Three Scenarios for Turkey ’s Election: The Good, the Bad, and the Scary

Mustafa AkyolOn Sunday, May 14, more than sixty million voters throughout Turkey will cast their votes in what may be the most fateful election for the nation since its founding a  century ago. According to the results, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been ruling the country since 2002 in a growingly authoritarian and erratic fashion, will either further consolidate his grip on power, or finally lose it.For many people in the West, the latter option may sound unrealistic, if not naive. They see that under Erdogan, Turkey has become an authoritarian regime where freedom of speech and rule of law have largely vanished, and many critics of the president have ended up in jail. They also recall the famous quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.”Yet Turkey ’s drift into authoritarianism has not quite reached a Stalinesque level. Erdogan is not the typical 20th century dictator, who rules unquestionably in the name of the proletariat or the Aryan race. Rather, he is a  21st century populist, who rules in the name “the people” — the latter being just 50% plus 1 of the electorate, made up of mostly religious conservatives, which he pits against the rest of society.Moreover, Turkey is not a  Russia, China, or Turkmenistan, where society has never experienced free elections. Instead, it has a decently competitive electoral system that has worked since 1950. All votes are counted ope...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs