Gloom descends over Turkey as Erdogan looks to tighten grip

If the President wins, as polls predict he will, his, and Turkey’s, troubles may be just beginning.

A ballot showing the two candidates, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, and Kemal Kilicdaroglu, at a polling station on the day of the presidential runoff vote in Ankara. Picture: AFP

Turkish opposition supporters dragged themsleves to the polls on Sunday with a sense of looming defeat and a fear that they have missed their best chance in decades to take down President Erdogan. But if he wins, as polls predict he will, his, and Turkey’s, troubles may be just beginning.

After 20 years in power, Erdogan went into the presidential run-off as the clear favourite. Two weeks ago, in the first round, he confounded expectations by narrowly beating Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the greying opposition challenger.

Yet while the President and his party, the AKP, did not lose, as many had predicted, neither did he deliver a resounding win. Despite claims by the opposition of voter fraud, Erdogan achieved the lowest level of support he has mustered in a presidential election. His base, once so devoted, is withering away.

Should he triumph on Monday morning. Australian time, he will remain at the helm of a country facing many deep crises created largely at his own hands.

Erdogan’s dream is to be the leader of a Muslim nation counted among the world’s great powers. But Turkey is fragile: economically broken, with spiralling inflation and a plunging currency, damaged by February’s earthquakes and torn apart by anger at its four million refugees. The ­judiciary is gutted and cowed after Erdogan’s purges, illiberalism is rising and the country has no chance of becoming a member of the EU any time soon.

Erdogan’s foreign policy wins, such as negotiating a grain deal with Russia and Ukraine, the expansion of Turkish business into Africa and the sale of Bayraktar drones across the world, play well with his base, but do not provide stability, prosperity and growth at home.

Relations with the EU, buoyed after the earthquake response, are degenerating into their usual ­antagonistic state, particularly ­because Erdogan and his supporters believe that Western countries backed the opposition in the polls.

If elected, Erdogan will probably use his veto to continue frustrating Sweden’s attempts to join NATO. Erdogan has demanded that Stockholm hand over 120 Turkish citizens he classifies as terrorists, while refusing to ­extradite a Swedish-Turkish alleged drug kingpin living in Anatolia, where police say he continues to control drug sales and order killings back home.

In Syria, Turkey has established control over parts of the north by launching a series of in­vasions. But Turkey’s sworn ­enemies, the Syrian Kurds, still hold a huge stretch along Turkey’s southern border, imperilling its national security.

The economy is in alarming ­decline as prices of ordinary goods spiral out of reach for many. Middle-class families have had to slash spending; some of the poor are going hungry. Erdogan, however, has pledged to keep lowering interest rates after years in which doing so has fuelled double-digit inflation.

Before the election, an AKP ­ insider said the question was not whether the opposition would win – he thought it was impossible – but whether Erdogan would lose. How far would his followers ­believe his narrative that despite having governed the country for two decades, all its problems can be blamed on shadowy outside forces ranging from Western intelligence to gay people?

Erdogan’s allies started briefing against him. Many believed that the AKP would splinter under pressure. Instead it and its allies, the hardline nationalist MHP, won a comfortable majority.

The President desperately wants another term, during which he would, in October, see in the centenary of the Turkish Republic. His supporters say that it is only fitting that Turkey’s greatest leader since Ataturk should lead the celebrations. Erdogan wants to be remembered as a great Muslim statesman. Instead, he may be ­remembered as the leader who pulled Turkey into the 21st century – through remarkable efforts to overhaul its health system and infrastructure – and gave it clout on the world stage, only to cripple the economy and the judiciary, and tighten the grip of illiberalism.

Amid the battle for the presidency, something rotten at the centre of Turkey has oozed into view. It sometimes feels like the only thing that unites this country of 85 million people is loathing for Syrian refugees. Syrians fear ­attacks, and they are right to. Shops have been looted and there have been fights and killings that families suspect are racially motivated. Outspoken anti-refugee sentiment is normal among large swaths of Turkish society.

But the election, and the idea that Syrians who obtained Turkish citizenship (a minuscule proportion of the electorate) were somehow behind Erdogan’s strong showing in the first round, has given it a far more immediate, nastier edge.

Compared with some of the ­opposition, Erdogan’s stand on refugees seems remarkably liberal. While he has allied with ultra-­nationalists and illegally deported thousands of Syrians, he is, for now at least, couching his policy in terms of following global standards of protection. The old divide between secular and religious Turks is becoming less important as people from across the political spectrum move instead to increasingly hardline forms of nationalism.

With this at stake, Turkey’s ­future looks exceedingly bleak, whoever triumphs.

The Times