How Erdoğan wants to trick his re-election with nasty and questionable means

politics

The Turkish presidential elections are coming up in 2023. Incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is in serious trouble. How he wants to stay in power with shady means.

Nico Conzett / watson.ch

Turkey celebrates a significant anniversary in 2023. The 85 million republic turns 100 years old. In 1923, after years of war, the country emerged from the Ottoman Empire. Under the founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, significant reforms were implemented, secularization advanced and basic democratic structures based on the Western model created.

Not only since 2018, when a constitutional referendum initiated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came into force, which guaranteed the ruler more extensive executive rights, but the longer the democratic functionality of the Turkish state, the more question marks have been appearing. In 2023, in the anniversary year of all things, this functionality will be put to a decisive test.

Erdoğan’s political vulnerability

Erdoğan is politically ailing, record high inflation and a generally difficult economic situation for the majority people in the country have significantly reduced the popularity of the ruler, who has been in office since 2014, and his AKP party. According to polls, the AKP currently receives barely 30 percent approval among the Turkish people.

The chances of the opposition forces in the Bosphorus Republic actually taking power democratically are better than eversince Erdoğan has been leading the country – although the parties different camps could not agree on a common candidate half a year before the votes in June, which is the declared goal.

Erdoğan is well aware of the danger. And he chooses cunning but highly questionable moves in order to somehow tip the mood in the country to his side and thus stay in power. On the one hand there is his threat, troops and tanks after Syria to sendto expel Kurdish militias there – he has announced this before, incidents such as the terrorist attack in Istanbul in mid-November should give him leeway to justify himself.

Erdoğan has to stand for re-election in 2023, and the chances of the opposition forces are high.Image: AP / Burhan Ozbilici

The Turkish government’s official account of the background to the incident is by no means watertight. It seems unlikely that the attack was entirely staged, but experts like the US Middle East specialist Seth Frantzman suspect Erdoğan and his people at least invented a propaganda story to justify military action against the Kurds.

The motives for a ground offensive in northern Syria are diverse. On the one hand, it’s actually about security policy and strategic goals like that Turkey expert Hürcan Aslı Aksoy by the Science and Politics Foundation Berlin explained. Among other things, Erdoğan wants to create a 30-kilometer-deep buffer zone to keep the Kurdish militia away from Turkey.

Domestically, on the other hand, it should be about something completely different. Erdoğan would not be the first head of state to swear by a common enemy before elections in order to unite his own people and thus gain more support. Expert Aslı Aksoy firmly believes that the Turkish ruler will invade northern Syria before the elections: “In view of the domestic political calculations and the international situation, it is very likely that Erdoğan will order a ground offensive in northern Syria and escalate the conflict further.”

The same motive is probably behind the blatant threats against EU and NATO member Greece. In the dispute over gas drilling and the alleged military build-up on Greek islands, the 68-year-old boldly (in)directly threatened the neighboring country with military attacks.

In contrast to a ground intervention in Syria, it is highly unlikely that Turkey would actually allow itself to be carried away by military interventions against its unloved neighbor due to Greece’s EU and NATO membership – but perhaps simply by hyping up the common enemy, a rethink can be made some heads of the Turkish people, which could give Erdoğan a few percentage points in the elections.

But that’s not the end of the Turkish president’s bag of tricks. The mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, is considered to be possibly the most promising candidate to be put forward by the opposition six-party alliance as a common challenger in the elections. But Imamoğlu was – fittingly – sentenced to more than two years in prison in December. Reason: official insult. Along with the punishment, the centre-left politician was – how appropriately – banned from politics.

Ekrem Imamoğlu faces a prison sentence just before the presidential elections.Credit: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire

Due to appeals, the judgment is not yet final. However, it does not seem unlikely that the process could be completed before the elections. Erdoğan would have gotten his fiercest competitor out of the way elegantly – even if he himself officially had nothing to do with the verdict.

In mid-December, the 68-year-old had rejected such allegations and pointed out that the Turkish judicial system was independent. Viewed objectively, the government’s increased influence on the justice and only with difficulty negate a separation of powers that has only existed sparsely since the constitutional referendum in 2017.

Stress test in the anniversary year

Even if Erdoğan currently enjoys less approval among the Turkish people than ever before, with the appropriate clever tactical maneuvers he could certainly succeed in significantly increasing the popularity of his person.

If not, then 100 years after the founding of the republic – as mentioned at the beginning – the democratic functionality of the Turkish state is likely to be put to a decisive test.