Erdogan wins Turkish elections again with his Islamist and nationalist discourse
20 years in power, first as prime minister and then as president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has once again revalidated his presidential mandate in Turkey, this time more narrowly, against the opposition Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. The Turkish leader obtained 52% of the votes in the second round of the presidential elections, compared to 48% for the social democratic leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP).
The election results were considered final after the announcement by the official Turkish news agency Anadolu and the Anka news agency, which is closer to the opposition, acknowledged a new electoral victory for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
The duel was very important to know the next political course of Turkey, which has finally chosen to continue on the path of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's conservative Islamist and nationalist policies. Turkey's political campaign was highly polarised between Erdogan's supporters and his opponents, who were concentrated in a single candidacy practically headed by Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, who came close to a surprise and fought to the end for the election victory.
Turnout was high in both the first and the second round of the elections. A second round of elections that was expected to have a positive result for Erdogan according to the polls and the fact that the third candidate in discord, the right-wing Sinan Ogan, after being left out of the race for the presidency, asked for a vote for the Turkish president in this second round of elections, due to his clear conservative political affinity, in the face of the final duel between the two final candidates. "For the next five years we have been given the responsibility of running this country. I thank every member of the nation who has given us this task," Erdogan said after his election victory during a public speech in Istanbul, the city where he was born in 1954, where he served as mayor from 1994-1998 and where he has exercised his right to vote.
This was the first time a run-off election had been held in Turkey since 2017, when Recep Tayyip Erdogan changed the previous parliamentary system to a fully presidential one in which the president holds virtually all the power.
This time the opposition had mobilised in a uniform manner to oust the so-called "sultan" from power, due to the political and judicial persecution carried out by the Turkish government against opponents and the severe economic crisis that the Ottoman nation is going through, affected by high inflation and a significant depreciation of the Turkish lira. In this second round of elections, the CHP party denounced numerous alleged irregularities in the electoral process, such as the voting of names of people who were not present on the ballot papers, the registration of deceased people as voters, and the handing out of previously stamped ballot papers.
In the face of the pressing problems faced by the Turkish government, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has in recent years embraced a conservative Islamist policy with strong nationalist overtones in order to win the votes of certain sectors of Ottoman society to his side. In terms of foreign policy, the Turkish president has for years pursued a policy of expansionism and Turkish protagonism on the international stage. In fact, Turkey is actively involved in conflicts such as the civil wars in Syria and Libya, as well as intervening in an important way as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine to promote trade in Ukrainian grain, paralysed at the time by the war on Ukrainian territory, using in this case its good relations with both the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski.
Political analysts have seen these different fronts as a way to position Turkey as an important player on the international political chessboard and also as a way to divert the Turkish public's attention from the nation's domestic problems. One of these problems, along with the economic crisis and the harsh clash with the opposition, is the entrenched confrontation with the Kurdish population, persecuted by the Turkish state, which accuses various Kurdish sectors of terrorist acts in the south of the country. In fact, one of the pretexts used by Turkey for its incursion into northern Syria to take part in the Syrian civil war was to establish a control zone on the Turkish-Syrian border in order to persecute Kurdish elements, in addition to the fact that at the beginning of the conflict in the neighbouring country Erdogan took a stance against President Bashar al-Assad for the repression exercised by the Syrian state against the opposition. The Eurasian country's stance has recently changed in order to pursue a rapprochement with the Syrian government, possibly due to the good relations between the Turkish president and Vladimir Putin, al-Assad's great ally.
On the domestic front, after winning these elections, Recep Tayyip Erdogan now sets his political party the goal of regaining local control in Istanbul, Turkey's financial heartland, and in the capital Ankara, major cities that he lost in the last local elections to the opposition Republican People's Party.