Police in Turkey have arrested three people and identified 17 suspects believed to be involved in an alleged “Israeli porn” video doctored to feature the likeness of former presidential candidate Muharrem İnce.
İnce, of the small and relatively new Homeland Party, dropped out of the presidential race two days before the May 14 vote citing the alleged “deepfake” pornographic images, accusing the Turkish state under incumbent Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of failing to protect his “reputation.” İnce also expressed that he did not wish to be blamed for splitting the opposition in the event that Erdoğan was re-elected.
Turkey held the first round of its presidential race, featuring four candidates, on Sunday. While polls consistently showed Erdoğan falling as much as six percentage points behind his main opposition rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Erdoğan significantly outperformed the polls and won the race. He received about 49 percent of the vote, however — below the 50-percent threshold to avoid a runoff against Kılıçdaroğlu.
A woman votes at a polling station in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday, May 14, 2023. Voters in Turkey go to the polls on Sunday for pivotal parliamentary and presidential elections that are expected to be tightly contested and could be the biggest challenge Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces in his two decades in power. (AP Photo)
Independent observers with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) condemned Sunday’s election as insufficiently free or fair.
“I regret to note that the election administration’s work was lacking in transparency, as well as the overwhelming bias of the public media and the limitations to freedom of speech,” Ambassador Jan Petersen, head of the team from OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), said on Monday.
Kılıçdaroğlu’s coalition formally lodged complaints citing irregularities in the counting of thousands of ballot boxes this week.
Turks will return to the polls on May 28 to choose between the two candidates.
İnce appeared on the ballot, as he dropped out too soon before the election to be removed. He was a longtime member of the CHP before leaving and founding the Homeland Party in 2021, so election observers expected most of his voters to be friendlier to the CHP’s secularist, nationalist politics than to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its internationalist Islamism. The fourth candidate was Sinan Oğan, a nationalist politician formerly of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which regularly caucuses with the AKP in the Turkish Parliament; his votes are expected to go to Erdoğan unless he chooses to endorse Kılıçdaroğlu.
In bombastic remarks on May 10, İnce announced that he would step out of the race as a result of the deterioration of political conditions in the country, citing the alleged pornographic materials.
“I was a member of parliament for five terms. I have been fighting in politics for over 40 years. What I have seen in the last 45 days, I have not seen in the last 45 years,” İnce asserted, according to the secularist newspaper Cumhuriyet. “Fake receipts, fake images … they cut an image from an Israeli porn site, cut off my head and put it on there.”
“The Turkish Republic could not protect my reputation. This country’s prosecutors, the media, security could not protect my reputation,” the former candidate asserted, reportedly blaming Philadelphia-based cleric Fethullah Gülen for the disinformation. Gülen, once an Erdoğan ally, is now one of Erdoğan’s most consistent political punching bags, blamed for a variety of ills in the country including the alleged failed coup against the current president in 2016.
Kılıçdaroğlu, who came out in İnce’s defense, blamed the Russian government for the alleged deepfakes.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main opposition Republican People’s Party leader, speaks to the media in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, June 26, 2018, two days after elections in Turkey. Kilicdaroglu maintained that the ruling party’s loss of its majority would cripple president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo)
“Dear Russian friends, you are behind the fabrications, conspiracies, deepfake content and tapes exposed in this country yesterday,” Kılıçdaroğlu wrote in a message on Twitter last week. “If you want the continuation of our friendship after May 15, take your hands off the Turkish state.”
“We strongly reject such statements,” top Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response. “We officially declare: there can be no talk of any interference … If someone provided Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu with such information, they are liars.”
Erdoğan, in turn, condemned Kılıçdaroğlu for attacking Russia and accused him of taking “instructions” from leftist American President Joe Biden.
Turkish President and People’s Alliance’s presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan gestures to supporters during an election campaign rally in Ankara, Sunday, April 30, 2023. Presidential elections in Turkey are scheduled to take place on May 14. (Ali Unal/AP)
“Biden instructed that ‘We have to bring Erdoğan down.’ I know this,” Erdoğan said last week.
The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported on Thursday that Turkish police arrested three people – “Mehmet Galoğlu, a municipal worker in the western province of İzmir, Salim Faruk Kızılırmak, a tradesman also in İzmir, and businessman Ozan Özgür Doğru” – in response to the alleged İnce deepfake. They were among 17 suspects detained in the last week, 11 of whom are facing potential charges of forgery, blackmail, and other crimes. Cumhuriyet added that the three arrested on Thursday were facing charges of document fraud and “violation of the privacy of private life,” a strange crime given that the content in question is, İnce insists, not an authentic representation of his private life.
“If I had such images of myself, they were taken secretly in the past. But I do not have such an image, no such sound recording. This is not my private life, it’s slander. It’s not real,” İnce said last week.
İnce issued a statement on Tuesday defending his decision to drop out of the race, insisting that, had he not done so, the CHP would have blamed him for “spoiling” the election and buoying Erdoğan’s surprising win.
“According to some, my withdrawal as a candidate was politically suicidal. I made this move because if I hadn’t withdrawn, I would have been declared the only one responsible for today’s [political] landscape,” he wrote.
İnce also used the opportunity to compare the struggle against Gülen’s supporters, whom the AKP government refers to as the Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organization (FETO), and the communist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists, to the medieval Crusades against Europe.
“The people of these lands [Turks] have been defending the homeland against the apocalypse for 1000 years,” he wrote. “They rightly see the PKK and its extensions, FETO and its collaborators, as a threat to the homeland and demand that they be fought at all costs.”
Much of Erdoğan’s campaign has focused on accusing Kılıçdaroğlu of supporting the PKK, an attempt to drive a wedge between the CHP’s nationalist voters and the country’s eastern Kurdish population that the CHP’s coalition needs to overcome the president’s share of the vote.