Turkey’s Erdogan is down, but don't count him out

Eventually, perhaps. This marks the beginning of a fight by opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, not its triumph. As the president put it in his speech accepting defeat: “We will stand tall, we will stand upright. March 31 is not the end for us, it is actually a turning point.”

By Marc Champion

This weekend’s election results in Turkey were astonishing, celebrated by hundreds of thousands of Turks as a victory for secularism, and by Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu as a revival of liberal democracy that offers hope not just to his country, but across the world.

Eventually, perhaps. This marks the beginning of a fight by opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, not its triumph.

Let’s start with the reasons for hope, because for anyone who has believed in the extraordinary promise of a democratic and open Turkey, the last decade has been unremittingly dark. What this weekend’s municipal elections have proved is that even for the most successful populist leaders, the power of identity politics can be insufficient if they destroy the economy.

The mismanagement was especially clear in Erdogan’s case, because he wore his personal responsibility for disastrous monetary policies as a badge of honor. His belief — against all advice and evidence — that cutting interest rates would reduce, rather than increase, inflation proved catastrophic.

Meanwhile, Imamoglu’s Republican People’s Party polled better than even its leaders expected. Known as the CHP, the party of Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk amassed more votes nationwide than the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, for the first time since Erdogan took power more than 20 years ago. The CHP also secured control over many more towns and cities. Even Turkey’s president seemed humbled by the rout.

The CHP achieved this despite abandoning efforts to field joint candidates with other opposition parties. The elections were only municipal, but in Turkey — where power is by now hyper-concentrated in the hands of the president — cities offer vital resources and patronage for any attempt to regain political power. And for the first time in a generation, the opposition now has in Imamoglu a credible challenger for the presidency.

Yet none of this brings the Erdogan era to an end. Nor does it mark the arrival of a healthy, secular democracy for Turkey. Not by some distance.

First, like municipal elections everywhere, those in Turkey are not always reliable indicators of how people would vote for a central executive. Second, there are no national elections scheduled until 2028, giving Erdogan time to recover from his mistake on the economy. Indeed, he secured re-election only last year by continuing to pump enough money into the system to soften the impact of runaway inflation. Turks have been paying the full price of this ideologically driven folly only since he secured another term, when he switched to a more orthodox monetary and fiscal policy team.

In other words, Erdogan knew that some kind of political reckoning was coming and he planned for it. Foreign investors have begun to return, and Erdogan can — as he has said — expect for the harsh medicine of fiscal tightening to bear results and enable a rebound well before the next elections. It isn’t impossible that he might be forced to call an early vote, but it’s hard now to foresee how that might happen. As the president put it in his speech accepting defeat: “We will stand tall, we will stand upright. March 31 is not the end for us, it is actually a turning point.”

Which way Erdogan now turns is critical and remains unclear. It looks as though he will hold fast to more responsible economic policies, but he will at the same time remain in control of most media and all critical institutions, giving him wide powers to shape events. He also will still have all the tools he needs to marginalize political rivals, should he decide to use them.

Selahattin Demirtas, co-leader of the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party or HDP, was jailed on trumped up charges in 2016, a year after leading his party into parliament with a bumper vote that cost the AKP its majority. He remains in prison despite renouncing politics and rulings from the European Court of Human Rights that found his detention politically motivated. Imamoglu himself has been accused of insulting members of Turkey’s election commission, a charge under which he could be prevented from serving as mayor of Istanbul.

All previous false dawns in Turkey, when Erdogan’s critics also thought he had finally made too big a mistake from which to recover, have been followed instead by him doubling down and re-slicing the electorate to his benefit. And while this time does feel different, it’s wise to recall the full meaning of the near-absolute power that he wields and just how much harder it is to establish independent institutions than to destroy them.

This weekend’s result could conceivably see Erdogan shift toward moderation, but that seems like wishful thinking. For one thing, the share of votes won by Turkey's large Kurdish minority was again large enough to secure an influential block of legislators hostile to the president in a parliamentary election, which may not bode well for their treatment. Erdogan may respond by targeting ethnic Kurds to court votes from Turkish nationalists.

Equally important is that while the CHP did win the most votes nationwide, at roughly 38% to 35.5% for the AKP, that margin was smaller than the likely defection of Islamist AKP voters to the New Welfare Party, which won just over 6% in its first outing. Erdogan may decide he has more chance of getting these hardline religious voters to back him or his successor in a future presidential runoff, than those who went to the CHP.

Erdogan has been a trailblazer for other populist strongmen who have bet on culture wars to bring them to power. His spectacular missteps on the economy should have cost him his position last year, but they didn’t, and he is probably safe for now. That means his political opponents, and Turkey’s democratic institutions, probably aren’t.