A “complete disaster”! It is without taking tweezers that the Turkish director Emin Alper commented a few days ago on the prospect of a re-election of the autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the presidential election of 2023. The Turks are called to the polls next May 14 .
“For culture, for education, for the free press”, it would be a disaster, summed up the creator, on the sidelines of the European release of his film. Burning Days, presented in the Un certain regard section of the last Cannes Film Festival. The work recounts the corruption and authoritarianism that have become commonplace in a Turkey under Erdogan’s yoke for 20 years.
A time that could be sent back in time by an election perceived by many in this transcontinental country, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, as the last chance election for the faltering Turkish democracy.
“Last chance for Turkey, but not only! For his whole region and for the rest of the world too, says Kemal Kirişci, a specialist in Turkish politics and a researcher at the Brookings Institution, at the other end of the videoconference, joined by The duty in Washington. If the opposition loses, it is the possibility of democratic reconstruction in Turkey that we will also lose. »
He adds: “Even if in his program, Recep Tayyip Erdogan shows signs of change, it is difficult to believe him. He has been turned for too long towards the world of autocrats who do everything to stay in power. »
Even if in his program, Recep Tayyip Erdogan shows signs of change, it is difficult to believe him
The game is far from a foregone conclusion for Erdogan and his People’s Alliance coalition. For the first time since 2014, they are facing a more structured opposition that is more determined to show them the door, despite an electoral law adopted in April 2022 which strengthens the hold of the autocrat on the institutions of the country and promotes his re-election.
Since the start of the race, five of the six major probes suggest a possible victory for Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of a coalition of six opposition parties, by an average lead of 3.6 percentage points over the current president. A fragile mathematics, which has been reduced since last March, of course, but to which many now cling with hope.
“A large part of the population has been persecuted by the Justice and Development Party regime [l’AKP d’Erdogan, parti islamo-conservateur], summarizes in an interview the Turkish poet, writer and teacher of literature Fahri Öz, who currently lives in Iowa in the United States. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu made a lot of big promises, among others on the reinstatement of officials who were sacked for their political position”. Mr. Öz is one of them. In 2017, he lost his professorship at Ankara University after signing the Scholars’ Declaration for Peace. “Kılıçdaroğlu offers a prospect of freedom that people have been waiting for a long time, and above all, eagerly. »
A unifier
At the age of 74, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, economist and former senior civil servant, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), a center-left party, has achieved a tour de force in the current Turkish political climate by uniting an astonishing political diversity around his candidacy. opposed to the current president. The “Table of Six”, as it is called, brings together the Good Party (İYİ) of Meral Akşener – figurehead and ally of the nationalist right -, the Europhiles of the Party of the Future (GP) and the Democratic Party ( DP), as well as the Islamist nationalists of the Party of Happiness (SP) and the pro-Kurdish formation of the Party of Democracy and Progress (DEVA).
The aspiring president can also count on the presence at his side of Ekrem İmamoğlu, a pet peeve of the regime in place, a politician in his fifties with barely veiled presidential ambitions, a member of the CHP too, and who, in 2019, took over the mayor of Istanbul from the hands of Erdogan’s political party. A stunt that İmamoğlu now dreams of reproducing within the coalition led by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on May 14, hoping to win more than 50% of the votes for a frank and clear victory in the first round. Otherwise, a second ballot must be played on May 28.
“This is the first time in 20 years that Erdogan is really faced with the possibility of losing the elections, summarizes in an interview Yaprak Gürsoy, professor of contemporary Turkish studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, joined in the United Kingdom . This situation is the result of a gradual change within the population, which has been amplified with the economic crisis induced by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. A discontent also carried by the youth, dissatisfied with the power in place, to whom Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu seeks to speak directly, simply and without artifice. First through a campaign showing him smiling under an appropriate slogan, “Hello, I’m Kemal, I’m coming!” “, and also in videos sometimes shot in the modest comfort of his kitchen. One of them, on the power of women, has so far garnered more than 10.5 million views.
“Erdogan’s failed economic policies and the perception of widespread mismanagement within the ruling party work in Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s favor,” said William Hale, Turkey scholar at the University of London. But he also presents himself very well, as a sincere man who knows how to address broad layers of society, and who holds the bar of a traditional party, very well organized, especially in the main big cities of the country. »
“His main strength is his unblemished past in bureaucracy and politics,” says Fahri Öz. He has a clean record on corruption. And this is what attracts in the current context where the economic collapse of the last few months, coupled with the earthquake [qui a frappé dramatiquement le sud du pays en février dernier], showed how ineffective government has become. »
The specter of a tragedy
“This earthquake brutally revealed how the country’s institutions also collapsed,” adds Kemal Kirişci. With the public security agencies, the thing was obvious. Erdogan has placed loyal people there, as elsewhere in the government apparatus. But loyal does not necessarily mean competent. »
Ironically, the autocrat gave fuel to his campaign in 2003 by attacking the flaws in the system which he said had led to the tragedy of the Izmit earthquake and its 17,000 deaths in the northwest of the country, in 1999. Twenty years later, he risks being overtaken by the ghosts of the 50,000 Turkish citizens carried away by the recent earthquake. Constructions without foundations and beyond seismic standards were built under his administration on the Levant and East Anatolian faults, in the south of the country, at the crossroads of the last Turkish natural disaster.
During a political rally in Ankara a few days ago, Erdogan was not afraid to face this reality by promising his supporters a “strong Turkey” in which he will erase the traces of the earthquake of February, “God willing,” he said, while calling for Turkey to be rid of “the putschists and the imperialists” who, according to him, would seek to bring it down. The president also promised to bring inflation down to below 10.5%, in a country where prices were still rising 50% at the last measurement, after a record high of 85% last October. . Figures that are blowing anger and a wind conducive to a change of course, a “new era” in Turkey, now hopes the opposition.
“Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu wants to revive a parliamentary system where state institutions will be strengthened”, and this, “to put an end to the domination of the presidency, and therefore of a single individual in all areas, including national and international,” says Yaprak Gürsoy.
“The stakes are high, but it won’t be easy, adds Fahri Öz, because in order to hope to end the one man show in our country, Kılıçdaroğlu had to make many concessions, negotiate with parties which, once in power, could complicate his policies. We see the horizon it offers us, with more freedom of expression, speech and academic autonomy, but, beyond that, there are still many questions. Questions, however, preferable to very dark certainties, according to him, coming with another mandate for Erdogan.