Election Analysis #5
Fallout
Hi folks,
I’ve recently done a Q&A with Claudio Fontana with the Oasis Foundation at the Catholic University in Milan.
Below are the first two questions. You can read the full thing on their website here.
Most of the polls projected that Kılıçdaroğlu would obtain around 49% of the votes in the first round of the presidential election. Since that percentage resulted from interviews conducted at the beginning of May, one could even expect Kılıçdaroğlu to be well beyond the 50% threshold. Things went in a different direction. With hindsight, it is always easy to criticize pollsters, and this is not our aim. Nevertheless, in your opinion what are the aspects that polls failed to grasp?
Yes, the polling around this election has been very unusual. Most polls, including the most reputable ones, projected a Kılıçdaroğlu win, many of them in the first round. Very few pollsters put Erdoğan within reach of a first-round victory, and the ones that did were dismissed as being pro-government companies, and thus designed to give Erdoğan a popularity bump. Of course Kılıçdaroğlu did 5 points worse than most pollsters expected, and Erdoğan did 5 points better. How to explain this 10-point gap?
I’m not a pollster, and it has been a long time since I took part in any quantitative studies. I can’t speak to the methodological failings in question. People are also researching unfair practices the government might have employed, including shifts in the voter base. Still, I doubt it’ll be enough to explain that 10-point gap.
I suspect, however, that pollsters failed to capture what pro-government commentators called a “nationalist deep wave.” I think of this as the promise of Turkish exceptionalism. Erdoğan promised the continuation of the imperial project he has embarked upon. He used his power over the media to strongly equate the opposition with the “enemies of the nation,” be they Western powers, Kurdish separatism, or simply irreverent metropolitan elites. The opposition ignored this for the most part. They bet that people had grown numb to Erdoğan’s warnings of existential threats and fifth columns. They thought that the economic crisis made people too miserable to care. They campaigned on strong, orthodox economic governance, anti-authoritarianism and inclusiveness.
There was this clash in the messages. Neither side wanted to compromise and react to what the other side was doing. Both stuck to their message. Perhaps, in the middle ground, there was a substantial group of voters who listened to both sides, thought about voting for Kılıçdaroğlu, even told pollsters they’d vote for him, but in the privacy of the voting booth, changed their minds. They did so mostly due to the negative campaigning on Erdoğan’s side, hammered home by the practically unlimited resources of the state. That, at least, is how I picture the “deep wave” of nationalism.
That raises the following question: how did one (smaller) group of pollsters see this “deep wave” while the vast majority didn’t? Were they methodologically superior in some way? Or did they get the same numbers as the opposition pollsters, bump up Erdoğan to account for the deep wave they were hoping for? I don’t know.
In the West, economy usually plays a huge role in defining voters’ preferences. This could have suggested that Erdoğan’s race was doomed. On the contrary, he proved resilient, and has gained the upper hand ahead of the run-off. You mentioned nationalism as a key factor in Turkish politics. But what’s the relationship between Islamic identity and nationalism in Turkey?
There’s a few aspects to your question. On the economy, yes, Erdoğan voters proved resilient to economic shocks. Inflation erodes incomes and creates a huge amount of stress. People are priced out of their homes, they can’t feed their kids on the paychecks that once afforded them comfortable lives. On the other hand, unemployment has been going down steadily in recent years, and being included in AK Party support networks did help people in covering basic necessities. Still, there has been a precipitous drop in the standard of living of the working and middle classes. Voters were told that this is part of a transition process to a “national economy,” and that it was part of the country’s epic struggle for independence and superpower status. I doubt that European voters would have been as forgiving, but you never know. Perhaps Turkey is a precursor to a political dynamic that is emerging in Europe as well.
On Islamism, one has to ask: which Islamism? Turkey is becoming more worldly by the day. Islamism used to be an effort to extract political system from religious orthodoxy. Now it is a cluster of mystic symbols, often being mixed in with other nationalistic themes or the conventions of cult-like “cemaat” networks. At the heard of Islamism is the promise of exceptionalism and geopolitical significance. That’s why the government didn’t campaign specifically on topics on the Islamist agenda, like the age of marriage, religious education, or the penal code. They campaigned on a strong defense sector and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, things that you could easily transpose to many European far-right parties (today or in modern history). The issue wasn’t whether Islamist principles would be applied in governance, it was whether the class assuming Islamist symbolism would maintain their supremacy. The opposition seemed to think that educated middle class Islamists (especially women) might. Perhaps some did, but many, it seems, didn’t.
Erdoğan’s prayer at Hagia Sophia on the night before elections was practically a campaign rally. Previous generations of Islamists would have been profoundly disturbed by that kind of a display, but things are different now. The various gradients of political Islam can sync around core symbols like that.
For the rest of the interview, click here.