European Central: Turkish Presidential Election Goes To Second Round

Tayyip Erdoğan and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu

In President Erdogan’s closest election to date, there will be a second round to the presidential election. Unlike his previous two presidential elections, this time Erdogan did not gain at least 51 percent of the vote in the first round. Because of this, Erdogan and Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the candidate who secure the second highest portion of the vote during the first round will face off again. As Erdogan got 49.50 percent of the vote, he is very close to winning the election.

United Opposition Against Erdogan

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s opponent received 44.89 percent of the vote, a higher percentage than an opponent received in the previous two elections. This is because six political parties came together as a unified coalition and chose Kilicdaroglu to run as their candidate and to avoid splitting the vote. The strategy seemed to work and Erdogan failed to win in the first round.

Deadly Earthquake Causes Shift In Public Opinion on Erdogan

One factor affecting Erdogan’s ability to win the election is the deadly earthquake which occurred on February 11th of this year. This was Turkey’s deadliest earthquake on record. While a politician cannot be blamed for the natural disaster itself, President Erdogan can be blamed for why so many Turkish citizens became homeless as a result of the earthquake. Turkey has national building standards to prevent catastrophic consequences as seen on February 11th, yet President Erdogan allowed builders to pay fines if their buildings did not meet the standards rather than tearing down and rebuilding. This is beneficial for the builders but not for the residents. As a result, over 2.7 million Turkish citizens were made homeless by the earthquake across 11 provinces. Kilicdaroglu tried to campaign on this issue yet he still came in second place behind Erdogan.

Inflation And Turkey’s Economic Woes

Inflation has caused economic troubles for the majority of the country. Two-thirds of Turkey’s population struggle to buy food and pay their rent. This is because the Turkish Lira has been losing its value, starting back in 2013. The Lira’s devaluation has primarily been driven by inflation. Inflation makes imported products more expensive and even saw Apple temporarily stopped selling products in Turkey on November 24th, 2021, due to the unstable exchange rate.

High inflation has been caused by President Erdogan’s insistence that Turkey maintain low interests rates in order to allow citizens to have more money to spend in the economy. This has been a strategy that President Erdogan has used to win elections but after a while this strategy no longer works and leads to sky high inflation that is difficult to control. Turkey’s Central Bank is not independent like the Federal Reserve in the United States or the European Central Bank meaning if President Erdogan does not approve of raising interest rates, it will not happen. President Erdogan’s insistence on maintaining low interest rates led to multiple finance ministers and heads of the central bank who attempted to convince President Erdogan to raise the rates.

Biased Media Coverage

One factor in President Erdogan’s favor is that the media coverage is almost exclusively favorable to him. Turkey also forced twitter to censor tweets from candidates running against Erdogan in order to not shut down the platform completely in the nation. Elon Musk has also faced a lot of backlash for censoring content on twitter in Turkey before the election. Twitter has taken the situation to court but it was too late to prevent the tweets from being censored before voters voted in the first round of the election. The Turkish government also shut down twitter to prevent citizens from criticizing Erdogan after the earthquake struck the nation. They mayors of Instanbul and Ankara are also upset with how election results were reported by Andalou, a state-run news agency which already made it appear that President Erdogan would automatically win the second round of the election and exaggerated his lead against Kilcdaroglu.

Refugees

Kilicdaroglu in a last-minute appeal to voters has pledged to deport all refugees from Turkey. He pointed out that President Erdogan has allowed millions to remain in Turkey and went as far to say that Erdogan is selling Turkish citizenship. Worldwide, Turkey currently has the highest number of refugees with currently over 4 million refugees staying within the nation primarily from Syria and other Arab nations. Turkey partially has a large number of refugees due to a deal that the nation signed with the European Union to stop the flow of refugees to EU member states.

Traditionalist Values

President Erdogan has changed the nation from a secular society to one where Islam heavily influences it once again. President Erdogan also stated that no Muslim family should use family planning or birth control to limit the number of children they have. Angering Christians, Hagia Sophia which was originally constructed as a cathedral into a mosque. When Turkey was a secular nation Hagia Sophia was a museum. In 2018, Erdogan also expanded religious education in public schools while removing Darwin’s theory of evolution from science classes. The European Court of Human Rights ruled twice that mandatory religion classes violates freedom of religion twice and Turkey’s Constitutional Court confirmed this ruling.

Consolidation Of Powers

President Erdogan was originally the Prime Minister of the nation. In 2014, he was unable to run for reelection due to the constitutional term limit. This led him to run for President. The office of the President in Turkey however was largely ceremonious, but President Erdogan has changed this over time.

In 2016, there was an attempted military coup that quickly failed. 150,000 public servants were fired and 50,000 people including Kurdish politicians, police officers, academics, lawyers, journalists, and soldiers were detained. President Erdogan however seized the opportunity to consolidate his power. In 2017, he successfully got a constitutional referendum passed by voters which gave him presidential powers such as declaring a state of emergency, intervening in the nation’s legal system, and appointing top public officials.

This election is Turkey’s opportunity to choose a new leader or reelect President Erdogan. President Erdogan is closer to winning the election, yet anything can happen in the end depending on various factors such as voter turn out and whether opinion shifts on either of the candidates significantly. No candidate is perfect as both Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu demonstrate, but electing Kilicdaroglu may stop the concentration of power in the office of the Presidency as Erdogan has done during his first two terms with no signs of stopping. Turkey may also get its economy back on track and raise interest rates in order to cut down on inflation. If Erdogan wins and continues to keep interest rates low, Turkey’s economy will continue to decline.