Turkish Presidential Election Polls Show Challenger Ten Points Above Erdogan

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday bumped the June presidential election ahead to May 14, ostensibly to avoid conflicting with the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and university entrance exams.

If it was actually a ploy to speed-run through the campaign before his chief opponent can build momentum, it appears to have failed, because weekend polls showed challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu leading Erdogan by ten points.

Reuters noted that a string of recent polls showed Kilicdaroglu leading by up to 15 points. Aksoy Research’s poll on Saturday was the first taken since a coalition of six opposition parties united behind Kilicdaroglu last week and formally announced his candidacy. Aksoy found him leading Erdogan — 55.6 percent to 44.4 percent — while his coalition led Erdogan’s ruling AKP party in the legislative race 44.1 percent to 38.2 percent.

The obvious reason cited by many observers for Erdogan’s slide in the polls was his government’s poor handling of the deadly February 6 earthquakes, but Reuters pointed to polls that showed the quake response is not really devastating for AKP, because almost as many Turkish voters blame shoddy work by contractors for the disaster as blame government regulators.

The Washington Post saw the earthquakes as a force multiplier for growing public discontent with Erdogan’s 20 years of increasingly authoritarian and Islamist rule, even if the latest polls found voters willing to spread blame for the 46,000 earthquake dead:

The earthquake last month has certainly bettered the odds for Erdogan’s opponents. Turks can see how the president’s policies have exacerbated the effects of the disaster. The president’s authoritarian bargain with Turkish society — based on the promise of affluence, good governance, and global prestige — lies in ruins. But what to replace it with?

The challenge for the opposition will be convincing Turkish citizens that they can provide good governance while dismantling the country’s one-man regime. It won’t be easy. In 2017, Erdogan consolidated power in a constitutional referendum, promising a more efficient government. Now, it turns out that his hyper-centralized approach created more dysfunction than anyone had imagined. State institutions are stacked with incompetent loyalists who won’t take decisions without a word from the man at the top. Construction-driven growth has created a rotten system of patronage. Institutions are hollowed out, including AFAD, the disaster relief agency. The Turkish Red Crescent once enjoyed a reputation as a reliable helper in times of crisis. Now, it is mired in scandal and mismanagement.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Saturday found plenty of men and women on the Turkish street who blamed Erdogan personally for both lackluster disaster response, caused in no small part by ruinous economic policies that left his government short on vital emergency resources, and for the climate of lax oversight that allowed so many contractors to build supposedly quake-resistant structures that went down like houses of cards.

The WSJ noted that Erdogan’s opponents are turning up the heat against him by coordinating private relief efforts that make the incumbent administration look even more ineffectual and irrelevant. The opposition-controlled government of Istanbul has been particularly aggressive in criticizing “the shortcomings of the central government,” as Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu put it.

“When there is no coordination in the field, the most common experience was in fact the earthquake victims’ extreme loss of trust. The most striking consequence of this in that moment of despair was their expression of anger toward their state,” said Imamoglu, who was a runner-up for the CHP party’s presidential nomination.

Imamoglu survived a vigorous effort by Erdogan to ban him from politics and became one of the vice-presidential candidates running on Kilicdaroglu’s ticket. Kilicdaroglu has said he will name an additional vice president from each of the five parties joining with CHP to support him.

Kilicdaroglu’s promising start could be derailed if the six-party Nation Alliance falls apart, and that could easily happen because of a seventh party, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). 

HDP is the third-largest party in Turkey, but several members of Kilicdaroglu’s coalition have threatened to bolt if he invites HDP to join, due to allegations that it has ties to the militant Kurdish separatist organization known as the PKK. The Nation Alliance could fracture even if Kilicdaroglu is seen as negotiating too eagerly with HDP to gain its support without giving it a seat at the coalition’s table.

Erdogan’s critics suspect he will exploit these tensions by provoking civil unrest that frightens voters into preferring the stability of his long-established rule instead of taking chances with a new administration. He is also reaching out to fringe Islamist parties for support, warning them that Kilicdaroglu is serious about returning Turkey to the secular government model of the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

“So what’s on the agenda of this coalition? There is only political ambition on their agenda. There is a division of rank and position. There is an account of how to plunder the country’s resources. There is an intention to disrupt our national unity and solidarity,” Erdogan said of the Nation Alliance in a videoconference with senior AKP officials on Saturday.

A few hours after Erdogan made those remarks, the extreme Islamist “Free Cause Party” announced it would not run its own candidate in the May election but would support Erdogan instead.

The UK Spectator noted an unusual spectacle last Monday, the day Kilicdaroglu was announced as the Nation Alliance candidate: a huge portrait of Ataturk was unfurled above the headquarters of the Good Party (IYI). 

IYI is an Islamist and ultranationalist member of the Alliance whose leader Meral Aksener literally walked away from the table because Kilicdaroglu is a disciple of Ataturk’s secularist philosophy, and he is not a Sunni Muslim, the majority religion of Turkey. He is an Alevi, a persecuted minority whose faith combines elements of Islam, Sufi mysticism, and Christianity.

Aksener marched right back to the table when her voters decided Kilicdaroglu was the best chance they had to get rid of Erdogan. Erdogan, a fiery campaigner who styles himself as the great defender of Sunni Islam and the would-be sultan of a revived Ottoman Empire, can be expected to exploit these dynamics to show his own voters that Kilicdaroglu is an enemy of Islamist government.