Erdoğan's Great Blunder
The results of the 2024 regional elections
We’re still digesting the election results from Sunday. Since the mayoral elections of 1994, that’s 30 years ago, Erdoğan has been winning. The political party he co-founded in 2002, and eventually took over, has won pluralities in every single election. Erdoğan himself has won every time he was on the ballot. The most recent demonstration of his electoral virility was in 2023, when he overcame great odds to become president again.
The air of invincibility was shattered Sunday night. For at least the past 10 years, opposition circles have been hoping for a “dip dalga” or “deep wave” of voters voting against the president. Now it’s here. The People’s Republican Party (CHP) didn’t just hold on to its 2019 gains, it won by huge landslides, and most importantly, was the top performer of the election.
It just so happens that on election day,
and I were driving from Ankara to Izmir. We took the road south-west through Eskişehir and Afyonkarahisar, where we made our customary stop at the Özdilek mall, then went straight west through Uşak, Manisa, and eventually arrived in one of Izmir’s coastal districts.Müjge wasn’t feeling well and slept most of the way, which left me to look around in silence. My family is from Izmir but we’ve usually lived in Ankara, so I’ve been driving that road ever since I can remember. It looked pretty shabby when I was a kid, with the Özdilek mall being the only large and interesting structure. Now it’s dotted with gleamy residential buildings, neo-Seljukid administrative buildings, and factories (Şişecam, Efes, and a bunch more I can’t remember the names of). The roads are now double-laned. The Özdilek mall has expanded into a network of malls with various global brands.
I always thought of it as Erdoğanland. These are conservative parts of the country that went through a huge upgrade in the last twenty years.
Müjge woke up towards the end of the drive, when we turned on the radio and heard about what had happened. Unbeknownst to us, a political earthquake had occurred along our path of travel - Afyon, Uşak, and Manisa had all moved aggressively towards the CHP.
And the bombshells kept coming. Kırşehir and Kırıkkale were going to the CHP? That sounded insane. Kütahya, Balıkesir, and Bursa too! Urfa and Yozgat had gone to New Welfare Party an Islamist splinter party.
How did this happen? There was a lot of analysis last year about the dire living conditions most people faced, and how pocketbook issues would turn people away from the government. That turned out to be false, mostly I think, because of Erdoğan’s nationalistic message. He was building up the industrial and military capability that would translate into geopolitical power, and that meant that people had to suffer economically for a while, which enough people were willing to do.
The same simply couldn’t be said for this election. Municipal government isn’t an existential issue, so more disgruntled Erdoğan supporters were willing to stay home or vote for opposition candidates. The AK Party’s weaknesses now came into play.
Here, for example, is how Afyon Postası, a news outlet in the city of Afyonkarahisar, documented the AK Party mayor’s campaign this election season:
This sort of thing was fine in the general elections last year, but now voters felt like punishing the AK Party for it. The way it’s often described is “varlık içinde yokluk yaşamak” meaning “living in want within abundance.” It’s the notion that everything around you is built up to the extreme while your life is tightly constrained. It’s neoliberalism as most people in the world experience it today.
What’s interesting are the decisions that the palace has made going into this election. They won in the face of immense economic hardship last year, so they thought that the credit voters extended to them would cover local elections as well. At some point in the months that passed, Erdoğan must have decided to risk it. He must have thought that people voted for him when they were hard up, and that they’ll do it again. They loved him and trusted him, no matter what. That’s why he tightened the economy even further. Mehmet Şimşek, his economy tsar, implemented an austerity program that was designed to get Turkey back into economic respectability. Unlike 2023, there were no handouts.
Most of his supporters did trust Erdoğan, but many must have been upset. Perhaps they felt like they were being taken for granted. They probably did love him, but they weren’t going to do everything he asked of them. They wouldn’t vote for his candidates. They’d stay at home or vote for the opposition candidate.
So it’s not that the country changed its mind since last year. Some voters just had two different answers to two different questions.
But that wasn’t quite Erdoğan’s blunder. His blunder was in failing to imagine the depth of the downside risk. Erdoğan adopted a risky strategy, so he was probably fine with the opposition holding on to its gains in 2019. That probably seemed like the worst that could happen. The CHP usually has a 25% ceiling. How dangerous could they be? If Erdoğan could have imagined a defeat on this scale, he probably would have taken the economic hit and given out the handouts. He wouldn’t have taken on this much risk.
Why did Erdoğan make this mistake? I don’t know. The 75-year-old former CHP chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu practically had “loser” stamped on his forehead. Maybe Erdoğan conflated Kılıçdaroğlu’s brand with that of the CHP. When Erdoğan was coming up in the 1990s and 2000s, the CHP was full of dinosaurs. The liberal, post-Kemalist discourse wasn’t too kind to it either. Now the CHP looks young and dynamic. The new chairman Özgür Özel is 49 and Ekrem İmamoğlu is 52, and they both seem pretty good at running unwieldy political organization. The party’s image isn’t quite as toxic as Erdoğan would like to think, even among conservatives. Erdoğan, meanwhile, is 70, and his AK Party’s image is getting more toxic by the day. He’s a first-class political mind, and I’ve always thought that political imagination was his strong suit, but maybe he’s not what he used to be.
As damaging as this is, Erdoğan could recover from it. These things can be pretty brutal in the AK Party. I’m sure that we’re going to witness some defenestrations in the coming weeks and months. But reform is hard. Erdoğan has tried it before, with talk of “metal fatigue” and promises of a better politics. What if he doesn’t make it, while he watches the CHP and DEM build on their success?
The lesson the palace will have drawn from this election is that the new regime is always at risk. This may not have been an existential election, but 2028 will have to be. It’ll take them some time, but they’ll come up with a new plan.