Can elections remove an autocrat like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power?
“Not all autocracies are created equal; Turkey is neither Russia nor China. In some, elections matter more than in others, and strongmen are weaker than they seem,” says Gonul Tol, the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program and Ali Yaycioglu, a history professor at Stanford University.
Gönül Tol and Ali Yaycıoğlu / Foreign Policy
Can elections remove an autocrat like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power? If you pose this question to Turkey watchers in Western capitals to get their take on the country’s upcoming election, you will get a resounding “no” from a significant number of them. Some will say Erdogan is still very popular—or at least adept at mobilizing his followers. Others will argue that elections do not matter in the entrenched autocracy he has built; one way or another, he will find a way to stay in power. Take the Western conventional wisdom about this Sunday’s election with a grain of salt, and here’s why.
Erdogan is indeed a popular leader. He commands somewhere between 40 percent and 45 percent support, no small feat after 20 years in power. But he is not nearly as popular as he once was. In the 2018 presidential election, Erdogan captured 52 percent of the vote, or some 26 million votes. Several factors worked in his favor then. The elections were held just two years after the failed 2016 coup and its “rally-around-the-leader” effect. Erdogan was riding high on a wave of nationalism after the Turkish military intervened in the Syrian civil war to fight the Syrian Kurds. The country was not suffering from a major economic crisis like today. The opposition was fractured: The popular Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair Selahattin Demirtas, Iyi Party leader Meral Aksener, Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Muharrem Ince, and Felicity Party leader Temel Karamollaoglu were each on the ballot running separately against Erdogan. The nationalist base was more unified, with the majority still backing Erdogan; the nationalist breakaway Iyi Party had been established too recently to draw away much of the vote.
Fast-forward to 2023. To win the election, Erdogan has to capture more than the 26 million votes he secured in 2018 because Turkey’s voting population has grown. His problem is that he faces a dramatically different political context that makes that task very difficult. The failed coup’s rally-around-the-leader effect is long gone. The wave of nationalism that Erdogan once rode has come back to haunt him: There is now a growing nationalist opposition to Erdogan, with several nationalist parties peeling away votes from his far-right ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The Turkish economy has plunged into a major crisis, with runaway double-digit inflation and soaring food prices. Most importantly, the opposition is more united than it has ever been: Six parties have come together under the Nation Alliance banner and a single presidential candidate, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, with additional backing from the pro-Kurdish HDP. Altogether, Kilicdaroglu commands 50.9 percent of the vote, according to the latest poll.
Skeptics might say that these arguments and poll numbers would only be relevant if Turkey were a democracy and add that Erdogan has so much to lose that he would do anything to secure victory. They have a point. It is easy to be cynical about elections in a country run by an entrenched autocrat who has demonstrably manipulated previous votes and refused to accept the results when they haven’t gone his way. In the June 2015 parliamentary elections, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority. Erdogan stalled talks between the AKP and the CHP about forming a coalition government and forced new elections. He renewed the fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party to reverse his party’s defeat in new elections held that November. In 2017, Turkey held a controversial constitutional referendum to switch to an executive presidency that would grant Erdogan unprecedented powers. The referendum, which Erdogan won by a narrow margin, was marred by widespread allegations of fraud. In both the parliamentary elections and referendum, the opposition was not organized enough to protect the ballot or challenge Erdogan’s efforts to create a fait accompli.
In 2019, however, things changed. Erdogan’s party lost almost all of Turkey’s major cities in municipal elections. Particularly frustrating for Erdogan was the loss of Istanbul, the financial capital where he had launched his political career. Erdogan did not accept the opposition’s narrow win in Istanbul and called for a rerun. When the election was run again, the ruling party lost by a much bigger margin. Erdogan abusing his power to deny the election result had the effect of mobilizing the opposition.
What does this tell us about elections in Turkey? That they are popular and fraud is not, making heavy-handed election fraud risky for Erdogan. The 2019 elections made something else clear, too. When the opposition parties get their act together, they can beat Erdogan at the ballot box. Skeptics might point out that the stakes are much higher for Erdogan in the upcoming vote than they were in the 2019 municipal elections and that he will not accept defeat gracefully. They are not entirely wrong. In personalist autocracies like Turkey, rulers who lose power are likely to end up in jail or exile, so they risk everything to cling to power.
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