Victory propels Erdoğan into elite club of strongman leaders

Outright victory in the first round of Turkey’s presidential elections has propelled Recep Tayyip Erdoğan into the foremost rank of global strongman leaders in the style of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. But his unchecked political dominance may mark the beginning of a new dark age for Turkish democracy.

Erdoğan’s triumphantly aggressive acceptance speech from the balcony of the Ankara headquarters of his neo-Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) set an ominous tone. He vowed to continue to “fight decisively” against Turkey’s enemies at home and abroad, as defined by him.

“We never bow down in front of anyone except God,” he declared. Erdoğan had no kind words for his defeated challengers. He offered no olive branch to the roughly 47% of the electorate that did not back him or his AKP-led parliamentary alliance. Given his daunting record since 2003, vanquished rivals have cause to fear political payback once the dust settles. Retribution is something Erdoğan excels at.

Now it will be even easier as he assumes the quasi-dictatorial powers of executive president that were narrowly agreed in a referendum last year. These give him personal authority to appoint and dismiss ministers, dissolve parliament, issue decrees, appoint judges, direct the armed forces and declare war.

Although Erdoğan has promised to lift the state of emergency imposed after 2016’s failed coup, it seems improbable thousands of Kurdish activists and MPs, lawyers, civil servants, judges and journalists who remain in detention will be released soon. About 160,000 people were arrested or sacked in the year after the coup.

As in past elections, there were suspicions of fraud, particularly regarding the unexpectedly strong showing of Erdoğan’s ally Devlet Bahçeli’s Nationalist Movement party (MHP). The main opposition, the Republican People’s party (CHP), complained during the count that results were being declared before ballots were fully counted.

In a strange twist, a pro-government television station accidentally aired election “results” showing an Erdoğan victory three days before Sunday’s polls. A report by the Oda TV news website claimed the station screened figures supposedly provided by the state news agency giving Erdoğan 53% of the vote and his CHP challenger, Muharrem İnce, 26%. In the event, Erdoğan officially won 53% on Sunday and İnce 31%.

Prior to the election, unidentified Turkish security sources accused the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which sent monitors to observe the polls, of plotting to create a “shady perception” of the process. Some European monitors were banned.

On Sunday, Turkey’s best-known independent newspaper, Cumhuriyet, whose journalists have been repeatedly harassed, said its website had suffered an unexplained distributed denial of service attack. But while İnce complained that the election was unfair, and state media biased, the defeated opposition’s protests seemed half-hearted.

No official fraud investigation is expected – or indeed possible, unless Erdoğan orders it. Nor will he take any notice of anything the OSCE monitors may say. Instead, he warned critics not to challenge the results. One bright point for the anti-Erdoğan camp was the achievement of the pro-Kurdish HDP in passing the 10% threshold for parliamentary representation, even though its de facto leader, Selahattin Demirtaş, was forced to campaign from a jail cell.

The AKP had its parliamentary wings clipped. It will rely on Bahçeli’s MHP for a majority – a marriage of convenience that will not necessarily endure over the next five years. Erdoğan’s reincarnation as a modern-day Ottoman sultan will be viewed with trepidation across the region and in Europe. But Putin, will be content. Despite bilateral strains early in the Syrian war, Moscow and Ankara have been drawing closer to one another, helped by Russian advanced missile sales and a joint nuclear power station building programme with Rosatom.

Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, will not be wholly displeased, either. Although Erdoğan broke with him soon after the war began in 2011, his priority in Syria now is to curb the influence of Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish forces along the shared border, not regime change. Erdoğan can be expected to continue his alliance with Russia and Iran, in the teeth of US and Nato objections.

In his acceptance speech, he also signalled a renewed military drive against Kurdish militants in south-east Turkey. This threatens to produce a repeat of the bloody events that followed the June 2015 elections. Likewise, Erdoğan will pursue his obsessive vendetta with the “terrorist organisation” of his bete noir, the exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen.

His re-election is not the outcome most EU countries would have hoped for. They deplore his human rights abuses, his subversion of democratic institutions, and his perceived efforts to overturn Turkey’s secular tradition. But Europe needs Turkey’s help with its immigration and terrorism problems, so will keep mum. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s rightwing prime minister, is an exception. He was the first foreign leader to send congratulations.

People like Orbán, Putin – and Donald Trump – see in Erdoğan an unscrupulous strongman like themselves: ultra-nationalist, unilateralist, populist – and utterly ruthless. Autocracy: it’s the new normal.