This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, May 12th, 2003. I'm Caleb Brown.

Upcoming elections in Turkey have the potential to end the reign of President Erdogan,

who has seized a great deal of additional

state power over the economy and education in recent years. Cato's Mustafa

Akio details where Turkey stands now and what may be to come. So Eruduans policies have been sort of all over the map.

There's been a lot of his attacks on inflation have been sort of laughed out of the

room in a in a way in terms of how he's tried to deal with that.

He has taken big steps to seize greater state control of universities and schools in Turkey.

And I guess I suppose why should we expect for this election to be legitimate?

That's a very good question and I see a lot of people outside of Turkey looking at Turkey's freedom of speech or rule of law and they see

that Turkey has become by and large an authoritarian regime by most measures and they

say well how should elections matter in a country like this I mean

in authoritarian regimes you don't expect the president to lose the election they

typically win some 90% of the vote all the time because they vote and they

counted themselves if people even if people vote in the government the ruling

party has control over the outcome but Turkey in this case is a unique country. Yes, it has become very

authoritarian when you look at the number of people jailed in Turkey for their ideas, people who are

detained. for their ideas, people who are detained for quote-unquote insulting the president, the number of journalists in jail.

There are many things that are totally not similar to what you would have in a democracy. But

Turkey's electoral system is different and I think it's still functional. For various

reasons, I mean Turkey has a decent electoral system that goes back to 1950.

So it's not like a Russia where nobody thinks the elections will change anything.

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