Turkey elections 2023

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Quite a few reports now of people in Hatay province complaining that the reason for the poor response of the government is political: i.e. that they're being victimized for not being a sufficiently pro-AKP region, unlike the other areas devastated by the earthquakes. I've no idea whether the accusations have any truth to them or if they're just an understandably paranoid rationalization of an otherwise inexplicable failure of the State to meet its expected obligations in a crisis, but it's relevant to this thread either way.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I do not believe that they are discriminated against. The earthquake response is just really really poor everywhere.

My instinct would be to think that this is, as I said, an understandably paranoid rationalization of otherwise inexplicable incompetence, but it makes little difference politically. Would be interesting to know what sentiment is like in the AKP strongholds devastated, actually.

As you can see casualties is correlated to how strong the earthquake was.

That's not actually quite true: Hatay is further along the fault from the epicentre and the earthquake was correspondingly weaker there. But the extreme damage and very high death tolls can be ascribed to drift geology: most of the populated areas are built on alluvial deposits, which is why the region has been hideously vulnerable when earthquakes strike for thousands of years.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Stupid question, is there a particularly pattern to that support?

Yes, although it's really quite messy. The strongest AKP areas are lower income districts (especially those that are basically banlieue) where most families are of relatively recent (especially, say, since the 1970s) Anatolian origin, while the strongest CHP areas are older and higher income parts of the city with Beşiktaş being somewhat emblematic to the point of cliché. The older Istanbul working class (which has suburbanized to a great extent and is roughly middle income in terms of the city overall) is a marginal group when the AKP are winning landslides, but solidly in the opposition column when things are tighter. There is also now a large Kurdish vote in the city, which is in the direction you'd expect (i.e. for its own parties and for unified opposition candidates when appropriate), but which very much complicates the overall picture as the Kurdish population is highest in some of the districts that also have very large Anatolian Turkish populations.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The sheer size of Istanbul means that any candidate has to poll at least respectably there in order to win nationally.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Note that, confusingly, most Turks in Britain are Turkish Cypriots, while most families in Britain from Turkey are Kurdish.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The urban/rural division in Turkey isn't particularly big: Erdogan isn't going to lead in The City but he's stilling going to poll respectably, while the Kurdish districts and the parts of the country resettled after various genocides and population swaps a century ago (there's obviously a substantial overlap with the Kurdish districts there) are voting for the opposition, whether urban or rural. Turkish elections are about cultural clashes, but not in that way.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That doesn't explain why what was once Greek Pontus is an AKP vote bank though.

I think it was mostly repopulated from the Anatolian interior. It is the big exception, though, yes.

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Well, sometimes there's a funny borderland between a proper election and an 'electoral-type event' and it isn't clear quite where the balance will end up tipping. This often happens because the strongman overestimates his own popularity: elections in Zimbabwe under Mugabe were like this.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

When you spend years usurping control of the media and electoral system to build structural advantages then it's not exactly a fair and free democratic election. We see this in Hungary especially, and to a lesser extent Poland.

It was true even of Northern Ireland before the Fall of Stormont.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

b) pro-Erdogan rural areas have ever been particularly strong for them.

Yes, they always used to vote for whichever party had a horse in its logo, until (as always happened) it got banned again.

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There's a lot as is going on that is very uncertain and I would caution against being presumptuous of much.

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It's still not over, of course, but it's fairly clear that the opposition should have run İmamoğlu, or someone else who manages to both have a degree of charisma and also does not give off very strong genepool CHP vibes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The “Left” in Turkey is similar to the centrists you see in Europe, supporters of a liberal economy with limited presence of the State.

Even though Erdogan is the “Right” candidate, he has used the State presence in the economic matters more incisively to fit the the needs of the population (what the left is originally about). Which is why you see high support from these places.

If anything, Lula = Erdogan and Bolsonaro = KK if people really insist in comparing with Brazilian voters trends. But Latin America isn’t the appropriate region to make this comparison, it clearly fits more into Eastern European ones if anything.

This doesn't really add up. Erdogan is a big Free Market man and this was always a critical part of his appeal in the Anatolian hinterland, where there was always resentment at Kemalist dirigisme as that was viewed as something that held them back so that the coastal regions could prosper. It's also why he was the darling of The Economist for such a long time.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Any guesses on how religious (I.e. weekly-church attending) Christians voted?

Turkey is only 0.2% Christian. Mods, are we allowed to say why? I don't want to get any possible Turkish members in trouble or get TalkElections blocked in Turkey.

I'm sure we can say, for instance, 'a few little light genocides'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

'Ultra-nationalist' lol.

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Well, the issue is that this is a country riven by social divisions that are completely irreconcilable without acknowledging how the state and modern Turkish identity came into being, and to do that would risk the stability of the state and therefore cannot be done as it is in no politician's interest to do so. Half the country think that the CHP views them as subhuman, and they're not entirely wrong for suspecting this. And about forty per cent of the country think that the AKP only cares about its own electorate and victimizes everyone else in a manner that is borderline sadistic, and, again, they're not entirely wrong for suspecting this. Don't get me wrong: I very much wish for Erdogan to lose and I do not think it is healthy for Turkish society for him to remain in post, but there's a reason why prizing out of the office that he's welded himself into is so difficult.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Functionally there would be, but just as a result of post-genocide-and-ethnic-cleansing settlement patterns in parts of the country: the usual practice repopulating areas where the local population had been killed off or deported from with people displaced from elsewhere was followed in Turkey, so you can see the ghosts of former geographies (social rather than political in this case) in Turkish election results in the same way as you can in Poland or Bohemia and so on.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Kilicdaroglu has given a rambling post-defeat speech in which he essentially said 'The Real Fight Starts Now' and has refused to resign.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Shame Kilic lost, I would have loved to see the refugees be kicked out and cause chaos throughout Europe. Kilic was also more western friendly as well.

He wanted refugees sent back to Syria, not into the EU.

And there were no real indications of significant foreign policy differences between the two (because Erdogan has not broken with the old Kemalist consensus on that front).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The classic example is Yitzhak Gruenbaum, who led the Bloc of National Minorities in the Polish Second Republic in the 1920s and later served as Israel's first Interior Minister.