President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s election victory means more power politics and more bluster.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan supporters poured onto the streets of Ankara after the election result was confirmed on Sunday evening.
At least tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of supporters flowed by families towards the thousand-room presidential palace built by Erdoğan. Jubilant children waved Turkish flags and the AK party’s whimsical light bulb logo.
Erdoğan has a huge number of very passionate supporters. It was almost impossible for a foreign reporter to comment on the victory parade. It is allowed in the party hype, but it was not unclear that the support is driven by a strong feeling. People love Erdoğan’s nationalist spectacle.
So that’s what they get.
Rationale They would be hard pressed to support Erdoğan now. The stubborn zero interest rate policy has caused inflation to jump to around 45 percent. In big cities, people have great difficulty getting their rent paid.
I met a retired man in Ankara whose rent exceeds the pension of about 450 euros. The only thing that helped the man was to return to work at the call center of the taxi station – and the representative of the opposition Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as a voter.
The opposition also had its support in the elections. Even though the defeat was a bitter disappointment, the 45 percent vote share was a surprisingly strong performance in a completely unfair electoral system. Erdoğan roared for months on dozens of TV channels, Kılıçdaroğlu managed to be heard on one.
Media control partly explains why even the devastating earthquake in February did not collapse Erdoğan’s support. Nobody can prevent earthquakes, but you can prepare for them well or badly. The disaster gave Erdoğan yet another opportunity to blame others for his own mistakes.
Erdoğan boasted in his victory speech that the result is a victory for all 85 million inhabitants of Turkey. In fact, he treats everyone who is not on his side as his enemy.
Erdoğan has not missed any opportunity to tighten the screw. The protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park – which by the way started ten years ago on May 28, 2013 – and the 2016 military coup made dissent in Turkey even more difficult.
Now Erdoğan has an empty playing field in front of him. He already announced his intention to rule until his death. That could mean removing presidential term limits. The 69-year-old Erdoğan does not seem to be the epitome of health and falls asleep during his public appearances. Still, he could easily rule for the next decade.
It means stronger division of Turkey, more power politics and more nationalist bluster.
And more sowing of banknotes. On election day, Erdoğan distributed small change at his polling station. Erdoğan is promoting the construction of the aircraft carrier he promised, and the plan, which is considered crazy, is to dig a canal through Istanbul. Signs of an even worse economic collapse are in the air.
How about Sweden’s NATO membership? Now Erdoğan is in a safe position and may do as has long been suggested. It may be that at the NATO summit in Vilnius in July, he will put on a spectacular show and prove himself to be the great leader with the great powers around his finger that his supporters love so much.
But how do you ever know these things. Even among liberal voters, Erdoğan’s message has been well received: Sweden protects terrorists. Sweden’s pain may also continue.
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