May 29, 2023 - 7:30am
By grinding out a narrow 52% victory in Sunday’s election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has cemented his legacy as Turkey’s most significant historical figure since Kemal Atatürk founded the republic exactly a century ago. While opposition supporters went into the elections with high hopes of overturning the strongman’s 20-year rule, by the second round Erdoğan’s eventual success had come to look inevitable. But that his victory was not absolutely certain highlights the nuances of the political system he has created: while the scales were always heavily weighted in his favour, Erdoğan still requires a significant degree of genuine acclaim from the voting public to maintain his legitimacy.
As the academic Howard Eissenstat noted back in 2021: “as egregious as Turkey’s authoritarian slide has been, Erdoğan portrays himself — and likely sees himself — as a democrat.” A closely-fought two-round election ending in a narrow victory is in this sense a better result for him than a landslide, preserving the illusion of meaningful democratic competition. But for all his faults and missteps, it is undeniable that Erdoğan retains significant popular support, evidently outweighing the fractious coalition of liberals, secular nationalists, Left-wing Kurds and far-Right ultranationalists assembled beneath Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu’s banner.
Certainly, Kiliçdaroğlu would have been no one’s first choice of candidate against such an entrenched opponent. Old, markedly uncharismatic, and from Turkey’s Alevi Muslim religious minority, Kiliçdaroğlu was a poor second best to Istanbul’s young and popular mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu, who Erdoğan managed to remove from the running early on through a conviction on charges of mocking election officials. Kiliçdaroğlu perhaps performed better than expected, but for Turkey’s opposition as well as its Western supporters, his campaign still fell distressingly short of their hopes.
The election has been widely interpreted as representing a new nationalist wave in Turkish politics, with both candidates relying on the support of fringe nationalist parties to widen their support base. This interpretation may be overstated, however. Turkey has always been a profoundly nationalistic country, as the Turkish political scientist Sinem Adar remarked recently: “there is this kind of narrative now, nationalism being the dip dalga [silent wave], but it is not. Nationalism is the sea itself.”
Yet for all that Turkey’s politics are a product of its unique historical path, many of the specific skirmishes of the election campaign, from Erdoğan accusing Kiliçdaroğlu of devotion to LGBT causes to fears of demographic change through mass immigration, echo the new political battlegrounds of Western democracies. As the Turkish analyst Selim Koru observes: “we live in the age of nationalism. Something about the political moment we live in across the world — be it the state of technology, economic current, or the geopolitical climate — seems to be conducive to far-Right nationalism.”
Viewed in this sense, the Turkish election is as much a local reflection of trends increasingly shaping all democratic systems as it is an exotic eastern spectacle. In Greece, the celebrity socialist Yanis Varoufakis was widely mocked for his petulant losing claim that Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s first-round victory was the result of the country’s “Erdoğanisation”, yet it highlighted a certain direction of travel across Europe and beyond. Through his stacking of the courts and media in his favour, the system of managed democracy Erdoğan has constructed has marked analogues in Central Europe.
Perhaps more strikingly, Anglo-Saxon conservatives increasingly believe the system is just as weighted against them, in a liberal inversion of Erdoğan’s heavy thumb tilting democracy’s scales. It is significant, after all, that the now-widely held concept of the “deep state” was borrowed from Turkey’s opaque and conspiratorial politics. For all its unique national quirks, in some ways Turkey’s “free but unfair” election indicates not the country’s divergence from liberal democracy’s mainstream, but democracy’s seeming eventual path.
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SubscribeAvoiding the big one: encouraging young, moldable people to think they are trans
Yes, that ‘big one’ occurred to me, too, as I read this. The pathologising, and medicalising, of ordinary behaviour traits (eg restlessness) or transitory mental states (eg teenage sexual uncertainties) is a damaging and dangerous modern phenomenon. The danger is amplified by the modern desire for victim status and the compassion of others. (See Mary Harrington’s article in today’s UnHerd.)
Yes…. Trans is so ‘trendy’.
And so desperately damaging particularly to young women many of whom I suspect may be doing it to escape predatory teenage boys as sexual harassment is now endemic in secondary schools in the U.K.
It used to be Tumblr that housed the internet’s real crazy, it seems to have migrated to TikTok – where the damage can be spread even more widely.
Agreed. Tumblr was fine since it was relatively self-contained – if you wanted to get out of the bubble you could. Not only is TikTok incredibly effective at mass dissemination, it is also ubiquitous and almost unavoidable even if you don’t download the app yourself (at least amongst young people). The purchasing of Tumblr by Yahoo and the subsequent mass exodus of users after they raptured the essence of the platform is one of the worst things that could have happened to the internet. TikTok blends lawlessness with ubiquity, and effortlessly channels the internet at its worst into the brains of children.
This is a growing issue and it reaches beyond social media and into primary schools. While ‘informing’ very young children about the existence of sickness of the mind, alongside sickness of the body and the chirpy ways it can be coped with, educators are suggesting to children that they can be depressed, have low mood, and worry about things. I find it slightly sinister but maybe that’s because bare knuckle fighting was a coping strategy when I was at primary school.
ADHD is one of the worst diagnoses ever. It’s completely made up. I’m not saying ADHD is made up, I’m saying the diagnosis criteria are.
If you were so inclined, you could find ADHD in anybody who becomes restless at times, forgets things and has trouble concentrating. Think back when you were children: was this not true for at least a few years of your life? Now imagine how it would be if you were to live in today’s even faster world. Lights and sounds everywhere, your cellphone constantly distracting you with small dopamine hits, and your parents being unresponsive due to staring into a screen 24/7.
What’s next? Easy – just give the children ritalin! Prescibe an amphetamine, known on the streets as speed, only one magnitude below cocaine, during the developmental stage of the brain. So now not only the phone nonsense, but also the medication becomes hardwired. You know how people who start smoking when they are young are having troubles with stopping? It’s the same idea, just that your whole mood is affected, the very perception of your existence and purpose.
Imagine doing something great and feeling nothing; imagine feeling like nothing unless you constantly do something that is perceived as great.
TikTok didn’t start this, Western doctors did, with their chemical-based perception of the human mind. I never thought I would say this, but their complete lack of religious beliefs has destroyed their ability to see things rationally. At least when you believe in the soul, you realize that there is more to the brain than chemicals. Don’t get me started on antidepressants.
Does inflating mental health problems harm and weaken Western society? Does the CCP want to harm and weaken Western society? Do the Chinese own and control TikTok? Join the dots.
I believe the correct spelling is ‘glamorises’.