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Elections

‘The Most Unfair Election’: Turkish Opposition Laments Defeat to Erdogan

May 28, 2023 by John Hayward Leave a Comment

Incumbent Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan entered his third decade in power on Sunday by winning the runoff election against challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

Leaders of the multi-party opposition alliance indicated they would not challenge the election result, but some said the contest was not free and fair.

“This was the most unfair election period in our history,” Kilicdaroglu said from the headquarters of his CHP party in Ankara on Sunday.

Kilicdaroglu suggested Erdogan used intimidation tactics to remain in power.

“We did not bow down to the climate of fear. In this election, the will of the people to change an authoritarian government became clear despite all the pressures,” he said.

“The means of the state has been entirely pledged to one person,” he said, alluding to Erdogan using state media to promote his campaign and spending billions from the government treasury to defuse popular discontent with Turkey’s declining economy.

Kilicdaroglu returned to his runoff campaign theme of blaming Erdogan for allowing huge numbers of refugees into Turkey, especially those fleeing the brutal civil war in neighboring Syria.

“I could never stay silent when your rights were violated. I could never tolerate you becoming second-class citizens after millions of refugees came here. I fought for all these and will continue to fight,” he told his supporters.

“My real sorrow is the fact that we will observe more difficult days ahead. But I can assure you that it will again be us who will try to stand in front of them,” he said.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the joint presidential candidate of the Nation Alliance greets the crowd at an electoral rally organized by CHP in Sivas, Turkiye on May 11, 2023. (Photo by Serhat Zafer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

“It does appear that President Erdogan has won these elections. But it would be a mistake to call this a victory. Perhaps a Pyrrhic victory is a better term to describe this situation,” said Kilicdaroglu adviser Mehmet Karli, ominously alluding to Turkey’s deep political divisions and perilous economic situation.

Kilicdaroglu’s CHP party said on Sunday that some of its election observers were physically attacked in southeastern Turkey after they objected to voting irregularities.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) found CHP spokesman Faik Oztrak in a “sour mood” on Sunday, departing from his first press conference of the evening without taking questions after he made a brief statement. AFP found this a “marked difference from his bullish remarks and vigorous contestation of the first-round vote count.”

Selahattin Demirtas, jailed leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, spoke even more harshly of the tactics Erdogan employed to win the election.

“I would like to thank everyone who went to the polls to vote, who could not go even if they wanted to, who resisted and worked hard to protect the votes,” Demirtas said on Twitter, implying some people who might have voted against Erdogan were prevented from reaching the polls.

“Even reaching this rate of votes with a principled and moral election campaign against a huge operational force that has taken over the state is considered a miracle,” he said.

“In fact, it was not an election, but a major operation. The election process was full of inequalities, oppression, incredible lies, slanders and smears,” he continued.

Demirtas contended the public actually desired a change of leadership, but “the whole process was manipulated” to keep Erdogan in office.

“We are not defeated. Let no one be hopeless because we are not defeated. Never surrender. Keep fighting, keep going, keep going,” he concluded.

Erdogan made a point of saying Demirtas would remain in prison only a few minutes after the final election results were announced.

co-leader of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas speaks during an interview on July 22, 2016 in Ankara. / AFP / ADEM ALTAN (Photo credit should read ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images)

co-leader of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas speaks during an interview on July 22, 2016, in Ankara. (Photo credit should read ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images)

“It is not possible for such a thing to happen,” he said, rejecting calls from the international community to release Demirtas, who is widely seen as a political prisoner. Demirtas has been in jail since 2016.

“In our government, justice is the foundation of property! This cannot be changed!” Erdogan thundered.

Sinan Ogan — the nationalist candidate who finished third in the first round of the election, enjoyed playing kingmaker for a couple of weeks and ultimately endorsed Erdogan five days before the runoff election — somewhat confusingly declared that the winners included “Turkish nationalists, Kemalists, the Turkish nation, and the Turkish world.” Although, Kilicdaroglu was the Kemalist in the race — a devotee of Turkey’s post-Ottoman Empire secularist reformer Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. 

Erdogan despises Kemalist philosophy, openly admires the Ottoman Empire, and has worked assiduously to reverse Ataturk’s reforms to make Turkey into an authoritarian Islamist nation.

Ogan said the election losers were “the lynch culture and the parties affiliated with terrorism and those who trusted them,” alluding to his unease with Kurdish support for Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan and his supporters consider most Kurdish parties in Turkey to be allied with the violent separatist movement known as the PKK.

Ogan mostly seemed pleased that so many of his supporters followed his lead and supported Erdogan, even though some key members of Ogan’s political coalition said he did not speak for them and they intended to vote for Kilicdaroglu, who made a strong play for nationalist voters in the closing days of the runoff campaign.

“Our voters abandoned the enthusiasm of those who said that these votes were not given to Sinan Ogan, they trusted us and to a great extent chose where we are,” he boasted.

The Associated Press

An election representative holds a ballot with presidential candidates at a polling station in Istanbul, Turkey, Sunday, May 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

Meral Aksener, chairwoman of the IYI or “Good Party,” was the first major opposition leader to congratulate Erdogan on his victory, but she also cautioned him not to “forget that the polls conveyed messages to him as well.”

Aksener — whose party pulled out of the six-party opposition National Alliance coalition in March because it did not want Kilicdaroglu as the alliance’s candidate but returned to the fold later after some concessions were made — told Erdogan to expect continuing opposition in the legislature.

“Don’t forget that we are still here, at the parliament. We will continue to fulfill our responsibility,” she said.

Reuters described a funeral mood in neighborhoods that supported the opposition, even as Erdogan-supporting districts erupted in riotous celebration. 

“I can’t believe this happened, he’s as bad as Hitler. My plan from here is to go to the airport and immigrate to Canada,” a 29-year-old architect who asked to remain anonymous told Reuters.

When the reporter asked if she had any hope left, she replied, “Just a little. Turks are not very smart people, so just a little.”

Filed Under: Breitbart, CHP, Elections, Israel / Middle East, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, National Security, News, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Selahattin Demirtas, Turkey

Turkish Opposition Documents Thousands of Ballot Box Irregularities in Presidential Election

May 17, 2023 by John Hayward Leave a Comment

Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), on Wednesday filed complaints about thousands of alleged irregularities at ballot boxes in Sunday’s election, when incumbent authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dramatically outperformed his poll numbers and came within half a point of winning an immediate victory over favored challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

CHP officials admitted their challenges were highly unlikely to nullify the first round of the election, which will be settled by a runoff between Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu on May 28. Some of the irregularities amounted to a single miscounted vote, while others allegedly affected hundreds of ballots.

Turkey’s main opposition party said it had filed complaints over suspected irregularities at thousands of ballot boxes in Sunday’s elections, in which President Tayyip Erdogan performed better than expected https://t.co/C3Y8ZMCcpy

— Arzu Geybulla (@arzugeybulla) May 17, 2023

CHP complained about a grand total of 2,269 ballot boxes nationwide in the presidential election and 4,825 in concurrent parliamentary races – a sizable number, but given the massive 88.8 percent reported turnout in the election and Erdogan’s lead of almost five points over Kilicdaroglu, probably not enough to change the outcome even if all of CHP’s challenges were validated.

“We do not have strong evidence to say irregularities can change the presidential race results or get another opposition candidate elected to the parliament. Since Erdogan officially started his election campaign yesterday, I believe the opposition alliance should also channel its energy into the runoff,” advised Mehmet Emin Ekmen, deputy chair of the DEVA party, a member of Kilicdaroglu’s six-party political alliance.

International observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) criticized the Erdogan government on Monday for failing to handle the ballots in a sufficiently transparent manner, and for blocking two OSCE observers for dubious reasons. The OSCE also said its complaints would be unlikely to change the outcome of the race.

People wait bus in front of a poster showing the portrait of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 10, 2023 in Istanbul, Turkey. (Burak Kara/Getty Images)

Skeptics of the election’s validity were particularly suspicious of Erdogan’s remarkable popularity in most of the provinces severely affected by the massive earthquakes in February.

Poor earthquake response, and shocking levels of corruption in the construction industry during Erdogan’s 20 years in power, were seen as massive political liabilities for the incumbent, but he and his AKP party wound up romping through 10 of the 11 provinces hit by the quake. Erdogan lost only in Hatay, the province hit hardest by the quakes.

Reuters interviewed earthquake province residents who said the region broke for Erdogan because its devout Muslim population responded to the Islamist elements of his campaign, and Kilicdaroglu did not convince them he could have done a better job with the response.

The Associated Press

Residents remove their belongings from their destroyed house after the earthquake, in Samandag, southern Turkey, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

“Earthquake survivors had seriously criticized the government response in polls and they said they would not vote for them. But these people were also looking for an answer to the question of ‘who will rebuild my house, who will rebuild my workplace?’ They see that it is Erdogan who can do this,” said pollster Mehmet Ali Kulat. 

As for the religious angle, Kilicdaroglu is a secularist who advocates returning to the principles of modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – principles Erdogan has aggressively dismantled as he sells a vision of returning to the glories of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk founded the CHP.

In the final weeks of the campaign, the normally soft-spoken Kilicdaroglu – the man known for making heart emojis with his fingers on the campaign trail – called out certain popular historians as “traitors” and “not even human” for spreading unsubstantiated smears that Ataturk had an affair with his own adopted daughter, and that Ataturk’s mother was a prostitute.

Opposition presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s best-known campaign slogan is an emoji, the heart. One sees a lot of them at today’s massive rally in Ankara. #Turkey #Elections2023 pic.twitter.com/6Kk9psqtDb

— Pekka Mykkänen (@PekkaJMykkanen) May 12, 2023

Kilicdaroglu himself is an Alevi, a minority Islamic sect that few prominent Turkish politicians have admitted belonging to. Kilicdaroglu’s open declaration of his faith was applauded by many for shattering an unreasonable taboo in Turkish society and promoting religious diversity, but it apparently alienated the hardcore Muslims and nationalists that Erdogan appealed to.

Erdogan ran hard against Kilicdaroglu’s secular governing philosophy, and his surrogates did a canny job of playing on anti-Alevi sentiments, although his presidency has been fairly decent to the Alevis over the past two decades.

Erdogan’s allies managed to paint Kilicdaroglu as the one who was looking to start a religious battle in Turkey by tearing down Erdogan’s Islamist institutions and flaunting his offbeat religious identity. They also linked him to pro-Kurdish parties and the Kurdish separatists of the PKK, the great boogeyman of Erdogan’s government. These tactics appear to have worked well enough to blunt the political damage from the earthquakes for the incumbent president.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the joint presidential candidate of the Nation Alliance greets the crowd at an electoral rally organized by CHP in Sivas, Turkey on May 11, 2023. (Serhat Zafer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Kilicdaroglu’s campaign took a somewhat surprising “no more Mr. Nice Guy” turn heading into the runoff, as he accused Erdogan on Wednesday of planning to flood Turkey with millions of “irregular migrants” and challenging nationalists to vote for him instead.

“We will not abandon our homeland to this mentality that allowed 10 million irregular migrants to come among us. Those who love their homeland, come to the ballot box,” he said in a video posted on Twitter. He warned the number of “irregular migrants” could soar to over 30 million if Erdogan is re-elected.

The Associated Press

A woman votes at a polling station in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday, May 14, 2023. (AP Photo)

Al Jazeera News expressed some confusion at precisely which group of migrants Kilicdaroglu was talking about. Turkey is well-known for having the world’s largest refugee population, thanks to a decade of vicious civil war in neighboring Syria, but the current total is closer to 4 million than the 10 million Kilicdaroglu claimed. 

Al Jazeera suspected Kilicdaroglu, now the underdog instead of the favorite going into the general election, was making a last-ditch play for the voters of third-place candidate Sinan Ogan, who ran heavily on repatriating refugees. 

Ogan is greatly enjoying his role as a kingmaker and seems to be in no hurry to endorse either of the runoff candidates. His views on returning to Ataturk’s secular government are similar to Kilicdaroglu’s, but Ogan severely dislikes the Kurds, and he stated on Monday he will not support Kilicdaroglu unless the challenger promises to make no concessions to pro-Kurdish parties.

Filed Under: AKP, Breitbart, CHP, earthquakes, Elections, Israel / Middle East, National Security, News, OSCE, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey, voting irregularities

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