He has locked up thousands of journalists, academics, leftists, Kurds, and other opponents. To compensate, he has gripped harder, changing the constitution (via a referendum) to create an executive presidency in which he rules by decree, installing loyalists in the courts and the military, and using legislative loopholes to cement his dominance over this country of 85 million people. That support has ebbed over the past decade as he has morphed into an autocratic religious nationalist, alienating secular Turks, minorities, and young people. (Like many people in Turkey who speak out against Erdoğan, she did not want to give her last name.) “We are all thinking of ways to leave the country if Erdoğan wins again.”Įrdoğan, 69, came to power in 2003 as a wildly popular, charismatic leader who promised to liberalize Turkey despite his conservative Islamist roots. “This is our only hope,” said Pelin, a 20-year-old first-time voter who attended a large opposition rally in Istanbul with her friends last weekend. And then there is the fear that Erdoğan has consolidated power so fully in Turkey already that a democratic victory against him might not be possible.Īyşegül Sert: Turkey’s trust in government has turned to dust Doing so would provide encouragement to other illiberal leaders around the world and put even greater stress on Turkey’s relations with the West. It might also be their last chance: Many Turks worry that if Erdoğan gets another five-year term, he will destroy the last vestiges of democracy in the country. They see the election as their best chance yet to pull Turkey’s century-old secular republic back from the brink of full-blown autocracy. The opposition senses that victory might be attainable. Kiliçdaroğlu has united a coalition of secularists, nationalists, and defectors from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party. Ahead of Turkey’s presidential election tomorrow, polling shows Erdoğan several points behind his main opponent, Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu, a grandfatherly former bureaucrat from the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP). The two crises-the earthquake and the economy-have left Turkey’s strongman leader in what might be his weakest political position yet after nearly 20 years in power. Shops had reopened in the buildings that weren’t destroyed, but the sidewalks were largely deserted inflation in Turkey topped 85 percent last fall, thanks largely to Erdoğan’s monetary policy. Only about half the town’s pre-quake population remains, the rest having fled or perished. Rubble had been cleared in some places, but work to replace the collapsed buildings had not begun. When I visited in April, modern apartment blocks were still abandoned, with deep cracks or gaping holes where whole walls had been sheared off-reminders of how shoddy construction, often the result of corruption, made the disaster’s toll worse. Since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks killed nearly 60,000 people across Turkey and Syria in February, the Turkish town of Pazarcık has stood as an example of the failures of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule.
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