Looking back at my election takes
Was I right? Was I wrong? Why?
We now have the elections firmly behind us. Erdoğan won - his parliamentary majority is sworn in, his new cabinet is already hard at work. The CHP appears to be entering leadership battle. The rest of the opposition is thinking about survival strategies. This is probably going to be Erdoğan’s last term in office, and will yield new dynamics for us to think about.
I feel like I should take the opportunity to look back on my recent output on this site and others. What did I get right? What did I get wrong? It isn’t always easy to present oneself to the reader in this way, but I will do my best.
What I got right
I think my long-range predictions were solid.
Erdoğan will win: this was my prediction for Turkey recap in late December. I thought at the time that the opposition didn’t have its act together and was likely to choose the wrong candidate. I also believed that Erdoğan’s movement still had a strong hold on its base.
Despite inflation and the earthquake, the palace is highly resilient. If it loses, I thought, it would only do so by a sliver. I wrote about this in Election Analysis #3 (below), which I’ve now made accessible to everyone. I think Turkish nationalism has a very strong exceptionalism strand, and Erdoğan’s campaign was able to maintain that, even grow it. I’ve written about that between the two rounds here.
What I got wrong
I think my predictions got worse as we got closer to the election.
Erdoğan will campaign on a nationalist platform, but he can’t bring it out without some form of conflict: this was actually a long-range prediction that I got wrong. I thought that given the economic situation, the regime needed some kind of tension, preferably with a Western country, that could secure it a majority. They did this with the Netherlands in the 2017 referendum. I thought some tension with Greece over and island or two could have a similar effect. They didn’t do it this even though the stakes were higher than ever before.
Erdoğan is likely to postpone the elections after the earthquake: again, I thought an unassisted win was very difficult. They had former AK Party (founding) member Bülent Arınç put out a statement to test the waters, but decided against this option. In retrospect, that was a very good decision on their parts. It’s clear that Erdoğan’s economic game plan wouldn’t have worked with a postponement.
The final polls are right, Kılıçdaroğlu is winning: I deviated from my outcome prediction in the last few days. Two sources were very influential in this. The first was a column I read by Ateş İlyas Başsoy, a veteran campaign strategist and ad man. He argued that most of the evidence was pointing to an opposition win (which was true), and that doubters suffered from some kind of learned helplessness. Then, on the Thursday before the first vote, Konda, the (hitherto) most reputable pollster in the country, put Kılıçdaroğlu ahead by roughly 5 points. I linked to the poll and tweeted “All evidence points to Kılıçdaroğlu accelerating. I don't think they can stop this now. It's really happening.” These polls had predicted previous elections correctly. I still don’t know how they got this one so wrong. Should I simply have discounted the bulk of the available evidence?
There are many smaller things I got right or wrong, but those are the big ones.
Who go it right?
Were there people who didn’t make the mistake I, and many others, made? It’s a hard question because it assumes that you can separate analysis from political speech. The vast majority of Erdoğan supporters said that Erdoğan was going to win, but I don’t think it makes sense to give them all credit for political foresight. Like the opposition, their analytical opinion was mostly an expression of what they wanted to happen.
Erdoğan and his team definitely deserve credit for seeing through the fog. Most of the publicly available evidence was stacked against them, but they stuck to their guns. Having vast resources, of course, they probably also commissioned big studies of their own. They’re also not squeamish about using their intelligence resources for political ends, so I assume they also had significant insight into the enemy camp in a way that the opposition didn’t. Still, a less experienced group might have lost their nerve. Everybody was thinking about the palace’s plan B, and what they were going to do if they lost, but maybe they didn’t. Maybe that’s how they maintain motivation in their ranks. Maybe Erdoğan told everyone that there was no safety net - if they lost, they lost it all. They had to get a grip on reality and shape it according to their will.
The CHP, by contrast, was comfortable with the reality they saw in the polls. They didn’t question it too hard. Perhaps it’s that tenuous relationship with reality that keeps getting Kılıçdaroğlu in trouble, and why he has failed to resign in the face of the most crushing defeat in recent political history.
There were also people in the opposition who got it right though. I remember having dinner with a senior opposition consultant maybe a week ahead of the election. He said the election was already lost, and he didn’t care what the polls said. I was a little more optimistic than him, but not much (only when the last polls dropped did I let myself go.) Another such figure was Burak Bilgehan Özpek, an academic known for his close connections to IYI Party. He was opposed to Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy, and was crucified for it. Things got so heated that he said he wouldn’t speak or write until the elections were over.
Soon after the elections, someone tweeted at him:
If they made your statue, there wouldn’t be enough cement for it. Was there ever a time when you thought that KK would win?
Özpek responded:
no, but to be honest, it was very difficult to resist the wave. I stayed away from social media.
Again, Özpek had come out pretty strongly against Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy. He had argued that an opposition win wasn’t secured, that Erdoğan was stronger than he appeared, and that one of the mayors should be the opposition’s candidate. When Kılıçdaroğlu put himself forward, Özpek must have had complicated feelings. On the one hand, he probably wanted to be wrong, and for Kılıçdaroğlu to win. On the other hand, he also knew that had Kılıçdaroğlu won, it would have been a body blow to his career. At that point his professional and patriotic drives were probably in conflict, which is not a good place to be in. Staying away from social media is a good idea in most cases, but absolutely necessary in that particular case.
I suppose I felt something similar. My overarching argument about Turkish politics is that a powerful strand of reactionary nationalism, and the sense of meaning it gives people, is the dominant force behind the “New Turkey” regime, and that it will determine the elections. Hence my long-range prediction of an Erdoğan victory. As we got closer to the elections, however, I also felt guilty about my analysis. Was I overly invested in my pessimistic take of my own country? I knew that we were only ever talking about a couple million voters switching sides, but it felt bigger. If the country managed a transition into a post-Erdoğan phase, what did that say about my analytical framework? Those kinds of questions were eating away at me as we approached the elections. I hoped that the elections would make my analytical framework a little less relevant. They did not.
Remember, dear reader, that I am a mere scholar of political ideas. I spend most of my time studying the world view behind the Erdoğan regime. I don’t travel around the country and ask people about their vote. I don’t look at polling data or economic data very closely. I rely on the expertise of others for that sort of thing.
I’ve been in my native Izmir for a few days, catching my breath, dipping my toes into the sea, planning future content. Starting next week, I will go back to writing about political culture (high and low) in Turkey, the original purpose behind Kültürkampf. I have some exciting ideas. Stay tuned.
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