The Foreign Policy Implications of Turkey's Elections
More Erdogan.
Turkey is holding national elections on May 14, and for the first time in twenty years President Erdogan is facing a serious challenge at the ballot box. The opposition has unified behind Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a mild mannered career politician from a religious minority group.
So who is Kilicdaroglu? And does he stand a chance to beat an entrenched and charismatic authoritarian? I recently spoke with political scientist Lisel Hintz of The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies about Turkey’s elections and the man who may replace Erdogan as President of Turkey. She answers these questions and more.
The podcast episode is freely available and the full transcript (below) is unlocked for paying subscribers. Enjoy!
Mark Leon Goldberg: So it would seem that Kemal Kilicdaroglu is posing the most serious challenge to Erdogan's hold in power in decades. Who is he and what do listeners need to know about him?
Lisel Hintz: I would say that there have been numerous challenges to Erdogan’s hold on power. You had the Gezi Park protests in 2013. You had the coup attempt in 2016. But in terms of the ballot box, through elections, the head of the Republican People's Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is certainly posing the biggest threat. And I think that Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, the AKP, are really trying to use all of the tools in their toolkit to try to make sure that he doesn't succeed in that endeavor.
So Kilicdaroglu, although he has been the head of the CHP — the Republican People's Party — for quite a while, has been challenged a couple of times internally. He's been criticized quite a lot on his policies. He's not considered super charismatic. A couple of months ago, when he was selected as the unity candidate among the six opposition parties for the table of six, as they are called, there was a lot of criticism that he's not the person to beat out Erdogan. He wasn't polling as high as some of the popular CHP mayors — like the mayor of Istanbul or the mayor of Ankara. They were polling higher than Kilicdaroglu and it didn't seem as though he was really connecting with audiences or wasn't really able to be very inspiring in his messaging.
But I think that really turned around in the aftermath of the earthquakes. Kilicdaroglu was selected, there was a very contentious process. We saw one of the leaders of the opposition parties defect from the coalition. She came back rather quickly, but it was not smooth sailing by any means in terms of his nomination as the unity candidate.
But since the selection as head of the opposition, he's been able to achieve some things that I think people didn't expect. And one is to find some way to deal with some of the identity politics that the AKP, the ruling party, has been trying to use to split the opposition. On that, I mean, the Kurdish issue.
The fact is that Kiricdaroglu is an oddity. He comes from Dersim — he's a Kurdish Alevi — which was a site of attacks against Alevis in the past.
Because he has this identity and because it has historically been a stigmatized identity, people don't often talk about the fact that they're Alevi and there are different definitions of what that is.
Mark Leon Goldberg Can you explain what that is?
Lisel Hintz So I've actually done a quite a lot of research on Alevism and there's different definitions by Alevis themselves. Some would say that they are a break off sect of Shia Islam. They worship Ali. They don't fast during Ramadan, so they're not Sunni Muslims. Others would say that they're actually not necessarily really Muslims at all, that it's more of a spiritual identity. Alevis tend to be quite leftist, quite progressive. Women and men worship together.
And then there will be those who say that it's not really a religion at all, it's much more of a cultural identity. One thing that I think is worth noting is that if you're born as an Alevi or you're coming from a region like Dersim, that is an identity that really sticks. And again, has been historically stigmatized. Alevis have been slaughtered under the Ottoman Empire. There was an incident of a lynching, a burning to death of Alevi poets and intellectuals in a hotel when they were gathering for a cultural gathering.
Last week, in response to the AKP's efforts to tarnish Kiricdaroglu as not a “good Muslim” — ‘Oh, you stepped on a prayer rug with your shoes on.' You're not one of us. You don't follow and respect our traditions. We don't want you as leader"‘ — he did this video where he just very plainly and genuinely and authentically says: "I'm an Alevi and I'm a Muslim and I have my own traditions and and I'm part of a group, but we should not succumb to the government's efforts to try to divide us. Let's unite, especially the youth. Let's get together and quit this identity politics stuff and really focus on more tangible issues."
So all that is to say he's someone who had a lot of strikes against him, but he's been able, in the wake of the earthquakes, to be a very stoic figure — a very uniting, calming, reassuring figure who refuses to be defeated by identity politics.
He has really struck the right tone in his messaging — very authentic and genuine, not the firebrand populist stuff that you get from Erdogan. But after 21 years of that, I think people are tired of it. I think a lot of people are tired of it. So he's really managing to strike a lot of the right notes in the last few months.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:07:55] So is it your view that the epic disaster of the earthquakes changed Turkish popular perceptions of what they wanted in a leader and this more stoic, more boring guy — to be honest — is someone that they might be looking towards in the wake of that disaster, more so than Erdogan? Or else how did that earthquake change electoral dynamics?
Lisel Hintz [00:08:24] I think it changed in a number of ways. I think first we have to look at what it did to the AKP. We'd already seen an economic crisis. We'd already seen the AKP weakened in its ability to use its media machine to spin the idea that there's not massive inflation and massive unemployment and all of these things. Rather, they send out messaging that Turkey's growing and engage in some populist financial handouts, they solve things that way.
[00:09:00] So you can you can use the media to do that for a while. And there the political economy of the media means that they have the ability to do so. You have all of these private holding companies that own private television stations, but also have banking interests, mining interests, and construction interests. That means that they are very closely tied to the government and show pro-AKP coverage in order to be able to get low interest loans, get the tender on the big construction project, and — which is really, really relevant to the earthquakes — look the other way when it comes to safety standards.
[00:09:35] What happened with the earthquakes is that not only had you had this failure of governance with the economic crisis — the government's mismanagement of the economy exacerbated that crisis — but you also had this clear, unconcealable failure to protect people, not only to just not respond. That's a whole other question of failure in disaster response, but the AKP fueled its political popularity on the back of this economic growth that was really, really heavily invested in construction and those construction projects were carried out, in a lot of cases, without proper labor safety standards.
[00:10:22] There were buildings that were built on areas where they were not supposed to have been — and we learned that after the 1999 earthquake and there were a lot of measures that were meant to be taken but were not implemented. And there were amnesty laws that were passed that meant that people could keep their buildings that were not up to code and just pay for it. So I think the absolute devastation, the grief, the frustration, the failure to respond, the tone Erdogan struck of, "Oh, if you're criticizing us, we're going to come after you", and then this crony capitalism that allowed these buildings to collapse — I think all of that really shifted opinions of the AKP for a lot of people.
[00:11:04] That wasn't the case for everybody. There wasn't the huge drop in the poll numbers that we thought we were going to see. But there's some. And then the other side is the opposition. And I think they have almost taken a card from Erdogan, who's a master of trading crisis into opportunity: we saw that with the coup attempt, we saw that with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The opposition has used this crisis as an opportunity for coming together, uniting, figuring out a way to get over the Kurdish issue — through some, "Ok some of us are going to talk about it, some of us aren't, we're going to try to convince the People's Democratic Party, that's the pro-Kurdish party, not to run their own candidate."
[00:11:40] Again, this kind of uniting message, but then really coming together with this narrative of, "We're not going to let them continue to run this country into the ground and we're going to find a way to build back and we're going to protect people in doing so, and we're going to create opportunities for youth." There are 7 million people in Turkey who are voting for the first time, who've grown up with nothing but Erdogan and the AKP, so that vote is a really important vote to get.
[00:12:08] I think the earthquakes further weakened and further destabilized the AKP's ability to continue this narrative that we're growing, we're good, and things are going to be fine. It provided an opportunity — the opposition smartly used those circumstances to put aside some of the infighting, put aside some of the identity politics stuff, and create some pretty — I think — attractive messaging for a lot of people.
[00:12:37] Now there's still a couple of candidates. it's not just two parties that we're talking about. But I think that that table of six that has since been able to attract a few other smaller opposition parties and, again, convince the pro-Kurdish party not to run their own candidate is showing some skill on their part that I think is attractive to a lot of people.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:13:00] So I do want to discuss with you the foreign policy implications of this election. But before we get there, I do also want to ask you about the role that runaway inflation is playing in this election. I think it's probably fair to say that in Turkey, like most democracies, foreign policy is not the issue that gets people out to the polls, it's kitchen table issues.
[00:13:26] Inflation in Turkey has been absolutely astonishing and runaway and the government's response to it has been the inverse of what Macroeconomics 101 teaches. Rather than raising interest rate, Erdogan has imposed his view that lowering interest rates in the face of surging inflation is the way to go and that seems not to be panning out. What's your expectation of how inflation may influence voter's preferences?
Lisel Hintz [00:13:53] That goes back a little bit to the economic crisis that I was talking about earlier. You can spin a narrative on television as much as you want, but when you can't buy onions, tomatoes, milk, and bread at the grocery store because inflation is so rampant, then I think you have a very serious problem that people are confronting on a daily basis. And that's very much what we've been seeing in some of the on-the-street reporting that is trying to provide an alternative narrative to the pro-government messaging.
[00:14:25] So I think the opposition has smartly picked up on that as well. You've got ads saying, "Oh, unhappy with the price of cheese, that the market? Well thank Erdogan for that." So they're honing in on, exactly as you said, quite literally kitchen table issues — not being able to put food on the table issues. Inflation has been a problem for years.
[00:14:48] As you said, the Central Bank is keeping the interest rates low. This is not only is a sign of mismanagement of the economy, but it's a sign of authoritarian institutional capture, in the sense that the Central Bank doesn't have autonomy. If the National Statistics Institute releases a particular number on inflation and Erdogan doesn't like it, well then someone in the leadership position is going to be gone the next day and someone else is going to come in.
[00:15:17] So I think the institutional control, the super highly consolidated executive presidency that put so much of power in Erdogan's hands, means that the Central Bank can't function on its own. It also means the Supreme Electoral Council can't function on its own, which is something that I think is going to be of immense importance on Election Day and certainly was in the 2018 and 2019 elections. In terms of investor confidence and attracting the kinds of financial flows that you would want, that's not a place where people want to necessarily be investing — if you don't have good governance, if you don't have autonomy of institutions.
[00:16:00] The whole point of the low interest rates is to fuel growth and exports. But that comes with this huge, huge problem of inflation. And you have this dynamic whereby you have a loss of investor confidence, you have a loss of partnerships, you have a loss of Turkey's reputation in terms of managing a concern with labor safety standards. There are all kinds of factors that go into why I think inflation is going to play a big role in the elections.
[00:16:32] I think it would have anyway without the earthquakes. But I think that the earthquakes really threw into perspective the ways in which that hyperauthoritarian consolidation has harmed the country. For example, the fact that disaster and emergency management is housed within the presidency and they weren't really able to respond quickly because there was a chokehold on dissemination of information. Everything was really in Erdogan's hands.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:17:02] So I do want to ask you about the foreign policy implications of this election. And I suppose there are two ways of asking or attacking this question. The first is: How do you suspect that Kilicdaroglu would differ from Erdogan? Also: If Erdogan wins, how do you suspect his foreign policy priorities may change? So, on that first question, what do we know about Kilicdaroglu's foreign policy preferences and how they might differ from those of Erdogan?
Lisel Hintz [00:17:40] Before we even whether it's Kiricdaroglu or whether it's Erdogan, we have to think about what winning the election means. That doesn't mean necessarily getting 50% of the vote. We have to recognize that these are certainly not fair elections in the sense that the playing field is tipped super heavily towards the government. But there's ways in which they might not be free either. And there's ways in which, again, with that connection of the government or of the ruling party to the Supreme Electoral Council, that they may be able to call this in their favor.
[00:18:09] And that's something that I really worry about, especially if you get people protesting in the street. How does the government respond? So just keeping that in mind, is really important.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:18:18] So do you think this will be a free and fair election? It sounds like not.
Lisel Hintz [00:18:22] Absolutely not. No. There's zero question that it can be fair. The idea of fair is that opposition parties have equal access to be able to compete: to have air time, to be able to get some kind of airplay for their messaging, that you don't have political opponents in jail, that you don't have journalists who provide critical reporting in jail. So that all means that this is not a fair election.
[00:18:50] We haven't had fair elections in Turkey since at least 2015. The idea is of an election being free means that people can vote freely for the candidate that they want without any kind of intimidation or coercion and that that ballot is then counted for the candidate for whom they cast it. I think that's also being called into question as well. We've had electoral violence in the Kurdish region in the past. We've had, when the 2018 general and presidential election was held under a state of emergency, ballot boxes moved at the last minute.
[00:19:29] It's tough to rig an election when you have election observers and a competitive authoritarian system in which — though it's relatively easy to steal two or three points, it's very difficult to steal seven or eight points. I think the best thing that those who want to ensure that the elections are as fair as possible, recognizing that they can't be 100% fair, is to try to have as many electoral observers on the ground as possible.
[00:19:58] I know the OECD is deploying; I know opposition parties are also going to be engaging in that they will stay by the ballot boxes, that they won't go home just because the AKP calls a victory early in the evening based on unofficial results. That's what happened in the 2018 elections and then the opposition candidate disappeared, almost literally. So I think that there's concern about the integrity of the elections and I think domestic and international observers being as vigilant as possible is going to be really, really important in that subject.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:20:28] That's really helpful, thank you. I actually had that written down on my list of questions and I'm glad that you you got into it. And on foreign policy, what do we know about Kiricdaroglu?
Lisel Hintz [00:20:40] So there are some issues on which I don't think we would see a whole lot of change. I think Russia is one of them. In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Erdogan seized this moment to be a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. That means not having to give up selling drones to Ukraine and it means not having to give up energy partnership with Russia. It also means being able to broker something like a Green Deal, which makes you look really important in the international community's eyes, or being able to object to Sweden and Finland's NATO membership — using their institutional position to do so and essentially becoming an international actor that really needs to be reckoned with.
[00:21:23] So I don't think that I see a big switch with Kiricdaroglu on Russia. It could be swayed in other directions because I do think that the relationship with the US would probably improve a little bit, not a whole lot. I think that Turkey has grievances with the US that are not ubiquitous but that are common across a lot of the opposition parties. Those include the US's arming of the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units — an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party — in the fight against ISIS. Most of Turkey sees that as a NATO ally arming a terrorist group against another NATO's allies. That's a big stumbling block.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:22:06] On that question, which is intricately linked to Erdogan's opposition of Sweden joining NATO: Do you see Kilicdaroglu also insisting on blocking Sweden's accession to NATO for similar reasons, or is there a softer or more nuanced stance that he takes that might permit Sweden's joining of NATO?
Lisel Hintz [00:22:35] I would expect to see Sweden's joining of NATO irrespective of who stays in. I think Erdogan's been holding out on that because it provides them with the opportunity of possibly being able to rally a little bit of a nationalist vote should the opportunity arise — it's looking more and more like it won't. But several months ago, Turkey was talking about another ground incursion in northern Syria and continuing to be able to rhetorically entrap international actors into saying "yes, these Kurdish actors are terrorists" provides more legitimacy for that ground incursion.
[00:23:11] It looks less likely that that's going to happen now, but one never knows. Things can change very quickly. So I would expect to see that either Kiricdaroglu or Erdogan would would be pretty okay with Sweden's membership post-election. I think that in the run up to the election, Erdogan is trying to hold all the cards in his hands that he can and not give anything away. But I don't see that he would have a lot of incentive to continue and to insist on that post election.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:23:38] It's interesting to me that post-election Erdogan or a President Kiricdaroglu, to your view wouldn't have a fundamentally different relationship with the United States or the West. It seems that Erdogan has been at profound loggerheads with the Biden administration in particular. But you're saying Kilicdaroglu probably wouldn't be too much different.
Lisel Hintz [00:24:05] So the differences would be personalities and institutionalization of foreign policy.Those those sound like they contradict each other, but what I mean by that is that you'd have a much less bellicose, aggressive rally around the flag: "We need to kind of assert our sovereignty at all costs and the US hates Muslims and so forth." I'm being a little bit flippant here, but there's a whole lot of different ways in which Erdogan's narrative can spin the US as undermining Turkey's interests.
[00:24:40] So I think the personalities will be different. I think Kiricdaroglu would be more amenable to particular forms of discussion and, again, wouldn't have that bellicose personality. I do think you would see a re-institutionalization of foreign policy, and by that I mean a strengthening of the Foreign Ministry. Under Erdogan you had that foreign ministry gutted in a lot of ways and you've had institutional bureaucrats replaced with relatively inexperienced lackeys. I know that affected US American relations when it was Serdar Kilic, who was the ambassador at the time.
[00:25:14] So I think that theprofessionalization of the Foreign Ministry will shape foreign policy in general, and particularly when it comes to the United States. But — it's a big but — again, the objection to the US arming of the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection, units is almost universal across Turkey. The objection to the US sanctioning Turkey because of its purchase of the S-400 missile defense system is pretty strong across Turkey. There, there'd be more of a willingness to work with the US.
[00:25:46] But there's a deep seated anti-Americanism that is not just on the conservative, pious, Sunni Muslim Right but also on the leftist, pro-labor, Social Democrat side when they remember the US pushing Turkey to be tough on labor unions and so forth during the Cold War with the Marshall Plan. So there's still some grievances that are going to linger. But I think that the style and the professionalization of foreign policy would be different. And I think that there are some major differences that we would see.
[00:26:19] I think we would see a much more reinvigorated EU track that would still get stuck on things like Cyprus. But I think one of the biggest criticisms that the EU and its various institutions — from the Commission to the European Court of Human Rights to other institutions — has had with Turkey has been the de-democratization, the jailing of academics and journalists and civil society workers and all that. I think that would substantially shift in a Kiricdaroglu opposition coalition.
[00:26:53] Now we can get all into all kinds of differences about, well, what if you have a parliamentary majority by the AKP and its coalition and then you have a presidency who is of another party? There could be gridlock, there could be all kinds of problems. I think that we could run into coalitions can fall apart. We've seen that in Turkey frequently. The nineties was plagued by coalitions falling apart, which is one of the reasons that the electorate was willing to give the AKP an opportunity and that none of the parties who'd been in parliament prior to the 2002 elections made it into the post-2002 parliament. So, again, I think the democratization is going to be something that shifts and that that will help EU foreign policy. But there'll be some sticking points.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:27:39] And on regional diplomacy, particularly in the Middle East, do you foresee there to be much difference between a Kiricdaroglu administration or a post-election Erdogan administration in terms of how they approach various like regional alliances and entanglements in the Middle East?
Lisel Hintz [00:28:01] I think one of the biggest shifts is going to be the support of Hamas. The support of Hamas by the AKP has obviously complicated relations with Israel, it's complicated relations with Saudi, it's complicated relations with the UAE. In the past couple of years, the AKP has tried to preside over a series of rapprochement with Saudi, the UAE, Egypt, even with Syria — it looks like at this point for different reasons.
[00:28:35] But there is a point at which it was really just Turkey and Qatar and Hamas together and they were really regionally isolated. Then you had the Abraham Accords, which compounded that geopolitical isolation. Then you look at economic crisis on top of that and you see that, "Maybe we should soften things with Saudi and maybe we should soften things with UAE and ask for investment and financial stimulus or credit swap line." So there's been a recognition that the strong identity politics of, "We are aligning with Hamas and we are lining up against some of these major Arab countries in the region" ran up against an economic crisis. We saw a rollback of that.
[00:29:24] I would say that while the AKP has been presiding over some of these rapprochement, you'll probably see an easier time of it under a coalition-led government. And one of the reasons for that is that though the Palestinian issue is something that resonates with a lot of Muslims, it resonates particularly with Erdogan's coalition. He's championed himself as protector of Palestinians. There have been numerous attempted rapprochement with Israel, nut every time Israel is attacking Muslims in the Al-Aqsa mosque or carrying out more settlements, incursions, that's something that the AKP takes on very strongly.
[00:30:07] It may not be the case that an opposition led coalition would take on that particular issue, that issue of justice for Sunni Muslims as strongly as the AKP did, which means that it might not derail any kind of future energy or security cooperation with Israel the way that it has for the AKP.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:30:29] Lastly — in the last minute — as we are headed towards this election on May 14th, is there anything it will be looking towards that will sort of suggest to you how the election might unfold? Are there any key inflection points in the weeks ahead of the election?
Lisel Hintz [00:30:46] I would be looking to see if the AKP, in fact, close the People's Democratic Party — the pro-Kurdish party — although at this point it doesn't really matter anymore. They have taken steps to run with another party, the Green Left Party. The People's Democratic Party has a history of having its institutions closed down and then reopening under another name and maybe a slightly tweaked platform.
[00:31:13] This particular iteration, the People's Democratic Party, is a bigger tent party. It's not a Kurdish nationalist party. It's a sort of radical democracy. gender equality, environment, LGBTQ, really progressive type of party. So I think I'll look for any kind of steps against them. On the Kurdish issue, I am really concerned about this. I'm really concerned about the AKP trying to fuel anti-Kurdish sentiment such that the opposition's ability to claim that they're going to be able to sort of stay united and run in this big tent coalition falls apart.
[00:31:54] I'm really concerned about violence. I'm really concerned about anti-Kurdish violence because we've seen that in the past in numerous elections. We saw it in 2015 when the AKP lost its parliamentary majority for the first time and then they reignited the war with the PKK. They took a hard nationalist, rhetorical and political turn, aligning with the Nationalist Action Party, which is an ultra nationalist anti Kurdish party. And then they got their parliamentary majority back. So they have seen that that's a card that they can play.
[00:32:26] So I'll be watching for moves against Kurdish political actors — for the use of the disinformation law or some of the other new laws that they've put in place to constrict the political atmosphere. The main thing that I'm really worried about is violence in the Kurdish region, because I think the AKP has seen in the past that that's been effective. And I worry that they're going to try and use that again.
Mark Leon Goldberg [00:32:49] Well, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for your time. This is very helpful.
Lisel Hintz [00:32:53] Thank you.
(transcript lightly edited for clarity)