The Daily - Turkey’s President Fights for Political Survival

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

For two decades, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has loomed large over Turkish politics. But skyrocketing inflation and a devastating earthquake have eroded his power and, in a presidential election over the weekend, he was forced into a runoff.Ben Hubbard, The Times’s Istanbul bureau chief, discusses how Turkey’s troubles have made Mr. Erdogan politically vulnerable.Guest: Ben Hubbard, the Istanbul bureau chief for The New York Times. Background reading: Despite the headwinds, Mr. Erdogan appears to be in a strong position to emerge with another five-year term. Here’s what to know.The election suggested that even if Mr. Erdogan’s grip on power has been loosened, it has not yet broken.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tabernisi, and this is The Daily. Skyrocketing inflation and a devastating earthquake left Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vulnerable at the ballot box for the first time in his 20 years in power. at the ballot box for the first time in his 20 years in power. In an election over the weekend, he was forced to a runoff, the first in Turkey's history. Today, my colleague Ben Hubbard, on Erdogan's fight for political survival and what it says about democracy in Turkey. It's Wednesday, May 17th.

So Ben, Turkey just had an election over the weekend where the country's leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, failed to clear the hurdle to win outright. And now the country's headed to a runoff. Help us understand what this means. I mean, this was really a remarkable moment in modern Turkish history and in the history of Erdogan, who has been by far the dominant politician on the national stage here for the last 20 years. Going into the vote on Sunday, he was down in the polls, which he has never been before. And he went into the election and he lost support in districts across the country, had fewer people voting for him.

And he failed to get more than 50% of the vote, which would have automatically given him a third presidential term. But if you look at this another way, it's not a setback at all. He's still in this race, and this is really the latest chapter in the longer Erdogan story, which is one of a politician of incredible talents who has just repeatedly, against the odds, managed to keep himself on top. Right. I mean, I covered Turkey for four years, and I just remember Erdogan as this astute, savvy force that was just absolutely dominant in Turkish politics. So let's talk about that then. Where does the story of Erdogan as political survivor begin? Before Erdogan came along, Turkish politics tended to be dominated by elites in the big cities, very much steeped in this idea that even though it's a Muslim-majority society,

that it was a staunchly secular place. But Erdogan comes up on a completely different track. He's not from the elite. He grew up in a poor, tough neighborhood in Istanbul. He attended religious schools, which at the time were supposed to be only for people who wanted to become preachers and serve in other religious functions.

And then he got into politics. He serves a stint as the mayor of Istanbul in the 90s and is celebrated all around. People give him a lot of credit for organizing what was otherwise a polluted and messy, gigantic metropolis. And then he gets his first shot at the national stage. In 2002, his party, which he had just helped found, comes out of nowhere and wins the majority in the parliament. And this is basically a protest vote by Turks who were so angry at the way that the previous parties had been running the country

that they decide to give these guys a chance. And the year after that, 2003, Erdogan is able to get himself into parliament and promptly becomes the prime minister. So he comes in and all of a sudden he's basically in charge of the government. And the country has really never seen anything like this. He's a scrappy underdog. He's largely representative

of a large religious underclass in the country, people who tend to be devout, who felt for a long time like they were looked down upon by the urban elites. representative of a large religious underclass in the country, people who tend to be devout, who felt for a long time like they were looked down upon by the urban elites. We're talking about the poorer parts of society, and they rally around him and they see him as their champion. And then Turkey really takes off. During his first decade as the prime minister, Turkey's GDP more than tripled. He went about a building spree, basically, where new neighborhoods, new areas, new homes cropped up across the country. They built new hospitals.

They built airports in lots of the regional cities, highways, rail lines. And so for people living in Turkey, the country really goes from a place where a lot of people are poor and don't have great services to a place where a lot of people are middle class and can really take advantage of it. People are buying homes, they're buying cars, they're earning more money. And so he, you know, was tremendously popular for that and voters continued to reward him and his party at the ballot box. I mean, this was a revolution in Turkish politics. I mean, this was not typical for a Turkish leader, and people really loved him for it. That's right.

But then after his first decade in power, the sheen starts to come off. the sheen starts to come off. We enter sort of a new chapter in the history of Erdogan where we really see new efforts to squeeze any kind of dissent or opposition to his rule to consolidate his control over the state. It starts with pressure on journalists, pressure on the opposition, efforts to modify the government. And these really get turbocharged after an attempted coup against him in 2016. The Turkish military says in a statement that it has taken control of the country

and imposed martial law. It's carried out by a religious group that had previously been close allies and people in the military, and they literally try to overthrow the government. Erdogan is at a vacation retreat. They send commandos in to try to kidnap him. He gets wind of it and gets out of there before they arrive. I mean, it's like something out of an action movie. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaking to the country via a FaceTime call into CNN Turk,

telling his supporters to go to the streets to fight for democracy. But then he survives. Well, the attempted coup on the Turkish government is seen to have increased public backing for the president, with several thousand people in Istanbul rallying in his support. And he really takes advantage of this coup and uses it to further consolidate his power. Altogether, more than 50,000 people have either been sacked or suspended since the coup attempt, including police, judges, soldiers and generals. Tens of thousands of people are arrested, are purged from their jobs in the government

bureaucracy, in the judiciary, in other parts of the state. The education ministry suspended over 15,000 personnel. We can make comparison between the Makarty era and Turkey right now. And many of these people are replaced by loyalists, by people who belong to his party. And that gives him even more sway over the government. And mark this the day that Turkey changed forever. Thousands celebrate a new constitution.

In 2017, he backs a referendum that passes by a slim margin, but passes. It would completely change the political system here from a parliamentary to a presidential republic. Mr. Erdogan would have vastly enhanced powers. The prime minister would be scrapped. And of course, he at the time is the president. So while his own allies say this is just like an American or a French or a South Korean presidential system. In fact, it's not really. He can, for instance, appoint the majority of the main judges, 12 out of 15. And so this gives him even more powers than he had before. And he takes those powers and uses them to give himself even more powers.

And so this is really when we head into the area where people start worrying about the health of Turkish democracy and wondering how far is it going to tip from democracy towards authoritarianism? And is he really out to establish a system of one-man rule? And of course, all along the way, he's still winning open elections, right? And handily. And this is the challenge. And frankly, this is what he and his supporters will always say is like, why are you talking about autocracy? The guy keeps winning elections. Right. I mean, in the most recent presidential elections before this one in 2018, he won in the first round with about 52%. His nearest challenger was more than 20 points behind him. So, you know, his defenders

will say, what are you complaining about? The people have spoken and they have chosen Erdogan yet again. So why are you complaining? Exactly. But that same year, Erdogan faces a new threat that really strikes directly at his popularity among voters. Turkey's central bank has confirmed what consumers have already learned the hard way. It's predicting inflation will hit a 15-year high this year. The currency starts losing its value and prices start to go up. Food prices shot up by 34% in the third quarter and all the money spent on essentials meant fewer purchases of white goods, cars and other big ticket items.

And that means basically that people's money is not worth what it used to be worth. They can't buy the same things that they used to buy. Their salaries are just worth less. And in one sense, this is very much the culmination of these years of economic policy, of massive government spending, lots of it built on debt. And these were policies that he championed and that he was largely in charge of. Right. Basically, to grow Turkey, as we talked about earlier, he pursued this single-minded approach to the economy, which kind of amounted to pouring sugar water into it. Like, it was

intended for rapid growth, which he succeeded at. But at some point, as we all know, when the sugar runs out, you get a headache. This is very much the end of the sugar high. Prices keep going up and they keep going up. And Erdogan basically makes it worse. Erdogan calls himself an enemy of interest rates. He says they lead to inflation, though the opposite has been proven true. Most economists will tell you that if you have an inflation problem, the first thing that you should do is raise interest rates to try to cool off the economy. He does exactly the opposite, and he starts reducing them.

He reduces interest rates? Yes, repeatedly. Man, when are we going to be wise? You can control the interest rates, but you cannot control inflation. Inflation occurs as a result of your wrong steps. And who pays the price? Our people, above all. At the same time, he's sort of burning through central bank chiefs. He numerous times fires the central bank chief and brings in somebody else. Turkey's President

Erdogan shook markets again by replacing the head of his central bank again, this time after just four months on the job. And through that process, we really see that, you know, he's in charge. He's running the show. He's the one who's setting the policy. Mr. Anbal's successor, Shahab Kavjolu, falls more in line with President Erdogan's unorthodox thinking about interest rates and inflation.

This builds and builds and builds until late last year when inflation shoots above 80%. Wow. Builds and builds until late last year when inflation shoots above 80%. Wow. Inflation in Turkey jumped to a 24-year high one week after the central bank cut interest rates again. I mean, by comparison, the U.S. peak was 9% last year. I mean, 80% is just unbelievable. This agency, however, an independent inflation research group, claims that the actual rate stands at a whopping 186%.

The lira is in freefall as the country reckons with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's unorthodox economic approach, which is contrary to widely accepted inflationary wisdom. I mean, how do you even go to the grocery store and plan a grocery list? It really undermines sort of anybody on any kind of a fixed income, whether you're retired and you're getting a pension, whether you're a teacher, whether you're a bus driver. Turkey is in economic turmoil. People are queuing for bread, cutting back on meat,

and are even fleeing to other countries. Prices are high. We're really struggling. We have two children who go to school. We are only earning minimum wage, and it's hard to make a living. You're just basically watching your salary effectively get smaller and smaller and smaller, and every time you go to the grocery store, you see that the prices for onions or tomatoes or pasta or rice or anything that you might want to buy just sort of going off the charts.

And so it changes the way that people eat. It changes the kind of trips that they take. It changes how much they drive because people just have to cut things out of their budget that they can't afford anymore. You know, this is the definition of a pocketbook issue. And it's really just hitting people

all the way across the country. I don't see a future here. I actually want to go abroad. This is true for most of us. And that really opens up a new possibility for something unusual to happen. So in the lead-up to this year's presidential election, we have the historically

fractured Turkish opposition coalesce. They come together, a group of six opposition parties whose ideologies are quite diverse, and there's many things they don't agree on. They come together as a coalition and back a common presidential candidate. So as we get into this year, we're in this very unique position where we have people suffering because of the economy, we have a united Turkish opposition, and so Erdogan starts heading towards this election facing a political threat in the one place that he's always been strongest,

which is at the ballot box. We'll be right back. So, Ben, tell me about this opposition coalition and the candidate they decided to back. Who is he and what is his pitch to Turkish voters? So the coalition has come together behind a man named Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. He is the head of the largest opposition party that the coalition has sort of built around, and he's a former civil servant. Basically worked his entire career in the government, and his last job was running the equivalent of the Social Security Administration. And what's he like? I mean, what's his pitch? He's almost the polar opposite of Erdogan. He's someone who seemed to be somewhat

quiet, somewhat reasonable in his way of discussing things, very modest in how he presents himself to voters. I mean, I think the biggest indication of this are these videos that he's released throughout the campaign of him sitting in his kitchen. It's a very modest Turkish kitchen, like you would see in most middle class families, somewhat old fashioned. There's some tea towels hanging behind him on the oven. People noticed in one of the recent videos that it looks like he had bought a new air fryer. And he literally just sits at the table and talks about stuff.

You know, he did one recently where he had an onion as a prop. An onion? Yeah, he held up the onion, which people use often in their cooking, and talked about how expensive they had become to go after Erdogan and his party and really hit them hard with this inflation problem. And he says, look, this is our actual agenda.

They know that when I come to power, democracy will come, money will flow, and your purchasing power will increase. They have no shame. So Erdogan is in this very unfamiliar situation, right, where he's facing a real opposition that has a serious chance of beating him. So what does he do? He goes on the attack. He runs a very aggressive campaign against Kılıçdaroğlu. He many times appears quite angry in his public appearances.

He belittles him. He at one point refers to him as a drunkard. A drunkard? Well, it's kind of a way to code to more religious voters that this guy is secular. And so he's not the kind of person that you're looking for. He's not from the religious class that we are, type thing. Right. It's very much a code for he's not one of us or sort of the religious parts of society. Right.

And he tries to create this general image of this is somebody who is incompetent and incapable and weak. And if you elect him as your president, Turkey's going to be in a lot of trouble. So that's what he says. What does he do during the campaign, Ben? Well, at the same time, he basically taps this tremendous power that he has as the president in this powerful presidential system and uses the

resources of the state to boost his chances in the campaign. And so he, three times in the last year and a half, has raised the minimum wage. He raises pay for civil servants. He changes some of the regulations about pensions to allow millions of Turks to get their pension early. A few weeks ago, we were in one of the medium-sized towns in the middle of the country, and we met a guy who's so excited because he's about to get his pension at age 46. Wow. And that's all because of these regulations that Erdogan has changed. His ability to do these things is so unchecked that he can just basically open the tap of public spending and pour money onto these people

to protect them in the short term from the very painful effects of this inflation that we've been talking about. But in the long term, the bills are eventually going to come due and somebody's going to have to figure out how to cover them. I mean, it sounds almost like he's bribing people to vote for him. Well, that's certainly what his opponents would say. And all of this is building towards last

weekend when we had the election. And what an election. It was such a nail-biter. I mean, I was watching it all day thinking, oh my God, what's going to happen? And it was so close. It was incredibly close. First thing, we had tremendous turnout. The participation rate was close to 90%. Wow. Just off the charts. Huge, huge numbers of people went out to vote. So at the polling places, you just saw long lines. You saw people excited about their particular candidates, waving flags, wearing t-shirts, all really excited to be participating in this political act. And the polls close, and we finally get the results, which is that Erdogan doesn't get it across the line. He ends up with 49.5%, so a half percent short of an outright victory.

Kilic Stadoli comes through with 44.9%, so trailing his challenger. And what do you make of those results? Well, the immediate effect is that we're going to go to a runoff. On May 28th, the top two contenders, Erdogan and Kulitsa Saroglu, are going to face off to determine who finally wins. What's interesting here is that Erdogan's actually in a very strong position. There was a third candidate in the race who got about 5.2% of the vote. He's eliminated. And most of his voters are likely to vote for Erdogan in the second round,

which could be enough to give him the victory. And I think everybody got a sense of where this seemed to be heading the night of after the results had come in. In the middle of the night, Erdogan appears on the balcony and it's dark out and he's wearing this long black coat and he has crowds of people beneath him who've been waiting to see if he's going to win the election and he comes out

standing straight up looking very confident and he addresses them and he basically says We love you a lot. This here is the result of that love. In a barbed sort of jab at his opponent,

he says, some are in the kitchen, we are on the balcony. He says, some are in the kitchen, we are on the balcony. And he says, while the final results are not clear yet, we are ahead by far. And that seemed to show that he was confident that he was going to win. So there you have it. An unbelievable story of political survival, right? I mean, years of economic turmoil, 80% inflation, like that would spell the end for pretty much any political leader's career in a democracy, but not his. How do you explain that?

but not his. How do you explain that? Turkey is a very complicated place. This is a country that people will tell you is not fully a democracy and is not fully an autocracy. It's a hybrid. It's somewhere in this murky middle that has characteristics of both systems. And because of the way this election was run, it was free. But because of the way that Erdogan was able to use his power to tilt the playing field in his direction beforehand, it was not really fair. So free, but not so fair. Yes, that's right. So that leaves us in a situation where he's still the survivor.

He's managed to do it yet again, and he's in a very good position going into this runoff on May 28th. And if he wins there, he's going to have five more years to leave his mark on Turkey. Ben, thank you. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Thank you. If the debt ceiling is not lifted, the government could run out of money by June 1st.

But the meeting was not without some progress. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy told reporters that it might be possible to reach a deal by the end of the week. And in North Carolina, legislation banning most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy will become law after the state's Republican-controlled legislature successfully overrode the veto of the Democratic governor. The override, which was completed Tuesday night, was possible because a Democrat, Tricia Cotham, switched parties, giving Republicans in the House the three-fifths majority needed to succeed. Until now, the three-fifths majority needed to succeed.

Until now, North Carolina had allowed abortions up to 20 weeks and had become a destination in the South for women seeking abortions after Roe fell last year. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Rochelle Banja, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Asla Chaturvedi. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Rachel Quester. Contains translations by Seda Ozturk and Elif Inge. Original music by Diane Wong and Marion Lozano. And was engineered by Chris Wood.

Special thanks to Elif Inge. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.