Through the arrestation of İmamoğlu Erdoğan aims at more than eliminating his strongest rival
By Arife Kose (UEA)
The arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu, mayor of Istanbul and the strongest rival of RecepTayyip Erdoğan, incumbent president of Turkey and head of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), on corruption charges has brought Turkey to the edge of moving towards full autocracy. Yet, the regime has encountered substantial resistance. In this piece, Arife Kose argues that the ongoing struggle between the regime and opposition over İmamoğlu’s arrest fundamentally concerns whether Turkish society perceives itself as a democratic society or not.
What is Erdoğan doing?
Turkey’s already uneven political ground has once again been shaken by the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu on 19 March. It was widely anticipated that Erdoğan would attempt to stop İmamoğlu’s candidacy. However, his arrest and imprisonment were unexpected. Indeed, İmamoğlu’s undergraduate diploma was revoked a week before he was arrested on the grounds that there were irregularities in his transfer from a private university in Cyprus to Istanbul University, Faculty of Business Administration in 1990. This was enough for the regime to disqualify him from running for president as in Turkey, according to the law, anyone running for president must have an undergraduate diploma. Why, then, did the regime need to arrest him given that he was already disqualified from running in the election?
First, Erdoğan wants to damage İmamoğlu’s credibility by arresting him on corruption charges. He doesn’t want people to think that he jailed a rival who could have defeated him in the election. Thus far, Erdoğan has failed this endeavour. According to a latest poll conducted by KONDA, a credible polling company in Turkey, 73% of the public thinks that demonstrators are right. Second, corruption charges enable the government to extend the investigation so as to cover other CHP municipalities. Third, Erdoğan is attempting to transform Turkey’s electoral landscape into one where no one can oppose him, as any significant challenger may now face imprisonment. By doing this, Erdoğan seeks to fundamentally alter Turkey’s political architecture.
Erdoğan’s move has sparked the largest wave of demonstrations in Turkey, bringing together different sections of society who are discontent with the state of the economy and democracy. This is the first time where such a huge number of people take to the streets to defend democracy. Arguably, for the first time authoritarianism is perceived as a threat by wide sections of the society that are not limited to the usual targets of the regime’s authoritarian practices, such as the Kurds, members of leftist organisations or activists. This is a new challenge for Erdoğan. To understand why, we need to turn to Turkey’s complicated relationship with democracy.
Turkey’s Complicated Relationship with Democracy
Turkey’s already imperfect democracy has further deteriorated significantly since the 2016 coup attempt. Turkey transitioned from a parliamentary system to a presidential one in 2017. The government purged 4,000 judges and replaced them with Erdoğan loyalists. It has also treated issues like the Kurdish issue and the ongoing economic crises as national security concerns, effectively removing them from the political sphere. Moreover, any kind of oppositional activity has been criminalised. Consequently, Turkey has been classified as a competitive authoritarian country or as an electoral autocracy for some time.
However, this had not resulted in mass democratic challenges to Erdoğan until recent events. This is partly because, in Turkey, democracy is very much equated with elections. Political scientist Evren Balta,a co-writer of the 2022 report Perception of Democracy, Security, State in Turkey argues in an interview that there is confusion about the meaning of democracy among the public. According to her “for some people, supporting democracy is limited to elections. When you ask about democracy only in terms of elections, support increases. But when you ask about democracy from a broader perspective, support drops. Democracy does not mean the same thing for everyone.”
Thus, a key reason why most people, particularly government supporters, have not been concerned with the state of democracy in Turkey is because of the existence of elections with a certain level of competitiveness. Turkish society highly values elections. The same research by Balta shows that whereas there are differences in the perception of democracy by different sections of society, there is a wide agreement (72%) that Turkey’s problems can only be solved by a government that comes to power through elections. As the World Values Survey covering the period between 2017 and 2022 also demonstrates, confidence in elections in Turkey is as high as 59%.
This is not to say that elections in Turkey have always been flawless. Opposition parties have faced inequitable conditions regarding media access and financial resources. However, despite allegations, the government has generally refrained from interfering directly in the ballot box on election day, and presidential candidates have not typically been arrested. While Selahattin Demirtaş, former co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) who also stood as a presidential candidate in 2014, remains in prison, his arrest was not perceived by people beyond specific sections of the opposition as an interference with the ballot box, but as part of an effort to combat terrorism.
In virtue of such perception of democracy, largely reduced to elections, Erdoğan has managed to justify his authoritarian rule. He has deployed a rhetoric wherein Turkey faces perpetual existential threats from ‘imperialist’ enemies (primarily the West) and their collaborators in the country. He has also positioned himself as the sole leader capable of guiding Turkey through such existential threats. If the survival of the Turkish Republic is in danger, then democratic principles can legitimately be put aside. This rhetoric has been deployed effectively for some time, especially as the coup attempt in 2016 posed a genuine threat. Moreover, the government has used the Kurdish issue to spur anxiety about the security. However, the terrorism argument has become less convincing since the government has started a new peace process with the Kurds. In the meantime, the economic situation has also dramatically deteriorated, and the priority of the population has become the cost-of-living crise, rather than security. According to the latest poll, 56.8% says that the economy is the biggest problem.
As the “existential threat” narrative is losing effectiveness and Erdoğan’s popularity has declined to the point where electoral defeat for him becomes plausible, he has opted to alter the rules of the game, increasing the price for challenging him in elections. However, in doing so, he has interfered with the people’s perception of democracy in Turkey. Erdoğan may aspire to be like Vladimir Putin, but, as the support for demonstrations indicate, most people do not want Turkey to be like Russia. Yet, Erdoğan controls an extensive state apparatus, which he is increasingly making use of to maintain his rule, just as his persuasive power diminishes. As a result, a hole has emerged in national politics where everything becomes possible. For the time being, Turkey is on this edge.
Arife Kose is a PhD researcher at the University of East Anglia. Her PhD project aims to understand authoritarianism beyond regime types and personality traits by combining insights from various approaches in political theory on democracy and totalitarianism with theories of rhetoric. It does so through Rhetorical Political Analysis (RPA) of speeches of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the incumbent president of Turkey and head of the Justice and Development Party.
Image: Protests initiated by university students in front of Beyazıt Square. Mellonsapka, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
