continued rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr. Erdogan has made it so to further consolidate his control over the country, and he has pulled out all the stops to that end. He has taken to new heights charges against opposition figures and promoted xenophobic fears. More than ever before, he has relied on stirring the nationalistic sentiments of Turks to secure a solid win. He wishes to transform Turkey’s domestic political scene to ensure greater personal loyalty and dependence upon him for aspiring ruling party leaders. Under the current constitution, maintaining a majority in Turkey’s parliament ensures dominant presidential power. As a result, the need for loyalty to the person of the president becomes more important than loyalty to the political party.
The last six years have been bumpy for President Erdogan domestically, even as he has weathered and overcome each crisis. Serious domestic reaction to his rule began in May 2013 with demonstrations in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, protests which for a short time spread nationwide. Just months later, in December 2013, a major corruption scandal came to light that reached into Mr. Erdogan’s inner circle. That affair brought about a final break with his closest political ally for a decade, Fethullah Gulen. The government had all charges connected with the scandal dismissed. Next, in June 2015, for the first time, Mr. Erdogan’s party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), lost its majority in the Turkish parliament, due to the popularity of a new party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which ironically ran on many of the broad, liberal themes the AKP had used in 2002 when it first came to power. Ultimately, the AKP had the HDP leadership arrested and imprisoned.
The severest shock came with a failed coup in July 2016. Mr. Erdogan thereafter ruled by emergency decree until July 2018, purging thousands of Turkish civil servants, military officers, academics, police officials, journalists, and others from civil life in Turkey. Many have received lengthy prison sentences. Continuing his string of political victories, Mr. Erdogan narrowly won a referendum in April 2017 to usher in a new Turkish constitution that would give him unprecedented powers under an executive presidency, and then successfully ran to become Turkey’s president in June 2018. Under the new constitution, the president can serve two five-year terms. If during a president’s second term, the parliament were to call early elections, the sitting president could be a candidate to run again. Potentially, this means that Mr. Erdogan could remain the president of Turkey into the early 2030s.
To make that possible, Mr. Erdogan has taken a number of steps. As head of party as well as head of government and state, he has been able to control without restraint the selection and announcement of mayoral candidates in all of Turkey’s 81 provinces. He has worked to focus loyalty on himself rather than build support for a broad-based party program in which other members of the AKP would retain some influence. Nearly two-thirds of the Turkish population is under 40, and most of those 20 and older have grown up under AKP governments. His campaign has emphasized the importance the party attaches to youth and uses social media extensively to reach this age group… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
AFTER AN OPPOSITION ELECTION VICTORY, ERDOĞAN FACES HARD CHOICES
Nate Schenkkan
Freedom House, April 1, 2019
After local elections on Sunday, Turkey’s beleaguered opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) declared victory in key contests in the capital, Ankara, and the country’s largest city, Istanbul. While most observers had expected Ankara to fall to the opposition, and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) appeared to have already conceded its loss, Istanbul was a shock.
Istanbul accounts for some 18 percent of Turkey’s population and around a third of its GDP, and the megalopolis’s ambitious redevelopment has been a crucial source of rents for the patronage machines of the AKP and its Islamist predecessor party, which have controlled the municipal government for 25 years. It is also the hometown of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the place where he forged his political career as mayor. Very few people thought that the AKP and Erdoğan would stomach defeat in Istanbul—and it is still not certain that they will accept the results as initially reported.
What happened in Istanbul says a lot about how the AKP has squeezed and distorted Turkey’s electoral institutions, and about the space for competition that remains.
How the AKP’s usual tactics fell short
As noted previously, the recent pattern of electoral manipulation in Turkey has centered on control of the media narrative. The fervently pro-Erdoğan state news agency Anadolu has a monopoly on real-time elections data, and it races ahead to publish results favorable to the AKP, which are then bolstered by coordinated messaging from the government’s stable of allied private media—a group that encompasses all but one major newspaper and television station—and statements by the government’s representatives.
The High Electoral Council (YSK) dutifully counts the votes but waits for instructions on when to announce the results. When there is some concern in the AKP about the outcome, last-minute rule changes (in the 2017 constitutional referendum the YSK decided to allow ballots without an official stamp after the voting had ended) or sudden pauses in the release of numbers (in Ankara’s 2014 elections the counting stopped when the opposition appeared to move into the lead) provide an opportunity to get the result “right.” Control over the narrative, through loyalist media and pliant electoral institutions, ensures that when the AKP announces its victory, there is no room to contest the claim. So why didn’t it work in Istanbul this time?
The most obvious answer is that the AKP must have lost badly, which suggests serious disaffection among Istanbulites given the party’s control of the media and long tenure in power in the city. As in 2017, when almost exactly 50 percent of the country rejected Erdoğan’s favored constitutional changes (despite the inclusion of unstamped ballots), there is enormous discontent in Turkey. The AKP’s tactics can paper over small losses, but not big ones. Istanbul was merely the crest of an urban wave against the AKP in Sunday’s voting. The CHP won 11 of the country’s 29 major cities (büyükşehirler), including four of the five largest. A liberal and Kurdish-oriented opposition party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), won three additional büyükşehirler in the southeast in a show of impressive staying power after dozens of its mayors were removed and replaced with centrally appointed “trustees” under the state of emergency from July 2016 to July 2018. The AKP still won by far the largest vote share nationwide, but its mayoral control over the urban population has shrunk… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
ISRAEL – BASHING SEASON RE-OPENS IN TURKEY
Burak Bekdil
Gatestone, March 27, 2019
Another round of Turkish elections and another wave of Israel-bashing at election rallies. This has become a pattern since 2009 and Turks have not shown any sign of frustration: They simply love it.
Blaming the man who brought Israel to public rallies is the easier thing to do, a kind of intellectual laziness. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been correct in thinking that his diplomatic wars with Israel, his more than undiplomatic language and outright anti-Zionism would work like a ballot box cash machine. It did.
A deeper look, however, should investigate why in the 1970s and 80s, when Turkey did not have full diplomatic relations with Israel, the name of that country or any politician there was never mentioned at Turkish election rallies. Why would the average Turkish voter, three or four decades ago, find the State of Israel totally irrelevant but today show up and cheer at every possible Israel-bashing election rally? How did Turkish politicians who in the mid-1990s spearheaded efforts to build an alliance with Israel, keep winning votes despite their pro-Israel policies? What took place to move the Turkish mindset to its present, deeply anti-Israeli point?
What took place was the not-so-creeping Islamization of Turkish society since 2002, when Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power. A Turk who is now 27 years old was only 10 at that time and has not seen any other leader of Turkey since. Erdoğan’s political and social engineering has changed the way the average Turk identifies himself: Most Turks used to identify themselves as “Turks first.” Now they identify themselves as “Muslims first” — the way Erdoğan seemingly wanted them to.
It is not surprising then that passionate fans of the Justice and Development Party often hear the words Israel, terror state, tyrant, dictator and so on at public rallies as Turkey heads toward its local elections on March 31. “What,” asked a puzzled European diplomat, a newcomer to Ankara, “does Israel have to do with Turks’ choice of metropolitan, small town or even village mayors?” A colleague answered with a smile: “A lot. Anti-Israel rhetoric is now an indispensable part of every Turkish election, including one to elect a village headman.”
The show for this year’s election took off as early as December, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “a cold-blooded killer in modern times,” among other slanders.
Most recently, Erdoğan threatened his own citizens — citizens who practice a different faith, of course — Turkey’s already dwindling Jewish community, now at around 16,000. “Do not provoke [us],” he said, before noting that he had not yet taken any action against Turkish Jews or their houses of worship… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
