After more than twenty years in office, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has just been made to realise that he could in fact be democratically unseated, something he previously thought was impossible in view of his ironclad hold on the Turkish politics with the unwavering support of his fiercely loyal Islamic Justice and Development (AKP) party. For a man who has survived several coups, bloody and otherwise, and has effectively blocked every avenue for his democratic replacement, staying continuously in power has become something akin to his birthright…..CONTINUE READING...CONTINUE READING
Erdogan became a recurring decimal in modern Turkish politics for almost half a century. Born in 1954 in Istanbul into a poor family, by dint of hard work and liberal dosage of luck and crass opportunism, he rose through the ranks of Turkey’s politics with all its attendant risks and plumbs to become President, an office which he now treats as his own inheritance. No doubt, he once enjoyed peculiar charismatic appeal from amongst the regular Turks, being once a budding footballer; he has now certainly overstayed his welcome.
Even though he became the President in 2014, he has long been at the core of Turkish politics. He came into the political limelight in 1994 when he was elected as the Mayor of Istanbul where he served for four years. Thereafter, he became a Member of Parliament under the banner of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 2003 where he became the Prime Minister and in 2014 quickly became the 12th President of Turkey at a time when the position was still largely ceremonial. He thereafter instigated a Referendum in 2017 which moved the country away from the parliamentary system to the presidential system of government whereupon the Turkish president became an Executive one with enormous powers concentrated in the Presidency.
People argue that the Turks should have seen all the tell-tale signs of a future autocrat in Erdogan. As the Mayor of Istanbul, then a member of the Islamist Welfare Party, he was found guilty and imprisoned for four months for inciting religious hatred and banned from holding political office thereafter. He subsequently renounced religious extremism and formed the Islamic Justice and Development Party, the AKP. Because of the ban, his deputy Ziya Gokalp, became the Prime Minister in a holding position during which period he used his executive prerogative to pardon Erdogan, his political boss.
Once Erdogan found his way back to Parliament through a seat from a contrived bye-election, he promptly replaced Gokalp and assumed the prime minister position himself. In spite of the controversies that trailed his election including allegations that be lied about graduating from a university which did not exist at the date he claimed he graduated, he still went on to win two subsequent elections terms and his tenure witnessed remarkable economic boom that saw great strides in infrastructural developments which bolstered Turkish desire for some “European-ness” coupled with some measure of political stability in spite of serious doubts raised about Turkey’s credentials for EU membership in the key areas of human rights and religious tolerance. It was also noted that he was taking Turkey further away from the Ataturk’s tradition of secularism alongside Islam.
Since then, Erdogan has been winning election after election, either by hook or by crook, despite the mounting complaints about his insipient dictatorship and his undeniable tilt towards petty imperialism as demonstrated by his questionable involvement in Syria and Iran in obvious disregard of the well-established pro-EU commitment in a supposed Western-type democracy.
His draconian anti-opposition policies saw to his banning of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and several other tools of social media for a while. He even became more desperate after the fantasy coup of 2016 which created for him ample opportunity to crackdown on thousands of actual and perceived opposition elements against his iron-fisted autocracy. Since then, he bestrides the Turkish politics like a colossus, unbeatable at the polls.
However, his hold on Turkish politics seriously began to ebb after the near collapse of the Lira, the national currency, while the economy tanked woefully due to several factors both domestic and external. So weak did the Turkish economy became that when the country suffered two major earthquakes recently, the government could not effectively respond to the humanitarian needs of the citizens which expectedly sparked a spate of nationwide protestations.
Just like it was in Nigerian after the “Endsars” revolt, the Turkish youth actively resorted to uncontrollable dissents, loudly calling for the downfall of Erdogan government. Signs of his political vulnerability started to manifest in several local elections that were held since then with the ruling AKP party steadily losing grounds. That somehow set the tone for the election that was held on Sunday the 14th May 2023.
For the first time in many years, the Erdogan presidency saw a real threat. Something ominous took place within the opposition fold as different parties suddenly saw tactical reasons to come together under the leadership of the 74-year-old Kemal Killcdaroglu, to electorally dislodge Erdogan and his AKP party at the polls. Turkish youth, working under the newly formed political alliance, decided to take their angst to the polls.
Of course, the government panicked in the face of the formidable cooperation amongst the hitherto irreconcilably divided and mutually antagonistic opposition parties. There is no better arena in which the saying that “unity is strength” makes more sense than in the theatre of multi-party politics.
With the result already released by the Electoral authorities as at the time of writing, a run-off election has become almost inevitable as none of the parties was able to scale through the constitutional threshold of 50% of the votes to win. It is true that the ruling party still managed to score a larger percentage of the votes cast but the important thing is that for the first in modern Turkish history, a runoff has been forced on the otherwise all-conquering ruling party. Whatever happens from the May 28th re-run, a clear warning has already been posted to Erdogan that it is no longer business as usual.
It is the hope that Nigerian opposition parties take the evolving lesson from Turkey seriously. Giving the very vulnerable electoral situation that the ruling APC found itself following the lackluster performances of the outgoing President Muhammadu administration, a defeat was quite imminent, but the party survived largely because of the ineffective strategies of the lone-fighting opposition parties.
Relying heavily on the failure of the ruling party to build such an enormous electoral expectation of victory amongst the population was naïve and without tact. To make things even easier for the opposition, the outgoing Buhari administration introduced a rash of bad and provocative polices that could only have weakened the party in power, but it was however reckless for the opposition parties to rely on that calculation because ours is not a typical two-party system where the failure of the ruling party automatically signals victory for the opposition party.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, dethroning a ruling party in a multi-party environment is usually possible through functional alliances unlike the case in the binary two-party situation. Ceaselessly mouthing the failures of the ruling party on social media and elsewhere in a cacophony was not enough. Collaboration amongst opposing parties with one voice matters.
But what did we see? Instead of the opposition parties coming together as their Turkish counterparts just did, they foolishly fought the ruling party separately thereby dissipating their political capitals. It is funny that opposition leaders who did not deem it necessary to unite to fight at the polls are now gambling together with election petitions anchored mainly on abstract people’s expectations. Anything to learn from the Turks?…..CONTINUE READING
