If Turkey's first-ever presidential election, which took place yesterday, had a defining characteristic, it was the overwhelming sense of the outcome's inevitability.
I spent the past three weeks travelling across the country—Istanbul to Van and back again—and at no point did I meet anyone who thought that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's victory wasn't a fait accompli. While the occasional interlocutor argued that the election might go to a second round, there was never any doubt about who the ultimate victor would be. For supporters of Erdoğan, who won the presidency with just under 52 per cent of the vote and has vowed to transform the traditionally ceremonial position into the country's locus of power, it was a matter of destiny. For his opponents, it was one of fate.
Of course, in reality, it was neither. Until yesterday, Erdoğan and the party he leads, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), had never won an election with more than 50 per cent of the vote. (Turkey has a proportional representation system that doesn't require a party to win an outright majority in order to form government.) The possibility that Erdoğan would fail to achieve the simple majority required to prevent a second-round run-off was more real than the government-friendly polling organisations—some of whose predictions were off by embarrassingly high margins—would have had you believe. But with unparalleled perception-management skills—and with the local media in his pocket—he was able to convince a majority of voters, not to merely to get behind his candidacy, but also, perhaps more importantly, that there was no alternative to him or to the religious-conservative worldview he represents.
That he was able to convince even his opponents of this is ultimately what determined the election's outcome. The decision of the traditionally liberal-secularist Republican Peoples' Party (CHP) to enter a coalition with the right-leaning Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and field an Islamic, centre-right candidate—former Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC )Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu—was based entirely on its acceptance of Erdoğan's confident but ultimately baseless characterisation of the electorate as ideologically homogenous. This attempt to appeal to a non-existent electorate in no way appealed to the party's own voter base—the very people who put paid to such assertions of homogeneity—and the results were predictable. Large numbers of CHP voters abandoned the party for the left-leaning secularist Kurdish candidate, Selahattin Demirtaş, who won nearly 10 per cent of the vote, or else abstained from voting all together. (Voter turn-out was 73.17 per cent, one of the lowest in recent Turkish history, and much lower than the 89 per cent seen in March's local elections. To be fair, this was as true of pro-AKP districts as pro-opposition ones, again because the outcome seemed so inevitable.) It was a self-defeating move for the MHP, too, with large numbers of its base turning towards Erdoğan after being turned-off by the party's newfound cosiness with the left. As Nate Schenkkan tweeted late yesterday afternoon:
It would have, of course, and it is to be hoped that both parties—particularly the CHP—have learned some lessons as a result. The most important of these—which we have learned time and again at home—is that decisions made for reasons of political expediency at the expense of values rarely prove as expedient as originally thought. The other is that accepting Erdoğan's assertions about the nation's character, rather than challenging them, strengthens his narrative more than it weakens it.
But they will lessons learned too late: the damage is done. It won't matter a jot to Erdoğan that he barely scraped it in, won't matter one iota that he is set to become president of a country far more divided than he claims. (Young pro-Erdoğan voters spent their evening driving around Taksim Square, the site of last year's Gezi Park protests and the brutal government crackdown that contained them, honking their horns in celebration while the managers of nearby restaurants mourned the end of Turkish democracy to anyone who would listen.) Erdoğan is now in a position to become Turkey's most powerful politician since Atatürk, a role he has already played for a decade, of course, but with potentially more power than he has had to this point.
The key word in that last sentence is "potentially". Erdoğan now faces a battle far more important, in the long run, than this mere election campaign: his battle to change the country's political structure and consolidate executive power in the person of the president—which is to say in the person of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—looms large on the horizon.
That battle is not unlosable. But it requires that opponents to such a move—an increasing number of whom are members of his own party—realise that resisting him on his terms is a political dead-end. What it requires is an end to their fatalism and its attendant perceptions of what is and isn't inevitable. This is a tall order, but the alternative is too disturbing for them to not at least try. Today there is merely a sense of inevitability. Tomorrow inevitability may be the reality. This is how dictators are made.
Matthew Clayfield is a freelance foreign correspondent.
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