Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has led Turkey for two decades, first as Prime Minister, then as President, and who has steered the country in an increasingly authoritarian direction, came out ahead, again, in last Sunday’s election, but not by enough to avoid a runoff. Erdoğan, despite trailing in polls, captured 49.5 per cent of the vote, and saw his Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) win a parliamentary majority; on May 28th, he will face Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the candidate representing a coalition of six opposition parties, who got just under forty-five per cent of Sunday’s vote. Even though the opposition—which includes a range of groups, from Turkish nationalists to the repressed Kurdish community—came closer to defeating Erdoğan than ever before, his ability to maintain a lead in the first round was remarkable, especially considering that he has presided over major economic troubles and a botched response to a catastrophic earthquake earlier this year. (A third candidate, the far-right politician Sinan Oğan, won five per cent of the vote; his support is expected to largely flow to Erdoğan.)
To talk about the results from this first round, I called Kaya Genç, a novelist and essayist from Istanbul. He is the author of the book “The Lion and the Nightingale,” about post-coup Turkey. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Erdoğan was able to win over voters affected by the earthquake, differing ideas of Turkish nationalism, and what the election results tell us about the state of Turkish society.
Why was Erdoğan able to exceed expectations in the first round, even if it’s the closest election he’s yet faced?
First of all, we have to talk about the control his regime has established over Turkish public life. We don’t just talk about his government. We don’t just talk about his party. We talk about his regime, which has control over the judiciary, over the military, and, crucially, over the media. If you were in Istanbul in the same room with me, and if we turned on the news, we would see pro-Erdoğan propaganda around the clock. That is the autocratic explanation for the votes. But then there is a historical explanation, which is a bit more complex.
It has to do with historical trauma. What did Erdoğan indicate to his voters? That he was their savior, that he was their falcon—and that he was getting old. All the pictures of him and the campaign were of an elderly man looking very melancholy through the eyes: “I’m an old sultan and I want your loyalty, because it is only I who can protect you from our enemies and who can continue the Ottoman tradition that we hold so dear.” But what was the trauma that brought so many of his supporters together?
Historically, it is the trauma of the C.H.P., the Republican People’s Party, whose leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, was defeated in the first round. According to Erdoğan and his followers, the C.H.P. caused them trauma, exactly a century ago, by establishing a republic and by stopping an Islamic way of life. We thought that the historical trauma that has always brought Erdoğan’s followers together would pale in this era of economic collapse because this is the worst period of Erdoğan’s decades-long reign both economically and politically.
After the February 6th earthquakes, we thought the whole façade of the strongman had collapsed. Now people would be able to see through him, that the sultan was not strong, that it’s all rhetoric. But, in a very unnerving outcome, of the ten provinces hit most by the earthquake, seven voted predominantly for Erdoğan. And this leaves us with a hard question: Why did people who were most violently influenced by the outcome of this lethal earthquake vote for the sultan?
Turkey is a country with very stark regional differences in culture, religion, and voting. So was it just where the earthquake hit, or does it go beyond that?
The earthquakes had the opposite effect of what we expected. Erdoğan went to the cities and promised to rebuild people’s houses. He said that the calamity was part of fate’s plan. He maybe said a few words of apology, but in an undertone. And then he said, essentially, “Life goes on. You survived. Sorry for your losses. Now we will build new houses for you in one year. We’ll give you credit. Of course, you’ll have to pay it back because there are no free lunches.”
Then Kılıçdaroğlu, the opposition candidate, went to the same cities, and said, “This is unacceptable. The government was responsible for this. There were no checks on the regulations for two decades. You have to fight for your rights, and we will build those houses for you for free. You won’t pay because this will be our responsibility.”
The reaction was that someone promising to give you something for free is lying. They are romantics. They’re not to be trusted. In this capitalist world of ours, nothing is free. So we will trust the man who wants to build the houses for us with our money. This response has shocked many leftists, like me, who were expecting a different public reaction.
And how do you understand it?
There is an unnerving confluence of religion and capitalism in Turkey. Maybe only literature can explain it to us. And it is a kind of strength in the face of adversity, but a form of strength that strikes us as irrational and difficult to decipher. So, in Turkey, in the seventies, there were strong leftist movements, strong Marxist movements, which captured the imagination of the working class. And those revolutionary movements were crushed by the military coup in 1980, after which a nationalist religious identity for Turkey emerged, imposed by the military. A kind of identity that took its inspiration from Republican America, a “we believe in God, we believe in capitalism” kind of identity.
That became attractive here. And, as the left lost its power, as the leftists were imprisoned or tortured, the Islamists took their place. They established these very close connections with members of the working classes, with the impoverished, with the outcast. They said, “We will help you in the name of Allah. We will form partnerships with other Muslims around the world, in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia. Muslims have money. We will bring together your wallets and their coffers.” The A.K.P. won the heart of the working class. And, with that power, Erdoğan claimed that the C.H.P. was the party of the bourgeoisie, of the Westernizers, of those who frown upon the working class. Sadly, this was an argument that triumphed on Sunday.
The C.H.P. may be leading the opposition, but it is one party in an ideologically diverse coalition uniting to take on Erdoğan. A lot of people who study autocracy and authoritarianism suggest that such coalition-building is the way to take on autocratic forces. What do you think of the opposition’s campaign and how they’ve tried to appeal to Turkish voters?
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the opposition’s leader, is an Alevi, which is a heterodox Islamic sect that combines elements of Sunni and Shia Islam. It’s part of a religious minority in Turkey. He’s also a minority in the group of politicians in the sense that he’s mild-spoken, he is very civilized, he never raises his voice. He’s a good man and a good strategist. He brought together the former wingmen of Erdoğan: the former economy czar, Ali Babacan, to lead the DEVA party; and his former Prime Minister and foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, to lead another party.
When people accuse him of moving the C.H.P. to the right in order to form this coalition, he said, “Well, the left and the right are eighteenth-century concepts—they’re concepts from the French Revolution. These concepts don’t apply anymore.” He decided to adjust, to form a coalition of Democrats. And much to our delight—much to my delight, let’s say—he announced his support for L.G.B.T.Q. communities, and he announced his support for progressive Kurds, which allowed him to win their vote on Sunday.
But let’s go back to the moment before he was announced as a candidate. Behind closed doors, the nationalist members of the opposition coalition said, “This man is unelectable as a President. We need someone who’s a Sunni like Erdoğan. We need someone who speaks in a loud voice, who is aggressive, who’s basically a Turkish nationalist instead of a Turkish social democrat. We need someone who bangs on the table in order to win. Erdoğan will eat this man alive.” And, for four days in early March, there was a big discussion in the opposition circles and on social media about this topic. And this discussion, I think, led to the diminishment of enthusiasm in the nationalist factions of the opposition.
All the signals suggest that, because they’re Sunni nationalists, they didn’t fully believe in Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy. They thought that, in the big part of Turkey, all those young men and women who grew up around nationalist organizations and in mosques would never vote for the soft-spoken Alevi who supports Kurds and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. They said that the opposition needed to come up with a more right-wing leader. Of course, we’ll never know whether they were right or wrong, because Kılıçdaroğlu led a very good campaign. The question is whether he was the right candidate.
When you say “Sunni nationalists,” can you be more specific? You have Erdoğan, whom I think a lot of people would describe as a Sunni nationalist, and who has become more right-wing during his twenty years in power. And then you also have a nationalist candidate who got five per cent of the vote on Sunday, who will not be in the runoff, and whose supporters are expected to go more to Erdoğan. And then there are Sunni nationalists in the opposition.
Nationalism is key in Turkey because the founding ideology of Turkey, the C.H.P. Young Turk ideology, is a nationalist ideology. A century ago, the Young Turks and the C.H.P. said, “There is no such thing as an Ottoman nation. There is a Turkish nation.” And they came up with this nationalist identity that asks Kurdish people and Jewish people and Armenian people and Sunnis and Alevis to stop calling themselves those things, but to call themselves Turkish. Just use this word for yourself, like the French did after the revolution. This was their nationalist proposal for many decades. It remains their nationalist proposal.
Erdoğan’s nationalism is different. In its current form, it proposes that the Young Turks and the Republican movement were part of the Ottoman tradition: that they were soldiers serving their sultan, they were religious men, they were Sunni supporters of the Ottoman caliphate. Unlike the C.H.P. nationalists, who say we have a century-long history, Erdoğan’s say, “Well, we have a much longer history, beginning a thousand years before. And there is no clash between religion and secularism. There’s no clash between religion and nationality in our form of nationalism, unlike with the C.H.P.”
And then there were disgruntled nationalists who don’t like Erdoğan’s nationalism or the C.H.P.’s project for Turkey. They said, “You are betraying Atatürk’s legacy.” Not only Erdoğan, but also Kılıçdaroğlu, because Kılıçdaroğlu has attempted to reform the C.H.P., has attempted to transform the C.H.P. from a secular nationalist party into a party that would apologize for what it has done to Kurdish people, and that would say, “This is a new C.H.P. where nationalism is on the back burner.”
This third nationalism, which won more than 2.5 million votes on Sunday, argues that both Kılıçdaroğlu and Erdoğan are betraying Atatürk’s legacy. In one sense, the winners on Sunday were neither Erdoğan and the A.K.P. nor Kılıçdaroğlu and his opposition alliance but nationalism and the far right.
Can you say more about what you mean by that?
Erdoğan got three per cent less than he did in the last Presidential election, five years ago. And his Party, the A.K.P., got less than it did in the last parliamentary elections. The C.H.P. got a very similar vote from the last elections. But Erdoğan, in his uncanny political savvy, was known to align with two far-right parties in March, when Kılıçdaroğlu announced his candidacy and formed his coalition of opposition parties. Erdoğan said, “O.K., here is my coalition of the right wing.”
He allied with HÜDA-PAR, which is a religious Kurdish party that wants to stop mixed education in schools, that wants to erase what it calls deviant culture, and stop divorced men from paying alimony to their wives. And then Erdoğan announced a partnership with Yeniden Refah, a fringe party that promises to close all L.G.B.T.Q. organizations in Turkey.
It was shocking because these were not classical A.K.P. policies. There was some reaction, but Erdoğan said, “No, these two far-right parties will help us in this election.” And it seems like he was right. Erdoğan went further to the right and made nationalism and religion the centerpiece of his campaign, whereas Kılıçdaroğlu moved further to the center and said, “We are a rainbow coalition, everyone is included.”
The two nationalist issues that at least in the West we hear about are Kurdish people, whose main party backed Kilicdaroğlu, and Syrian refugees, more than three million of whom have fled to Turkey since Syria’s civil war began. I’m curious how these two issues played in the election and what that portends.
We expected Kurds to be the kingmakers in this election. But, as I was saying, the nationalists turned out to be the kingmakers. The majority of Kurds, who form a very well-organized political entity in Turkey, kept a promise and voted for Kılıçdaroğlu—and Kılıçdaroğlu broke the taboo of mainstream Turkish politics. He seemed very relaxed aligning himself with the Kurdish people. He had no problems with that. And they supported him wholeheartedly, but the political party that represents them did worse than the party that represented them in the last election.
To the second point, Syrian refugees: As you know, Erdoğan has played the role of protector for millions of refugees in Turkey. Kılıçdaroğlu’s refugee policy has rattled me. He calls Turkey’s borders his “honor” and pledges to send back the “unruly flood of people flowing into our veins.” That is the ugly language of Turkish nationalism. Erdoğan, meanwhile, has framed himself as the protector of the umma, the nation of Islam, and, in this case, his Islamic nationalism seems humane by comparison.
How does that fit with what we have been talking about in terms of nationalism and Erdoğan’s pitch to voters?
This is the difference between Turkish nationalism and Islamic nationalism. Erdoğan says, essentially, “The borders of our culture are not limited to Turkey’s borders.” He thinks he has a responsibility to the former territories of the empire, and he has to look after the people in them. That’s his message. The Turkish nationalists say, “We have nothing to do with them. We don’t like Arabs anyway. They didn’t support us during the First World War. Why are we spending all our state resources on these people?” This is the kind of nationalist discourse that is represented by the nationalists in the opposition alliance.
Turkey is often described as a country divided between secular and religious, between city and countryside, between a broad conception of a “modern state” and something that predates it. Is that an accurate picture of modern-day Turkey?
We thought those divisions didn’t apply anymore, that they didn’t explain Turkish life. But, on Sunday, I think we were a bit unsettled to learn that, to a large extent, they still do. There is a pessimism of history that has triumphed over the optimism of the present.
Let me explain: This rhetoric about Erdoğan representing the rural, the religious, and those on the periphery, and the opposition representing the secular and the modern, we thought those were categories of the past. Because Erdoğan made people richer, he made them move to the cities. Now they are the bourgeoisie, they have money, they have control, they’re in a position of imposing their will. So they have nothing to complain about. They have no more grievances. This was the opposition’s optimism for the present moment.
Then there was the pessimism of history, which said that people in the rural parts of Turkey, religious people, women wearing head scarves, were traumatized. They were mistreated by Kemalists, by Republicans, for decades. That trauma is too precious to part with; nice words, good politicians, and new policies will not change it. They want to keep their trauma, they want to feel like a sultan figure is what brings them together and protects them. Otherwise, they’ll be attacked again by Kemalists, by the Western powers, who will take away their head scarves, their religious way of life, their religious freedoms. Once again, it will be like the nineteen-thirties or forties when the C.H.P. was ruling this country.
Erdoğan’s whole campaign was about history, about how life was in Turkey before he came to power, and how that has changed. There was a kind of pessimism about it. There was a kind of pessimism about anyone proposing something different. And the whole opposition campaign was about how these categories don’t apply anymore, how the C.H.P. has changed. Of the religious people who complain about traumas, they said, “No, we don’t believe that. The trauma keeps us together and we want to continue using it as our identity.” ♦
An earlier version of the photo caption accompanying this article misidentified the Turkish interior minister.
