“WE HAVE always said this divine journey will be completed, and we have always shown our commitment to this divine journey,” the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, told a crowd during a victory speech outside his home in Istanbul on Monday of last week. “Thank God you have responded to our call.”
Those remarks closed a fevered election period, during which the contest for Turkey’s presidency — between President Erdoğan and the main challenger, Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu — reached a second round, two weeks after an initial vote proved inconclusive. Religion played a prominent part in both candidates’ electoral communications, belying simplistic perceptions that Turkish politics involves a simple opposition of the “religious” to the “secular.”
President Erdoğan won the final ballot after receiving the endorsement of Sinan Oğan, a nationalist candidate who came third in the first round, polling 5.17 per cent, and had been eliminated. While Mr Ogan’s voters appeared to be split almost evenly between the two remaining candidates, it was enough to carry President Erdoğan over the line to an outright majority: his vote share rose from 49.52 per cent in the first round to 52.18 per cent in the second; Mr Kiliçdaroğlu‘s increased from 44.88 per cent to 47.82 per cent.
The Brexit-like result was dispiriting for the six-party coalition that backed Mr Kiliçdaroğlu. Yet, in a country in which the electoral playing field has been slanted so heavily against opposition parties, it represented a remarkable achievement.
Arrangements for voting in the areas hit worst by the massive earthquake earlier this year (News, 10 February) were compromised. President Erdoğan’s majority would have been impossible without the support of the 5.5-million-strong Turkish diaspora in Europe, to whom he had granted voting rights in 2015. The latter cast their ballots overwhelmingly for him, without having to live with the consequences of his governance.
SINCE 2003, President Erdoğan, who is 69, has governed Turkey continuously, either as President or Prime Minister. During that time, he has received international criticism for authoritarianism and for his country’s poor human-rights record.
Turkey ranks 165th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. The imprisonment of political opponents is commonplace, as happened before the local elections in May. Turkish authorities routinely ignore judgments of the European Court of Human Rights which direct them to release critics of the regime who have been interned on spurious pretexts. Freedom House, a human-rights NGO based in Washington, DC, says: “Turkey remains one of the most challenging places in the European region to exercise one’s right to free speech and expression.”
President Erdoğan is supported by a parliamentary coalition in which his Conservative-Islamic AKP (Justice and Development Party) is the principal force; but it rules in alliance with several more fervently Sunni-Islamic and nationalist groupings. In recent years, these elements have had increasing influence over government policy, as the President has found it increasingly difficult to form partnerships with mainstream parties.
Mr Kiliçdaroğlu’s CHP Republican People’s Party, meanwhile, is the heir to Turkey’s secular and liberal Kemalist heritage, as exemplified by CHP’s (and modern Turkey’s) founding father Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938). The fact that the 2023 election was fought in the centenary year of the inauguration of Turkey as a nation state with a secular constitution made it particularly charged.
DURING the election contest, however, religion worked at times in favour of Mr Kiliçdaroğlu and against President Erdoğan. The former’s “coming out” about his identity as an Alevi Muslim — a minority tradition historically much stigmatised and persecuted by Turkey’s Sunni majority — robbed President Erdoğan of a favourite ground for insinuation, and won Mr Kiliçdaroğlu respect for his courage.
Furthermore, the narrowness of President Erdoğan’s victory — barely four per cent in 2023, compared with 22 per cent in 2018 — could have been caused, in part, by the alienation of female religious voters, who have formerly been a key element in his electoral coalition.
Religious women in Turkey initially welcomed the AKP’s Islam-friendly policies, especially being allowed to wear the veil. This allowed them access to services and opportunities, including higher education, from which Turkey’s secularists had long excluded them. Many reassessed their support, however, owing to rampant corruption and concerns that Erdoğan’s government (acting under pressure from hard-line Islamists) might remove forms of legal protection against domestic violence.
“We thought a religious party would bring equality and fairness, but as time passed we saw they did no such thing,” Aseyl, an observant Muslim woman in Istanbul, told Politico Europe last month, before the election. Observant women, no less than secular ones, have struggled to feed their families: inflation has, at times, been above 80 per cent during the past year.
Which diplomatic path Turkey will now take under its renewed AKP administration, especially regarding Russia, is much discussed among political experts. One thing, though, is sure: religion will remain central to its public life.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.
