Guney Yildiz

It is harder for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to recover from a double election defeat in Istanbul.

By rejecting the Justice and Development (AK) Party candidate in Istanbul, the Turkish electorate has sent three clear messages to President Erdogan.

The first one is that a significant portion of the electorate in Istanbul didn’t think the decision to cancel the election was justified. The fact that the opposition consolidated its base and that there was a notable swing from the ruling AK Party to the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) was a strong indication of this. The original election on March 31st was canceled because the High Election Council ruled that some polling station officials were not appointed from among public officials, as required by law.

The Turkish electorate has also twice rejected how President Erdogan and his government are handling the country’s economic problems. Turkey has been facing a significant downturn, with forecasts suggesting the economy will contract in 2019 and a more prolonged recession lies ahead. President Erdogan’s foreign policy choices, which put Turkey increasingly at odds with the U.S. and Europe, have hit the value of the Turkish lira and exacerbated the problems on the economic front.

More importantly, the electorate also rejected political polarization. President Erdogan and his party’s discourse, especially before the original election at the end of March, was polarizing. Erdogan and the pro-government press relentlessly accused opposition parties of siding with terrorists. He basically said you are either with us or with those who conspire with the terrorists. President Erdogan put nationalism and largely anti-Kurdish rhetoric center stage and declared that the election was a matter of survival for Turkey.

President Erdogan adopted this approach because he thought he had a stronger hand running on the issues of security and nationalism, given the AK Party’s alliance with the ultranationalists of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP). Following the collapse of the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2015, President Erdogan veered sharply to the right, adopting a more anti-Kurdish discourse than even hard-line nationalist leaders. He didn’t win all the nationalist votes by doing so, but he surely alienated the Kurds, who voted strongly for the opposition in Istanbul and beyond, thereby tipping the scales in its favor.

If the AK Party hadn’t pushed for the cancellation of the March election, it would have been easier to recover from a narrow defeat in Istanbul and several other major cities, including Ankara and Adana. Now, however, the ruling party is in a much weaker position.

Apart from the gains by the opposition, two former AK Party heavyweights, former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and former Economy Minister Ali Babacan, are leading efforts to set up new political parties that could further eat into President Erdogan’s base.