Competitive yet unfair: May 2023 elections and authoritarian resilience in Turkey

ABSTRACT

On May 14, Turkish voters headed to the polls to vote for presidential and parliamentary elections. This was the most challenging race yet for authoritarian populist Erdoğan, as the ongoing economic crisis and deadly earthquakes severely diminished his performance legitimacy. Moreover, the opposition parties united against his regime by rallying behind a joint presidential candidate. However, Erdoğan turned the tables on the opposition and won the presidential race for a third consecutive term while his electoral bloc secured a majority in the parliament. This paper analyses the context and results of Turkey’s 2023 twin elections. We highlight the features of the competitive authoritarian regime, Erdoğan’s religio-nationalist electoral strategy, and the opposition’s fragile state and weak strategy to explain Erdoğan’s electoral resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• Tayyip Erdoğan
• competitive authoritarianism
• AKP
• CHP
• polarisation
• opposition coordination

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These two Islamist parties are to the right of the AKP in their extremist policy stance with respect to gender equality, women’s rights, and Islamic education. They specifically demand the repeal of laws that protect victims of domestic violence and seek gender equality while seeking criminalisation of adultery, Islamizaton of the educational curriculum, and gender segregation in schools. Of the two parties, HUDA-PAR has been particularly controversial due to its ties to radical Islamist Kurdish party Hizbullah that had committed violent atrocities in the 1990s against civilians with progressive Islamic views and secular Kurds. For further details on party platforms see Yeniden Refah Partisi (2023) and HUDA-PAR (2023). For violent roots of HUDA-PAR see Kurt (2017).

2. For a comprehensive overview of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey see Gurses (2021).

3. The opposition leaders used the term ‘strengthened’ to imply that their goal was to initiate an institutional reform process for establishing a parliamentary system with strong democratic checks and balances mechanisms, rather than the restoration of the previous system.

4. For the full text of the Nation’s Alliance, see Evrensel (2023).

5. According to a recent interview, Necati Özkan, the chief strategist of the CHP Istanbul campaign in the 2019 local elections, told Kılıçdaroğlu as early as 2022 that his electoral chances against Erdoğan were slim (Medyascope 2023)

6. Kılıçdaroğlu’s video message owning his minority faith and promising an inclusive Turkey was viewed on YouTube by tens of millions of people (Gazete Duvar 2023).

7. After pressures from opposition groups Muharrem Ince withdrew from the presidential race right before the first round of the elections.

8. KONDA estimated that Kılıçdaroğlu would finish the first round of the presidential race ahead of Erdoğan with 49.5 per cent (KONDA 2023).

9. In fact, several pre-election polls showed that he is the least potential opposition joint candidate (e.g. Medyascope 2022)

10. Erdoğan also made other changes in his administration, including the appointment of new figures to critical ministries such as Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs, steps that sidelined formerly trusted figures in previous governments such as Suleyman Soylu.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Berk Esen

Berk Esen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Sabancı University, Turkey. His research interests include the political economy of development, party politics, and authoritarian regimes with a focus on Latin America and the Middle East. His research has appeared in various journals, including Party Politics, Journal of Democracy, Third World Quarterly, Government and Opposition, Armed Forces & Society, PS: Political Science & Politics, South East European Society and Politics, Journal of Near East and Balkan Studies, Mediterranean Politics, Middle East Journal, Turkish Studies and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies

Sebnem Gumuscu

Sebnem Gumuscu is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College and the author of Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Democracy, Identity, and Foreign Policy in Turkey: Hegemony Through Transformation (with E. Fuat Keyman) (Palgrave, 2014). She has published several articles on political parties, political Islam, elections, and democratic backsliding in the Middle East.

Hakan Yavuzyılmaz

Hakan Yavuzyilmaz is teaching at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Başkent University, Turkey. He is also Co-Director and Research and Policy Development Coordinator at Checks and Balances Network, Istanbul Policy Center, Sabancı University, Turkey. Previously, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Politics & International Relations Department, University of Nottingham, UK and Research Fellow at Research Center for Political Parties and Democracy (REPRESENT), UK. His research primarily focuses on political regimes, political parties, and party systems. His research has been published in journals such as Party Politics, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.