In his lengthy tenure as prime minister and president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faces a critical race on May 14. He will stand up against an opposition more united than ever, a far-right candidate tapping into anti-refugee sentiment and a former rival.
“The most important election of 2023,” according to The Economist, will be a test for the president who endured countless challenges in his political career, from coup attempts to neck-to-neck electoral races.
The president and his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) have not conceded a defeat in more than two decades, to the chagrin of foreign powers dissatisfied with the “new Türkiye,” a proactive country with a stable democracy. The Economist’s article accompanying the notorious cover with the tagline “Erdoğan must go” claims the defeat of Erdoğan would prove that “strongmen” elsewhere can be ejected from office.
Erdoğan, who denounced The Economist and similar publications looking to interfere in elections in the past, was quiet in his first rally on Friday about the issue, though he tweeted a message critical of the weekly earlier in the day. He said they would “not allow covers of magazines, which are the operational apparatus of global powers, to meddle with the nation’s will.”
Addressing a major rally in the eastern province of Van on Friday, the president slammed the opposition and "the mindset" it represented, which would "bring dark clouds over the country." He said the opposition bloc led by Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu had "no course" and was a puppet of powers he did not name.
"Kılıçdaroğlu seems to be behind the wheel but he is not. The strings are pulled by others," he said.
He reiterated his faith in AK Party supporters who would bring another "ballot boom" for the party and himself on May 14.
Western media outlets have turned their attention to Turkish elections more as Kılıçdaroğlu, despite successive defeats against Erdoğan, brought hope to the opposition by consolidating seemingly diverse political ideologies. He has received unprecedented support, unlike the past challenges of his CHP against Erdoğan and the AK Party, including from terrorist groups. Kılıçdaroğlu's opposition campaign promises economic prosperity and "restoring" democracy, which was conveniently ignored by the old CHP up until May 14, 1950, when the country held its first multiparty elections. The CHP lost that election and more after that. In the following decades, democracy was disrupted by several coups and coup attempts, but it eventually prevailed. Yet, no single party managed to govern Türkiye alone for an extended period as the country succumbed to multiple coalition governments in elections throughout the 1990s. Erdoğan's AK Party was the first to rule the country alone without a coalition in a long time, and the country was singled out as one of few "genuine democracies" in its region by the very same publication, The Economist, under the AK Party's governance.
