No Campaign, No Gain

Issue #200

Welcome to Issue #200 of Turkey recap! Yes, and we’re celebrating just like this Şanlıurfa bus driver after his pay raise. 

That’s 200 weeks of recapping Turkey news for you, with you and all thanks to you! To mark this moment, and dance number, we’ve built a digital Pun-theon of our best headlines over the years. Enjoy!

In this week’s recap:

• Erdoğan goes full campaign mode

• CHP ends Hatay candidate drama

• Efforts to find missing miners halted

• US-Turkey relations gain ‘momentum’

• New challenges for the Muslim Brotherhood

• CB pauses interest rate hike trend

• World poses risk to cultural norms

And in our original reports:

• Diego Cupolo on why İYİ Party is running its own candidates

• Eray Görgülü on how rural voters have changed campaigning

Erdoğan pins the trail on the country. © TCCB

All politics is local, and Erdoğan is everywhere. So much so, that he could pass his 70th birthday on the campaign trail Monday. The Reis is on and the AKP election machine is churning out talking points at full speed:

• Turkey’s KAAN fighter jet took its first flight = win.

• First Turkish astronaut came back to earth = win.

• CHP used AI for its candidate selection process = jackpot.

Erdoğan has really been dunking on the last point in campaign events. On Friday alone, he spoke at three rallies along the Black Sea coast. The president is tireless, unstoppable and not running for office.

He’s boosting morale and promoting his party’s local candidates, but given his central role in the AKP, it’s become hard to imagine the party without him. And his gravitational field now extends beyond the AKP galaxy, according to Selim Koru, a Turkey analyst and author of the Kültürkampf newsletter.

“People think Erdoğan is only the leader of the AK Party and the other parties in his alliance belong to other leaders. That’s not the case. Erdogan effectively leads all of those parties,” Koru told Turkey recap, referring to MHP, YRP and HÜDA PAR.

“He is the central product to the entire political enterprise, and arguably the regime itself. That’s why he has to campaign, even though other people are running,” he continued. “The norms and conventions of representative democracy were created in settings that were radically different from Turkey today.”

Indeed, Turkey today is flooded with the president’s live broadcast speeches. On tour this week, Erdoğan covered a wide range of topics, often praising construction projects, listing services provided by the AKP and humiliating the CHP, which itself gets little-to-no airtime to respond.

During a speech in Giresun Friday, Erdoğan accused the CHP of trying to drag Turkey into the Ukraine-Russia war without evidence. Just before that, he said high gas prices hit European countries so badly that:

“Boilers were turned off, government offices distributed blankets to their employees, but in my country, natural gas flowed like before.”

Earlier that day in Ordu, Erdoğan also linked ballot box victories for the AKP to natural gas access for the region.

“How will a metropolitan municipality – I'm sorry, to be frank – bring in natural gas without us?” he asked. “If we are there, there is natural gas. If we are not there, there is no natural gas."

All the above is standard AKP election campaigning as opposition infighting continues, whether organic or not, Koru said.

“They have a winning formula and they’re just applying it at the highest level they can. Think of a critically acclaimed theater cast that’s just doing show after show, refining their performance every time.”

Koru added, “The movement here is in the opposition camp. They are naturally divided, so for the Erdoğan camp, it’s really important that those divisions remain deep and lasting.”

– Diego Cupolo