Now that Erdogan has won Turkish Presidential election for the fifth consecutive term, he must gear up to face an almost equally tough challenge to secure his place as a leader who changed the course of history.
Modern Turkey, going to complete 100 years of its founding on October 29, 1923, by Kemal Ataturk, an officer of the Ottoman army after the country’s crushing defeat in World War-I, experienced a very exciting Presidential election on May 14. The election process was watched with considerable interest not only by Turks but also the rest of the world, particularly Europe, parts of Asia and the US. It was, perhaps, the toughest fight between Islamism and secularism after the emergence of Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) as the longest surviving executive head (first as Prime Minister and then as President) of Turkey after Ataturk.
Erdogan had to employ all kinds of tricks to emerge victorious with a 52.1 per cent vote share in a runoff election on May 28 for a fifth consecutive term of five years. It was not any easy victory as the country had been suffering from numerous problems, including hyper-inflation, with the Erdogan government unable to find effective remedies.
Erdogan’s main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party, secured 47.9 per cent of the votes polled despite being a very weak opposition candidate, representing the Kemalists.
There is a clear indication that the Turkish Presidential election result this time could have led to an end to the Erdogan era if the most popular Kemalist leader, Ekram Imamoglu, a former mayor of Istanbul, would have been there in the ring. He was jailed for two years in December 2022 on a charge of “insulting public figures”. It is alleged that Erdogan’s party influenced the court verdict against Imamoglu as he was considered the game changer by the ruling AKP. According to opinion polls, Imamoglu had acquired enough following to defeat Erdogan as he had trounced the ruling AKP in the Istanbul mayoral elections in 2019 with a comfortable margin, undoubtedly a surprising performance.
Erdogan reportedly had the realisation that a strong anti-incumbency factor was working against him. After all, he has been controlling the levers of power in his country since 2002. That is why he left nothing to chance and ensured that his candidature got projected in a manner so that the Turks were convinced that the country could slide into an uncontrollable chaos with the people’s economic woes getting worse if the Kemalist forces captured power again.
