The eyes of the world were on Turkey this past weekend as the country headed to the polls for a rare runoff election. The two presidential candidates campaigned on dramatically different visions of the country. The candidate who emerged victorious was Turkey’s leader for the last 20 years: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, known for his extensive presidential power and his Islamist-rooted party positions. His opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, had promised big changes, like restoring Turkey’s democracy and improving human rights. Despite allegations of corruption and a botched response to the devastating earthquakes a few months ago, voters decided President Erdoğan will rule the country for another five years.
Metehan Tekinirk, a lecturer at Boston University and Turkish politics expert, joined All Things Considered host Arun Rath to recap the election and explain what it means on a global scale. This transcript has been lightly edited.
Arun Rath: I think a lot of people were expecting that the widely criticized response to the earthquakes could cost the election for Erdoğan, but it didn’t. Why is that?
Metehan Tekinirk: Indeed, there was a lot of hope on the part of the opposition going into the electoral cycle. We could name a number of factors that don’t necessarily have to do anything with opposition and some factors that have to do with the agency, strategies and organizational aspects of the opposition.
First of all, the most obvious and important factor that can help us explain Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s victory at the polls is that the electoral scene in Turkey has been tilted towards the incumbent and, of course, against the opposition. This is something that is pretty common to what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” that is, hybrid regimes where the incumbents have built-in advantages.
To exemplify, we could talk about President Erdoğan having unrestricted access to state resources and state-regulated channels of communication. On the other side, on the part of the opposition, of course, that was not the case. For example, the telecommunications agency in Turkey restricted the opposition candidate from even sending text messages to citizens.
The biggest factor — the elephant in the room — is that the incumbent party, having been in power for 20 years, has enjoyed tremendous built-in advantages with all sorts of state-regulated instruments and public funds available to finance Erdoğan’s campaign, so that’s the most obvious and biggest factor.
Rath: Given all the advantages that have controlled the levels of power and basically control the media, is it noteworthy that the opposition did as well as it did and that the election was in any way close?
Tekinirk: Yes, that’s a good question. It is certainly noteworthy. We should not downplay the attainments of the opposition. Of course, because of the economic despair in Turkey right now, the botched response to the earthquake and the migration crisis, there were greater expectations for the opposition to perform better. But again, in terms of putting up a good fight, they certainly were able to do so.
Rath: Do we have a sense of what Erdoğan’s victory will mean for relations with the West? There have been some tensions with the U.S. and Turkey’s role in NATO, especially with the war in Ukraine, is particularly important right now.
Tekinirk: Right. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a very pragmatic leader who has embraced a more transactional style in foreign politics in the past decade ago, so it would be foolish to assume that simply because his party won again, Turkey would sever its relations with the West completely. But a number of facts remain.
For example, we do know that the Russian state and Vladimir Putin invested very heavily in a potential Erdogan victory; they explicitly came out in support of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The same thing could be said about a number of other countries, such as Azerbaijan. Of course, we do know that the Erdoğan administration has fostered growing ties with the state of Qatar. Certain deals, especially financial deals, were made with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. So Turkey is certainly more open to cooperation with those states.
But we would be foolish to expect a complete anti-Western, anti-NATO or anti-American stance. Turkey will most likely keep playing the role of a somewhat balanced relationship between the West and other countries.
One thing is clear: We do know that the regime in Russia is perfectly content with the electoral outcome, so that’s going to be a hot issue, especially as far as NATO membership for Sweden is concerned.
Rath: We have a large Turkish American community in the greater Boston area. Do you have a sense of how much the political divisions in Turkey are at play in the ex-pat community here? How do people tend to fall in terms of their politics about their home country?
Tekinirk: The foreign vote was certainly interesting to observe. The vote in European countries and cities was heavily in favor of Mr. Erdoğan, and that’s been a longstanding trend. Looking at the United States in comparison, we saw that Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu actually dominated almost all of the polling stations in the United States. For example, if I’m not mistaken, the tally from the Boston consulate was something like 83%, so a very clear dominating lead for Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
Part of that could be explained by the immigration patterns out of Turkey and into Europe versus out of Turkey and into the United States or, say, the U.K., Canada or Australia. That is not necessarily surprising; those who know Turkish politics and those immigration trends certainly expected the outcome to look exactly like this. That is, a very dominant position for Mr. Erdoğan in Europe and a very dominant performance for the opposition in the United States.
Ex-pats living in the United States are very much invested and emotionally invested in what happens in their home country, of course, so I do not expect their attention to be any less, given the result of the election.
