Turkey’s inflation crisis has become a central theme in the campaign a month before the country holds a general election on May 14, with six major opposition parties fielding Kemal Kılıcdaroglu as the strongest challenger yet to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But analysts say dissatisfaction with Erdogan’s handling of the economy won’t automatically translate into votes for Kılıcdaroglu, especially given that cultural issues loom large in Turkish politics.
When Erdogan finally launched his presidential campaign on April 11, more than two weeks after the secular CHP leader Kilicdaroglu, his focus on economic promises was telling. “We will bring inflation down to single digits and we will definitely save the country from this problem,” Erdogan told his supporters at a stadium in Ankara.
Turkey certainly needs savings from inflation. Growth is solid, but the latest official figures show inflation remained at more than 50% year-on-year in March, after hitting a quarter-century peak of more than 85% in October.
“Few doubt that the real numbers are much higher. The actual experience of ordinary civilians is much more dire,” said Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey expert at St. Lawrence University and the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.
The Turkish lira fell to an all-time low against the dollar in March, the latest in periodic lira declines in the currency and inflation crisis that has plagued the Turkish economy since 2018.
Experts blame the crisis on Erdogan’s belief, contrary to all economic evidence, that high interest rates fuel inflation and his decision to cut rates at a time when tighter monetary policy was needed to curb inflation.
“It’s really tragic.”
All of this marks a significant shift from the economic outlook of his early administration, when Western commentators praised Erdogan as a forward-thinking reformer.
President Erdogan’s moderate Islamist AKP party achieved an extraordinary feat in the 2003 Turkish elections, defeating the secular hegemony that modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had consolidated in the 1920s. Turkey’s economic crisis in 2001 was a major factor in the AKP’s victory, and when Erdogan became prime minister in 2003, he set about reviving the economy and turning it into a great power.
Buoyed by IMF support and a strong European economy, Turkey’s GDP growth averaged 7.2 percent from 2002 to 2007. This brought with it many working-class, socially conservative Muslim voters in Turkey’s Asian region, central Anatolia, Mr. Erdogan’s core constituency.
But over the past five years, inflation and a currency crisis have affected all segments of Turkish society, from Istanbul’s Europhile bourgeoisie to devout working-class voters in the Anatolian heartland.
“The daily life of the Turkish people is being squeezed in a very fundamental way,” Eisenstat said. “Those who consider themselves middle class have a very hard time maintaining a basic standard of living. And for the majority of Turks, who in the best of circumstances live week to week, month to month; The situation has become really dire, and even putting food on the table has become a huge struggle.”
Unreliable polls?
Opinion polls show that the president is losing support in the current economic climate. President Erdoğan and the AKP have repeatedly sought re-election over the past two decades, but the latest Media Poll poll shows Mr Kilikdaroglu with a slight lead in the first round of voting, with 42.6% to Mr Erdogan’s 41.1%.
“I want change,” Selman Deveci, a voter in Konya, a traditionally AKP-backed region in the Anatolian regional heartland, told the Financial Times. “They’ve messed up the economy.”
But Debech was also unimpressed with the opposition. “I don’t trust them.”
Analysts say there appears to be widespread disillusionment with Erdogan and skepticism toward the opposition, casting doubt on Kiricdaroglu’s lead in some opinion polls.
“I don’t think we have much faith in the polls,” Eizenstat said. “Many outside observers tend to simply assume that people will leave the party because the economic situation is bad, but that’s not necessarily the case. I think a significant number of AKP supporters will return to the party after considering other options.”
After all, many Western observers underestimated Erdoğan last time in 2018, when then-CHP leader Muharrem Ince put Erdoğan in a second run-off after a vigorous election campaign. I expected it to push. In the end, Mr. Erdogan won 53% of the votes in the first round, giving him the necessary majority and 10 million more votes than Mr. Ince.
culture war
The influence of the economy on election outcomes is one of the oldest rules in politics, most famously encapsulated in the cliché, “It’s the economy, idiot!”, a mantra that Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville coined for his staff when he challenged George H. W. Bush for the US presidency and won in the midst of a deepening recession in 1992. But not all election campaigns are conducted in conditions like the US in 1992, when rampant political tribalism was confined to the past and the future.
Cracks have appeared in Turkish society since the early 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk severed the deep ties between Islam and politics that had defined the Ottoman Empire.
Since coming to power, Erdogan has slowly but surely returned Islam to the center of Turkish national life, weakening Kemalism (named after the secularist philosophy espoused by the republic’s founders) and the “deep state” military and legal establishment that had long supported it.
The 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul drew international attention to anger from secularists in Turkey’s capital region, but Erdogan remains popular among his millions of supporters in the Anatolian heartland, many of whom welcomed his victory over the old regime.
This cultural divide has many characteristics that differ from those seen in Europe and the United States. However, Eisenstadt stressed that “the issue of culture wars is as much an issue in Turkey as it is in the West.”
And changes in technology over the past decade have amplified this phenomenon, he added. “In a world of social media, where we experience the world through our politically chosen news sources, political identity and ideology play a bigger role in voting behavior than ever before. Only in Turkey As we have seen in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom.”
Yet as a presidential candidate uniting diverse opposition forces, Kilicdaroglu has taken a much more pragmatic stance on Turkey’s culture wars than his CHP predecessors.
Last year, Kılıçdaroglu reversed the CHP’s position on women’s headscarves, a signature issue in Turkish politics. Atatürk discouraged their wearing in the 1920s and his successors gradually introduced an explicit ban in public institutions that Erdogan has since rolled back in several stages.
Not only did Prime Minister Kilicdaroglu say the CHP “made mistakes in the past” by supporting restrictions on the headscarf, but she also supported constitutional reform to guarantee women’s right to wear the headscarf.
This strategy will make it easier for Prime Minister Kurtzdaroglu to focus on the economy, suggested Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, head of the German Marshall Fund’s Ankara office. “The culture war is the main driving force in Turkish politics, but it is not the only one,” he said. “Kurçdaroglu has used conciliatory rhetoric to soften the effects of polarization, so the economy will play a more important role than usual in this election.”
Return to orthodoxy?
Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s economic platform is a return to orthodox monetary policy and central bank independence. Beyond that, the opposition has avoided going into the nitty-gritty details of economic policy.
But while a simple answer to the inflation crisis, a return to economic orthodoxy is not so easily accepted by Turkey’s opposition parties.
“The opposition is promising trust and a return to normalcy, but their problem is that trust and normalcy require short-term pain,” Eissenstat said. “So they want to keep the debate about why Turkey got into this mess going and keep the elections as a referendum on Erdogan without really questioning what would happen if the opposition took power.”
“What Turkey needs is to bring economic confidence and get back to the basics of governance,” he concluded. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s popular or easy.”
