Istanbul - © 4.murat/Shutterstock
Despite some early signs of moderation, after winning his third presidential term in contested elections, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has remained committed to his traditional repressive policies
We will soon be one month into Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s third term as Turkey's president. His victory and subsequent decisions have been interpreted in various ways, including by those who argue that his picks for cabinet reveal signs of moderation. However, hopes in this direction seem premature. Whether the issue is Turkey's relationship with Europe, its unorthodox handling of the economy, or repression of dissent, Erdoğan’s promised “new Turkey” looks much like the country his Justice and Development Party (AKP) has ruled for the last 21 years.
A tight election
After falling below the 50% threshold needed to win in the first round of voting in the presidential election, Erdoğan won the run-off on May 28 with 52.18%. In the parliamentary election held at the same time, the AKP coalition retained its majority. Erdoğan was promptly congratulated by international political leaders and officials like US President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who said she “look[ed] forward to continue building the EU-Turkey relationship”.
This victory came as a shock for the 47.82% of voters who voted for the opposition candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the People’s Republican Party (CHP). The latter had managed to bring together conservative, nationalist, and even an Islamist party into a coalition known as the Table of Six. In addition, the Green Left Party, which has a strong base with Kurds and social democrats across Turkey and in the country’s southeast, decided not to field its own presidential candidate. A wide range of allies had thus come together with a single goal: defeating Erdoğan so that the country would have a chance at change. Thanks to a growing economic crisis and the government’s widely criticised mishandling of the massive February earthquakes, many felt that Turkey might finally vote for a new direction.
Is Turkey still a democracy?
There are many reasons why the plan to open a new chapter in Turkey's history failed. First, there was no even playing field between Erdoğan and his opponent. While Erdoğan and his party used state resources, including Turkey’s national broadcasting station TRT, to run their campaign, the opposition was left with a few beleaguered opposition channels and social media. For example, in the month of April alone, Erdoğan was given 32 hours of airtime while Kılıçdaroğlu was only allotted 32 minutes.
The official report given by the observation mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) notes that “the incumbent president and the ruling parties enjoyed an unjustified advantage, including through biased media coverage”.
In addition to this unequal playing field and widely reported irregularities and intimidation , Erdoğan and his allies ran a highly polarising campaign, with some popular opposition leaders in jail or facing long jail sentences. They repeatedly painted the rest of the opposition as terrorists. According to an opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post, this kind of electoral environment is something new in the history of democracy. “Are such elections free? Technically, yes — but they are also profoundly unfair,” he argued .
Any hopes for change should have been dashed by the targeting of journalists immediately after the election. Turkey's Radio and Television High Council fined several broadcasters for comments made during their election coverage. The opposition channel TELE1 was fined for a programme covering ballot irregularities while FOX TV’s popular journalist Çiğdem Toker faces a legal battle for saying on-air that “democracy does not solely consist of the ballot box”.
Hopes for moderation dampened
After Erdoğan’s win, he went about forming his new government. In his first cabinet speech, he seemed to offer an olive branch to disappointed opposition voters: “All of Turkey has won with us and our coalition. Every one of the 85 million [citizens] has won, no matter their political preference”.
Some choices of cabinet members also seemed at first glance to signal a softening. The belligerent Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu was sacked. However, when successor Ali Yerlikaya served as Istanbul Governor he was responsible for banning the annual March 8 International Women’s Day March in Taksim. Former head of Turkey's intelligence agency MIT, US-educated Hakan Fidan was named as Foreign Minister. However respected he might be in international security circles, journalists abroad were targeted and spied during his time as intelligence agency chief.
A similar pessimism has set in regarding Turkey's relationship with Europe, as foreign policy under Fidan so far seems to be the same as ever. On July 12, officials from Turkey, Sweden, Finland, and NATO will meet in Lithuania to discuss Sweden’s accession bid, but Fidan repeated Turkey's talking points about Sweden a haven for “terrorists” . Stockholm’s moves to address Turkey's security concerns regarding the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) while still remaining in compliance with local and EU law remain insufficient for Turkey to lift its objections to Sweden’s accession.
Most important at a time when Turkey's economy seems to be heading toward an even greater crisis was Erdoğan’s choice of Finance Minister. The post was given to Mehmet Şimşek, a man respected by financial markets when he served from 2009 until being sacked by Erdoğan in 2018. Şimşek’s return seemed to signal that Erdoğan would allow Turkey to return to more orthodox measures and abandon the policy of slashing interest rates despite runaway inflation. In addition, Hafize Gaye Erkan was appointed as Central Bank Governor, a former executive at the First Republic Bank and Goldman Sachs in the US and the first woman to hold the post in Turkey.
However, soon after these appointments seemingly designed to soothe markets, Erdoğan made it all too clear that his own view on economics remained unchanged, even as the Turkish lira has lost 80% of its value against dollar in the last five years and the cost of living is spiralling. Speaking on June 14, he insisted that inflation in Turkey would fall to single digits while also insisting he is against raising interest rates : “Some of our friends should not be mistaken by thinking things like ‘The president is heading towards a serious change in terms of interest rates’”. It is unclear how much autonomy the new Finance Minister and Central Bank governor will have when Erdoğan has previously sacked economic officials whose views depart from his own.
Markets seem to be unconvinced by these steps to signal a return to economic common sense. Since the election, Turkey's foreign currency reserves have reached net-negative levels while the Turkish lira continued to depreciate for two weeks straight. With critical local elections on the horizon, including the mayorships of Istanbul and Ankara which are currently in the opposition's hands, it is unclear whether the president would risk returning to rational ground, which would be a bitter medicine that could initially cause economic stagnation and even worse inflation.
Repression continues apace
There are also signs that the repression of civil society, human rights activists, and opposition figures will continue and perhaps even worsen. On the eve of the election, Erdoğan gave a speech in which he vowed never to let popular Kurdish politician and former Peoples’ Democratic Party co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş out of jail. The crowd listening to the president responded with shouts of “Death to Selo”, calling for the politician to be executed. This came as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) again ruled that the rights of Demirtaş and other HDP politicians had been violated.
Meanwhile, many high-profile human rights activists remain in jail. One of them is lawyer Can Atalay, who was elected as an MP from the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP). He is one of eight people who were imprisoned in the 2013 Gezi Park protests case and convicted of orchestrating the popular protests. However, Atalay is now legally an MP. According to Article 83 of the Turkish constitution, MPs cannot be arrested or detained without Parliament voting on the issue. Despite TİP rallies across the country calling for his release, Atalay remains in prison.
Erdoğan and the AKP coalition also made anti-LGBT+ rhetoric a key part of their election strategy. In his first speech after his inauguration , Erdoğan vowed to make a constitutional amendment to “protect the family” from “perverts”. Key figures in the AKP coalition partner Yeniden Refah Partisi (YRP) said they would work to shut down LGBT+ civil society initiatives and NGOs. Turkey now has its most right-wing parliament in its century-long history, with extremist Islamist parties like YRP and Hüda-Par, a party with links to Turkey's Hizbullah terrorist organisation, in parliament as AKP allies. Both parties are strongly opposed to gender equality in law. They have also targeted laws aimed at preventing violence against women and taken issue with current laws on alimony, the legal age limit for marriage, divorce rights, and other topics.
This strongly misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric continues to have concrete ramifications, especially as the LGBT+ community in Turkey gears up to celebrate its annual Pride Month. For example, on June 7 a cinema collective had a film screening about miners and gay people in Great Britain cancelled by local governors in Istanbul. When the group went ahead with the film screening anyway, police surrounded the building and took both organisers and audience members into custody .
