Experts say that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's victory in Turkey's presidential election may not bring significant changes to his governing style, and may even embolden him further. The 69-year-old has won 52.1 per cent of the vote in a runoff vote on Sunday May 28 against challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu, extending his rule into a third decade. With his increasingly authoritarian policies, Turkiye has been polarized and its position as a regional military power has been boosted.
Critics hope that the results of the election, which showed that Turkiye is a very divided country, will force President Erdogan to change his style of rule, said Dr James Dorsey, an assistant professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. I'm a bit more skeptical about that. He said he thinks you're gonna see in many ways, more of the same. He argued that President Erdoan has some idiosyncratic ideas about the economy like keeping interest rates low when he should be raising them, and undermining the independence of institutions like the Turkish central bank.
While he has indicated that Turkiye is receiving support from the Gulf states, Dr. Dorsey notes that those countries have themselves changed their attitudes in terms of providing economic support. The demand for economic reform is increasing, which would mean that Erdogan would have to change his economic policies. And that's one area where potentially we could see change, he said. Dr Dorsey also expressed reservations over whether President Erdogan will change his foreign policy, which are seen by some as anti-western. If anything, I think that he will feel emboldened and strengthened by the election victory, he said. He still has 52 per cent of the world's population in 1990, and it's up from 58 per cent in the past 20 years. That's an achievement in itself and of itself, he said. James Ryan, director of Research Middle East Programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said President Erdogan's immediate economic concerns will intertwine with his foreign policy objectives.
President Erdogan's first challenge in his new term is going to be dealing with a foreign debt reserve crisis that is rising, he told CNA s Asia First. And Turkish foreign policy is very much going to be on the offer, whether it's going to be to regional partners in the Gulf or to Russia or partners in the west, Ryan said. Ryan said that elections are hardly fair and at times not even free, and that elections in the country are hardly fair and not even free. Although the opposition pushed heavily on nationalist issues and refugee issues, those were also President Erdogan's strong suits, so he was able to outgame them.
Erdogan's resiliency is rooted in the system that he has built, which is a deeply entrenched patron-client system built around the construction sector of the economy, allowing him to control levels of society all the way down to the bottom, he said. While that system was believed to be on the verge of collapse following the earthquakes in February this year, Mr Ryan said, the opposition was unable to build a strong enough coalition to capitalise on that. In many ways, Turks vote on ideological terms rather than on pocketbook terms, and that's proven with his re-election, Dr Dorsey said. He called President Erdoan a master politician who has a very emotional relationship with his voter base and has played the nationalist card very well, including in tapping on anti-Syrian sentiment in the country.