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NY Times, April 1, 2019
Erdogan, Turkey’s Leader, Staring at Major Electoral Defeat
By Carlotta Gall
ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confronted the prospect of a
stunning political defeat on Monday, as local voting in Turkey showed
his party had lost the capital, Ankara, and possibly Istanbul, its
largest city and his key base of support for many years.
The results of the municipal balloting on Sunday from around the country
was a telling barometer of Mr. Erdogan’s weakened standing with voters,
as Turkey’s economy has fallen into a recession and he has assumed
sweeping new executive powers.
Mr. Erdogan was not conceding defeat on the results in Istanbul, which
were still unofficial. But the head of the High Election Council said
the opposition mayoral candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, was leading the
Istanbul race by 27,806 votes, with only 24,000 remaining ballots to be
counted.
“The mathematics of the issue is over,” Mr. Imamoglu told a news
conference, asserting there was no way that the candidate of Mr.
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, former Prime Minister Binali
Yildirim, could catch up.
If the Istanbul results are confirmed, the Justice and Development Party
is likely to appeal to the High Election Council.
Mr. Erdogan claimed victory over all in the elections, pointing to
results that showed his party 15 points ahead of the opposition
Republican People’s Party in districts nationwide.
But for the first time in his political career, Mr. Erdogan was tasting
defeat not only in mayoral races in the center of Turkish political
power, Ankara, but his hometown, Istanbul, the country’s business center.
“Please do not be heartbroken with this result,” he told supporters in
an address Sunday evening. “We will see how they are going to administer.”
Rusen Cakir, a veteran commentator, said on Twitter that the turnaround
was as historic as Mr. Erdogan’s arrival on the political stage, when,
as an Islamist and former political prisoner, he first won the mayorship
of Istanbul.
“The election today is as historic as the local election in 1994,” Mr.
Cakir said. “It’s the announcement of a page that was opened 25 years
ago and is now being closed.”
If Mr. Erdogan’s candidate loses the Istanbul race, it would be a severe
blow to his party, which after 17 years in power has been showing a
decline in popularity.
“While losing Istanbul would be a nuclear defeat for Erdogan,” said
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “losing Ankara, which is
shorthand for political power and government, is a pretty significant loss.”
In a sign of how seriously he regarded these elections, Mr. Erdogan held
up to eight campaign rallies a day across the country, taking center
stage in the municipalities as he portrayed the vote as a matter of
“national survival” and a chance to cement his administration “in
perpetuity.”
The declining economy was at the forefront of voters’ concerns. After
years of impressive growth, Turkey entered a recession in March.
Unemployment is over 10 percent, and up to 30 percent among young
people. The Turkish lira lost 28 percent of its value in 2018 and
continues to fall, and inflation has reached 20 percent in recent months.
Investment analysts reported that Turkey was depleting its international
reserves to bolster the lira in the run-up to the election. Finance
Minister Berat Albayrak promised to announce a package of new financial
measures after the election, but investment confidence remains weak.
“The campaign showed Erdogan’s desperation to win,” said Asli
Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign
Relations. “He is vulnerable because of his declining votes.”
While Mr. Erdogan remains by far the most popular politician in the
country, his party failed to secure a majority in parliamentary
elections in June and was forced into an alliance with the Nationalist
Movement Party. A referendum in 2017 that gave him sweeping new
authority over the legislature and the judiciary was approved by just a
narrow majority of Turks.
Even pro-government newspaper columnists warned that corruption and
cronyism in the municipalities were turning voters away from the ruling
party. Opinion polls showed that a larger percentage of voters than
usual remained undecided right up to the election, which officials of
his party took as a sign of unhappiness among the electorate.
Opposition candidates offered change and promised to create jobs,
improve education and bolster social services. And some were blistering
in their criticism of Mr. Erdogan.
A former deputy prime minister to Mr. Erdogan, Abdullatif Sener, said
that while the economy was tanking, Mr. Erdogan was building not only a
second but also a third presidential palace, and spending millions to
fly around on his presidential plane.
Municipal elections usually draw little notice outside Turkey. But the
local votes for mayors, municipal councils and neighborhood
administrators was seen as critical to Mr. Erdogan’s grip on power.
The municipalities represent the core of his working-class, conservative
power base and a source of income for his party, said Aykan Erdemir, a
former member of Parliament and a senior fellow at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, a research institute in Washington.
Mr. Erdogan began his career as the mayor of Istanbul, and built his
popularity on providing local services like garbage collection and mass
transport.
The president intervened personally in the race for mayor of Istanbul,
pushing his longtime ally Mr. Yildirim to run when the race promised to
be close. He picked another former minister to run for mayor of Ankara,
the capital.
Mr. Erdogan also adopted a more negative tone on the campaign trail than
in previous elections. He threatened lawsuits, accused the opposition of
criminality or terrorism, and whipped up nationalist anger at rallies.
Conjuring up a clash of civilizations, he even played edited segments of
a video of the mass shooting at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
On the economy, Mr. Erdogan told supporters that the municipalities had
nothing to do with the downturn, and that he as president would handle
economic matters. In the weeks before the vote, the government set up
municipal stalls to sell cheap vegetables to combat rising prices.
Most political analysts had predicted that however dissatisfied they
were, supporters of his party, known as AKP, were unlikely to make the
leap to vote for the opposition alliance. But some voters in the
AKP-held district of Uskudar in Istanbul said they were switching.
“We had enough,” a middle-aged voter, Mustafa Topal, said after voting.
“We had enough of this robbery. The system of ransacking led to my change.”
Younger people across the political spectrum have also voiced
dissatisfaction, chafing at the lack of media freedom and the dearth of
job prospects, said Ms. Aydintasbas, the European Council fellow.
“I think this is a growing trend that you cannot suppress,” she said.
“There is a second generation of young urban kids who are not behaving
like the AKP. They have yearnings not unlike those of the kids on the
other side of the tracks.”
“They feel it is odd,” she added, “to have Erdogan’s picture all over
town like a Central Asian republic, and every time you turn on the TV he
is on.”
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