Maybe what some critical mass of ordinary Russians want, at least at some subconscious level, isn’t an easy victory. To wonder how Erdogan could possibly be reelected after so thoroughly wrecking his country’s economy and its institutions is akin to wondering how Vladimir Putin appears to retain considerable domestic support in the wake of his Ukraine debacle. In it, they see not a sign of extravagance or waste, but the importance of the man and the movement to which they attach themselves and submit.Īll this is a reminder that political signals are often transmitted at frequencies that liberal ears have trouble hearing, much less decoding. Far from scandalizing his supporters, it seems to have delighted them. Erdogan, as the tribune of the Turkish Everyman, built himself an aesthetically grotesque, 1,100-room presidential palace for $615 million.
The illiberal tradition is based on the exaltation of it.
The classically liberal political tradition is based on the suspicion of power. Only a denuded secular imagination fails to notice that there are things people care about more than their paychecks. It’s a rebuke to James Carville’s parochially American slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Actually, no: It’s also God, tradition, values, identity, culture and the resentments that go with each. That last line is telling, and not just because it gets to the importance of Erdogan’s Islamism as the secret of his success. Then, too, Kilicdaroglu was widely seen as a colorless and inept politician, promising a return to a status quo ante that many Turks remember, with no fondness, as a time of regular economic crises and a kind of repressive secularism.Īll of this is true, as far as it goes, and it helps underscore the worldwide phenomenon of what Fareed Zakaria aptly calls “free and unfair elections.” But it doesn’t go far enough. In December, a Turkish court effectively barred Erdogan’s most serious prospective rival, Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu of Istanbul, from politics by sentencing him to prison on charges of insulting public officials. He has sought to criminalize an opposition party on specious grounds of links to terrorist groups. He has exercised his presidential power to deliver subsidies, tax cuts, cheap loans and other handouts to favored constituencies. The president, they say, has spent 20 years in power tilting every conceivable scale in his favor.Įrdogan has used regulatory means and abused the criminal-justice system to effectively control the news media. That’s not quite the way Erdogan’s close-but-comfortable victory in Sunday’s runoff over former civil servant Kemal Kilicdaroglu is being described in many analyses.
And it should serve as a warning about other places - including the Republican Party - where autocratic leaders, seemingly incompetent in many respects, are returning to power through democratic means. It’s an observation that should help guide our thinking about the reelection this week of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. “The totalitarian phenomenon,” French philosopher Jean-François Revel once noted, “is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or - much more mysteriously - to submit to it.”
#Nytimes election website series
This page is part of a series on 2024 presidential candidates. She also wants politicians over 75 years old to take a mental competency test and suggests President Biden won’t make it through a second term, at the end of which he would be 86. Haley compared finding common ground on abortion to negotiations to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina State House grounds following a 2015 mass shooting at a historic African American church in Charleston. She wants to talk in a “ loving” way about abortion rights, saying she can build a “consensus” on the explosive issue (but is notably light on specifics). The daughter of Indian immigrants who became governor of South Carolina, a key primary state, Haley has rejected being defined by identity politics - whether having to do with her ethnicity or gender - calling that approach “ woke self-loathing.” She denies the existence of a glass ceiling despite running to put a “ badass woman” in the White House. ambassador is the first prominent woman of color to seek the GOP nod for the presidency.
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