The Decibel - What Turkey’s election means for the rest of the world

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

With a cost-of-living crisis and rampant inflation, there’s a lot on the line for Turkey in the runoff election on Sunday. But this also matters beyond Turkey’s borders. The country is an important – and often challenging – ally for Western countries.Today, Istanbul-based writer and photographer Adnan Khan tells us what issues are at play in this election and what it could mean for Turkey’s role on the world stage.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

On Sunday, Turkish citizens will vote in a runoff election to determine the country's president. That vote will have big implications within the country, but it also matters beyond Turkey's borders. In the last two decades, Turkey has been remade by its powerful and controversial leader. And where the nation heads next will have major ramifications for its Western allies. Adnan Khan is an Istanbul-based writer and photographer and contributor to The Globe. Today, he tells us about the issues at play in this election and what it could mean for Turkey's role on the world stage. I'm Menaka Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Adnan, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's a pleasure to be here, Meneka. I want to start with what things are like for people in Turkey right now, because there's incredible inflation. They're still dealing with the aftermath of those devastating earthquakes from February that killed 50,000 people. So what is life like in the country? Yeah, life has, it's reached a point where people are just trying to find ways to get by. I mean, Turkey is a more, how should we say, I mean, traditional is maybe the wrong word, but there's certainly a more of a sense of community in a place like Turkey. So people

are helping each other out. There are ways families are coming together. People are moving back home with their families to try to survive. Just basic food is so expensive that getting by is extremely difficult. Well, let's talk about food and inflation in general, because it's been incredibly high. In the fall, it hit 85%. And that's crazy, right? Because here in Canada, our inflation, it didn't get past 10%. And it felt like a big crisis, right? So 85% is really high. How do people in Turkey live with inflation that high? Yeah, I mean, 85 is the official number. So independent economists have put it in the range of 100 and over 100 percent. Daily things like

food, rent, this sort of thing there. It's incredibly high. So, you know, one thing that the Erdogan and the AK Party, the governing party and President Erdogan have done to try to compensate this is keep they keep raising the minimum wage. So, I mean, but economists say raising the minimum wage or paying people more is just another way of printing more money. So that just goes into a cycle of inflation once you do that. It's kind of like this sort of cat and mouse chase with inflation and trying to hit it with a mallet of raising a minimum wage, but that just exacerbates the problem. Yeah. So this is the context in which this election is taking place. And people have been saying that this election is the most important election in Turkey in at least a

generation. So why is that, Adnan? Yeah, I mean, there's so much at stake, right? I mean, this is, first off, this is happening on the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. So symbolically, there's quite a bit going on. And also, I think this more specifically, this is Erdogan's potentially his last term in office. And so we're looking at a potentially a legacy period for him with a lot of changes happening. The international order is changing. So for Turkey's place in that, Erdogan is pushing towards a much more militaristic and much more sort of strong position and independent position. So this is going to prove an extremely important moment. So, of course, we're talking about the incumbent president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

He's been in power 20 years. That's a long time. Can you give us some sense of Erdogan's political history and how he came to power? Sure. Actually, it's a fascinating history. You know, Erdogan didn't start off on a path towards politics. I mean, he grew up in a very sort of rough and tumble neighborhood in Istanbul. As a child, in fact, he was sold water on the streets, sold this Turkish style of bagel called a simit on the streets to get by to make a little bit of money. He was at university at a very fractious time in Turkish politics in the 1970s. And at that time, there was a lot of battles between the right and especially Islamist

groups and left-wing communist groups. This was during the Cold War. And he cut his teeth in that sort of milieu. And from there, we can start to get a sense of the kind of leader that he's become. He was known as a very good orator. He was very good at sort of raising people's emotions and getting them fired up. So this was, you know, he took that into his period as mayor of Istanbul. His time between 1994 and 1998 when he was mayor, he focused a lot on infrastructure and making people's lives better. And so he sort of proved himself as a kind of builder as well at that time, which we've also seen in his time as leader of Turkey as well. But at that time, he was also taken out of politics because of his Islamist stances. And he was banned for and arrested and banned and put in jail for four

months. He helped to form the AK Party in the wake of that and then returned in 2001. What's interesting about his return, if I can just throw that in, is Erdogan came to power during a time of real deep sort of anxieties in Turkey. But he's managed, you know, this time around with an earthquake and an economic crisis, he's managed to what looks like he's going to manage to stay in power. So it's an interesting sort of bookend to his long career. Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. And the AK Party, which you said he helped found there, he's still the leader of that party today.

So what kind of leader has he been? You know, his leadership style has changed and it's an interesting trajectory. You know, early on, he built the party alongside some very prominent leaders that came from the more sort of conservative. I wouldn't say Islamist because there were Democrats that were part of that group as well. These were very well-educated sort of thinkers that helped him set up the party. And at that time, he was much more sort of,

you know, open to negotiation, consensus building. He really, you know, people in the 2000 knots were excited about this new party that was, you that was giving religious people in Turkey a voice, but without taking Turkey down a kind of theocratic path. But what we did see starting around the 2010s, we started to see Erdogan become much more authoritarian. And then around 2013, there were street battles. There was a lot of protest movement that developed. That was the Gezi Park protests. And it was a lot of sort of secularists and more liberal Turks rising up and pushing back against what was already Erdogan's growing authoritarianism at that time and the AK Party's growing authoritarianism. The street battles and protests spread throughout the country, and there was a

massive police crackdown on that. And we saw Erdogan really turn much more authoritarian starting at that point. I understand that Erdogan's also made a lot of changes to the structure of politics in Turkey during his 10 years later, including the consolidation of power. Can you help me understand what he's done? I think, you know, especially since 2013 and moving towards 2016, we saw Erdogan in that period becoming much more consolidating power to himself, right? I mean, especially after the 2013 protests, he tore apart the bureaucracy, arrested, thousands were arrested and cleansed out the police services and replaced them with his own people. We saw within the party cleansing as well. A lot of the more intelligentsia of the

AK Party started to disappear and we started to see Erdogan surrounding himself with his loyalists. Erdogan and the AK Party emerged from that changed in a deep way. As we move towards 2016, we see the coup attempt, which was carried out by parts of the military, not the entire military. It was a failed attempt. And he came very close to being actually killed. And in the wake of that, we see the sort of final transformation of Erdogan into the authoritarian that we see today. Emergency rule, particularly we saw it went on for some months, but even when it was removed, some of the elements of it that gave him power were codified into law. So we see this shift towards the authoritarian. And of course, then two years after the coup

attempt, we saw the referendum for switching towards a centralized presidency. Yeah. So this referendum in 2017, he was essentially getting rid of the prime minister role and made the president, which was himself then the head of government. So more control there. Yeah. The president before that, prior to that was just a figurehead. He was representing the head of state. And yeah, getting rid of the prime ministership and also weakening some of the powers of the parliament gave Erdogan, as president, the power to essentially rule by decree. And that's something that the opposition today now had promised, and that they would switch things back to a parliamentary system,

return a lot of those powers back to the parliament. I also want to ask you about what he's done to tackle inflation, because we talked about that earlier. This is a huge issue today in Turkey. How has Erdogan contributed, actually, to the dramatic inflation that the country's seen? It's this very unorthodox economic policies. And one of the key elements of that are interest rates in Turkey, for some reason that even I think to this day, traditional economists, sort of your everyday economists can't wrap their heads around is Erdogan's notion that high interest rates cause

inflation. So, you know, there are a number of things at play that cause Turkey's economy to become unstable. One of them, of course, being that Turkey relied heavily on construction and tourism, which can be very unstable. So the Turkish lira started to lose its value somewhere around 2018-ish. I mean, for a while, the Central Bank of Turkey raised interest rates to battle that, but against Erdogan's wishes. And then we saw a period of the governors of the central bank where we cycled through three or four of them in a matter of months until someone finally did Erdogan's bidding, which was essentially to lower interest rates in the face of a falling lira. And that just took up inflation. And he's kept doing that against all sort of standard thinking in economics. He keeps lowering interest

rates. I mean, it's a vision that it's just a lot of people are shaking their heads. How popular is he in the country right now? Quite. And I think, again, it has a lot to do with how adept he's been at building a kind of image for himself. He taps into people's sense of, you know, the anti-globalism and the neoliberal order and the elites and Erdogan is fighting for the everyman or every person. I guess, help me understand this, Adnan, if he's kind of doing this with the economy, the interest rates, the response to the earthquake wasn't great. I guess, why is he still so popular? It's not entirely a mystery, I don't think. I mean, there's a lot of schools of thought on this. One of them being that he's very adept at tapping into the sort of the issues of the moment. Like right now, he's transitioning himself into a nationalist

or in the past, he's also transitioned himself into a humanist because he opened the borders for refugees. So he finds the moment and the issues of the moment that are going to be, that are really going to resonate with voters. And he taps into those. But he's also, at the same time, you know, he's charismatic. He has built Turkey. I mean, Turkey's transformed under his leadership. You can't take that away from him. So there is that trust in him. he's charismatic. He has built Turkey. I mean, Turkey's transformed under his leadership. You can't take that away from him.

So there is that trust in him. And there is also that populist side and that side of, you know, playing up to people's sense that Turkey is a great nation and should be independent and sit at the table with the great nations of the world. And he's really tapped into that

sort of imperial legacy as well. We'll be back after this message. So this Sunday, there's a runoff election. Erdogan is running and there's an opposition leader running against him. So what do we need to know about him, who he is and the party that he's leading? Kemal Kilic Daroglu, the opposition leader, he has a much more traditional trajectory when it comes to politics. He started off this regular, you know, as an economist, he was trained as an economist, entered the civil service, did extremely well as a civil servant, moved his way up. He's a kind of a standard politician in that sense, a little bit boring, but also from

this minority group, the Alevis, who faced a lot of persecution. So he tends to be much more of a consensus builder. And he's spoken a lot about, you know, minority groups having their say, giving voice to minority groups in Turkey. And how are his politics different from Erdogan's? He's much more of an institutionalist. You know, he very much wants to see Turkey as part of Western democracies. He very much wants to see Turkey in the European Union and much more of a centrist when it comes to economics as well. So he's sort of the foil to Erdogan's nationalist and his sort of economic unorthodoxy.

He's the exact opposite of that. But I will say, and we can talk about this as well, is he's turned much more nationalist in his rhetoric, almost ultra-nationalist to some degree, in this election. And there are a number of reasons for that. The refugee issues become huge politically in Turkey. We're talking about 3.7 million, and that's by official figures, unofficially much more than that. Some people have gone as high as 5 million refugees in Turkey. So that issue resonates. It's going to be a huge issue for the international community to try to deal with. But certainly it's become a political issue as well. Oddly, with Kilic Darullu taking it on from the extremely right-wing perspective, Erdogan, interestingly, over the years, because he did open Turkey's borders, and I think there was much more of a play towards the region speaking,

because Erdogan fancies himself, I think, a leader of the Muslim world, and a lot and most of these refugees are from Muslim countries. We're talking about Afghanistan and, of course, Syria. So he fashions himself as a regional leader. So it's been an interesting reversal. We see Erdogan sort of playing that role, whereas Kilicdaroglu has very much played the far right role. Adnan, why does this election matter outside of Turkey? Yeah, I mean, for a number of reasons. And that refugee issue, of course, part of it plays into that. We are, as we go forward in this world and i think we can all

agree where you know we're going to just see more and more migration and turkey is geographically just so central i had a smuggler in turkey say to me once all roads lead to istanbul so we're talking about you know smuggling routes from central asia from the middle east um afghans pakistanis you know everybody africa everybody comes through turkey it kind of bridges the middle east and europe it's it's a very central location it's it's it's some people like to say it's the center of the universe and you know but it's also that geography is a curse in a way right i mean makes it it makes it prone to a lot of different forces that are constantly pulling on it and pulling on it in different directions.

So I think, you know, Turkey can play a really positive role in the world. Like we saw this in the grain deal that it made with the Russians, facilitating the grain deal that allowed the export of grains from Ukraine. But also at the same time, it can play this huge spoiler role, right? And we saw this in the NATO issues with Finland and Sweden joining NATO, and Sweden still hasn't. And that has to do with Turkey, largely Turkey, to some degree, Hungary as well, I think. But Turkey can play both roles because at the moment where it stands right now, it's not going to be an agenda setter, but it can certainly be a spoiler or it can certainly be a facilitator.

I want to come back to Ukraine, which you mentioned a little bit earlier. How has Turkey been responding to the war in Ukraine? And what could this election maybe change about that? Turkey's managed to thread a very fine needle on this. It's walked a fine line on this. It's managed to keep a close relationship with Russia and Putin in particular. I think, you know, when we look at the authoritarianism of something, someone like Erdogan and the authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin, you know, experts have long said that one of the things with authoritarians is the personalization

of their relationship. So we've seen a very close relationship between Erdogan and Putin. And because of that, he's been able to broker these deals like the Great Deal. But at the same time, you know, he's not really abiding by sanctions. I mean, meaning Turkey is not abiding by sanctions. By like the Western countries have put sanctions on Russia. Western sanctions, exactly. Economic sanctions on Russia, etc. We've seen Russian oligarchs really settle in in Turkey. Potentially, there's been allegations of them hiding their money there by buying property. Yachts have been sort of super yachts. These super yachts have been found there. So, you know, it hasn't stepped over the line enough that the US and European nations are going to start penalizing Turkey, but it's certainly been dancing along that line. So what happens to these international relationships, particularly for Western countries, other NATO countries, if Erdogan does win on Sunday? The key issues I don't think will change so much, right? For instance, Ukraine. I think that there will be a sense of uncertainty. Again, we have a lot more going on in the world as well, beyond Ukraine and Russia, of course. You know, the relationship with the EU

in particular is potentially going to worsen. You know, Erdogan has always been very critical towards the EU and is very open to using some penalizing measures, for instance, or threatening to open up the border to refugees. So I think there's a lot of concern as the war between Russia and Ukraine moves forward that, you know, Turkey could shift more towards Russia, for instance. And if there is a need for negotiations, play a stronger role for Russia. Yeah. Adnan, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you. It was really nice to be here, Menaka. That's it for today. I'm Menaka Raman-Wilms. Our interns are Wafa El-Rayis and Tracy Thomas. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Leaman-Wilms. Our interns are Wafa L. Reyes and Tracy Thomas.

Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.