During his victory speeches on Sunday night, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan celebrated re-election as Turkey’s president with a call for national unity. “We are not the only ones who have won, Turkey has won … our democracy has won,” he told supporters, while at the same time doubling down on the type of inflammatory rhetoric he deployed against LGBTQ+ people throughout his campaign.
As Mr Erdoğan embarks on a record third decade in power with a conservative and nationalist mandate – and with increasingly authoritarian powers to enforce it – millions of other Turkish residents also have good grounds to disbelieve his sunny rhetoric. In an increasingly militarised “anti-terror” environment, political repression and harassment of the country’s sizeable Kurdish population are set to continue. The president’s campaign was loaded with barbs and misinformation about the mainly Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party, which backed Mr Erdoğan’s defeated rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
Women’s rights groups – already battling the consequences of a 2021 decision to withdraw from an international convention to combat gender discrimination and violence – will have noted with dismay the rising Islamist influence in the president’s parliamentary majority. Syrian refugees, shamefully scapegoated in the lead-up to Sunday’s vote, will wonder when Mr Erdoğan plans to carry out his promise to deport one million of them to a deeply uncertain future across the border. All will now fear for the future in a country where constitutional changes pushed for by the president have worn away checks and balances, and potentially begun an era of one-man rule.
In a deeply polarised country, Mr Erdoğan calculated that such constituencies and their concerns could be outvoted by an identity-based coalition – one comprising his socially conservative heartland voters, Islamists and more secular nationalist forces. The acuity of that approach was confirmed by a victory achieved despite inflation running at close to 50%, and widespread criticism of the state’s sluggish response to devastating earthquakes in February.
For the opposition parties that united to back Mr Kılıçdaroğlu, guarded optimism before the first round has thus turned to crushing disappointment. As the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has noted, Mr Erdoğan won in elections that were free but not fair; the president controls the vast majority of Turkish media, while political opponents have been harried and, in some cases, jailed. But amid encouraging earlier polls, Mr Erdoğan’s critics at home and abroad dared to hope that, having assumed quasi-monarchical powers, he would pay the political price for presiding over the current crises. Instead, the president’s loyalist base judged that he was the strongman required to sort them out.
For the west, the main takeaway from Mr Erdoğan’s victory is that leaders must continue to deal – in the most geopolitically fraught of circumstances – with an unpredictable Nato member that refuses to fully align itself with the west. As the Turkish lira sinks to a new record low following Mr Erdoğan’s re-election, the need to alleviate the deepening economic crisis may create new opportunities for negotiation and rapprochement. Domestically, for those who hoped this election could bring to an end the authoritarian drift of Mr Erdoğan’s second decade, the picture is unremittingly bleak. Pace the president, Turkish democracy was the big loser on Sunday night.
