By charisma, control over state institutions and divisive remarks, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has managed to hang on despite the headwinds. Almost re-elected in the first round of the presidential election on Sunday (with 49.50% of the vote) against the social democrat Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu (45%), he belies the polls which we knew however that we should not trust too much . Once again operates, to a good extent, the “emotional populism” conceptualized by the sociologist Eva Illouz, this spring of political mobilization which lubricates at the same time as it jams the cogs of democracy almost everywhere in the world – including in our own backyard. With this leverage, “Tayyip” will obviously not stop, by the second round of May 28, throwing oil on the fire by hitting, against a “KK” without much political brilliance, on the nails of national pride and anti-Western resentment.
There were obviously headwinds and there still are: financial and economic crisis, inflation in the 50% range, disastrous management of the earthquake last February which killed 45,000 people in the east of the country. All this against a backdrop of the wear and tear of power and growing social resistance to a president whose petticoat of authoritarianism is protruding more and more. The ascendancy of Erdoğan, who has reigned over the country for twenty years, certainly felt it on Sunday, as evidenced by the fact that the results of the ballot boxes forced him today, an unprecedented situation, to present himself to a second turn. However, this champion of Islamoconservatism has not been dethroned, for multiple reasons.
Because his Justice and Development Party (AKP), having slowly but surely integrated the state to the point of cannibalizing it, has created extremely effective patronage networks, based in particular on a whole series of aid measures social.
Because freedom of the press and of expression is kept on a leash: nearly 90% of television channels belong to people close to the Head of State, while a number of journalists and intellectuals deemed too critical have been imprisoned and that laws restrict the right to speak on social networks. Which forces, from this point of view, to find it almost surprising that Mr. Kiliçdaroğlu, old Kemalist leader of the old Republican People’s Party (CHP, secular), obtained such a good score.
Also because, as there is no more classic way to reign than by dividing, Erdoğan certainly did not fail to make a big deal out of KK’s support for the Kurdish cause and his membership of the Alevi religious minority. , long denigrated. For a number of conservative Muslims, prejudice weighed in the balance.
If therefore, in this intervening period, the strong man finds himself for the first time besieged by a coalition of secular opposition parties which has managed to get its head above water, the fact remains close to getting a third presidential term. Especially since we can assume that the votes of the ultranationalist outsider Sinan Oğan, who obtained 5% of the votes in the first round, will be at least partially postponed on his candidacy.
That Erdoğan loses on May 28 and one could wonder, anyway, how would the heterogeneous coalition led by the CHP – a party which is not without a heavy historical record of authoritarian collusion with the army – manage to hold the road once in power, in terms of fulfilling its promises of democratic restoration and calming of relations with the European Union and the United States.
That he loses and that would not change the fact that the coalition formed by the AKP and its main ally, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP, extreme right), easily renewed their majority in Parliament, against a background of strong voter turnout (89%) in this dual presidential and legislative ballot. The polls were all wrong, to the point that Erdoğan and his coalition even won in the south-east of the country affected by the February earthquakes, including in the largely destroyed region of Kahramanmaraş, despite the obvious failures of relief governmental.
In doing so, it is analyzed, Sunday’s elections have reconfirmed the worrying alliance built around Erdoğan between Islamists and Turkish ultranationalists, these forces “which together hold the state institutions”, writes the Turkish journalist Yavuz Baydar, for whom the opposition lives in the illusion of a real alternation of power. If the Head of State seems for the moment to be heading for his re-election in “respect for the ballot boxes”, we do not forget that he is perfectly capable, if his cause requires it, of electoral manipulation. As a “sultan” who cultivates the neo-Ottoman image of a triumphant Turkey, a little like Putin dreams of recreating the Russian Empire, Erdoğan has built a fortress whose level of impregnability can be measured with these polls.