April 29, 2024
Turkey’s Democracy Is Down but Not Out
Last month’s local election results in Turkey delivered a harsh blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Just under a year since the presidential election, in which Erdogan won another five years in power, Turkey’s opposition party—the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—won big victories in the majority of the country’s largest cities, including Istanbul, the economic powerhouse of Turkey. Thirty-five provincial capitals (out of a total of 81) now have a CHP mayor, while the AKP-led People’s Alliance has just 24. The CHP also scraped past Erdogan’s party in the country overall, garnering 37.8 percent of the votes compared to 35.5 percent for the AKP.
The CHP’s victory is a hopeful signal of the resilience of Turkish democracy and its electoral system. After the CHP’s disappointing results in last year’s presidential election, where it only managed a little over 47 percent of the vote, its share of the national vote came as a shock to many experts. It was a surprising achievement, not least because nearly 90 percent of Turkey’s media is in the hands of the government or its supporters, granting the ruling party a lopsided advantage when campaigning.
Turkey has a long way to go before it can be considered a liberal democratic country. Its democracy has declined precipitously in the past 15 years; but this election signals that there are pockets of resilience.
For years, analysts have argued that Turkey has slid away from democracy and given way to authoritarian politics—with Erdogan leading the way. A single election does not erase years of calculated efforts to centralize power and remove checks and balances on the president. And yet, despite an uneven playing field, the opposition largely prevailed. Even Erdogan himself acknowledged that “regardless of the results, the winner of this election is primarily democracy.”
There may or may not be any real feeling behind the president’s statement. But the fact that he gave these conciliatory remarks on the night of the election is, in itself, surprising. Erdogan is not in immediate political peril himself. The next presidential elections will not take place until 2028. But it turns out that he has less space in which to maneuver than some analysts previously assumed.
Read the full article from Foreign Policy.
More from CNAS
-
Will Europe Send Combat Forces to Ukraine?
Commentary
Any idea that Europe could deter Russia from breaking a cease-fire and renewing its attack with the presence of a light peacekeeping force is fantasy....
By Franz-Stefan Gady
-
Israel Strikes Gaza as Efforts for a Truce Intensify; Trump Envoy to Visit Ukraine
Video
Jim Townsend, an adjunct senior fellow in the CNAS Transatlantic Security Program, joins to discuss reports that President-elect Donald Trump’s envoy to Ukraine intends to vis...
By Jim Townsend
-
Putin’s Point of No Return
Commentary
The United States and Europe must invest in resisting Russia now or pay a far greater cost later....
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Michael Kofman
-
What Can Europe do in Syria?
Podcast
After 54 years of brutal rule in Syria, the al-Assad family’s reign came to an end last week. Following 13 years of devastating civil war, which saw over a million refugees fl...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Jim Townsend
