Why did Erdoğan win?

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2023

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Following the Turkish president’s success in the run-off election on Sunday, Izzy Finkel and Tom Stevenson join Tom to discuss whether Erdoğan’s victory was ever in doubt, why the recent devastating earthquakes and economic turmoil seem to have had so little impact on his support, the challenges faced by the opposition, and the growing importance of xenophobia in Turkey’s politics. Find further reading, and listen ad-free, on the LRB website: lrb.me/erdoganpod Sign up to the LRB's Close Readings podcast here: lrb.me/closereadingspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.
0:15.9	Today, to talk about the Turkish elections, I'm joined by two guests, Izzy Finkel, who has written several
0:21.0	pieces on Turkey for the LRB blog, most recently on the 19th of May, and Tom Stevenson, a contributing
0:26.8	editor at the LRB, who has a piece on the elections in the latest issue of the paper. Both pieces were
0:31.5	published between the first and second rounds of the presidential election. Hello, both. Thank you
0:36.1	very much for joining me. Thank you.
0:37.7	Hi.
0:38.7	President Recep Tayap Erdogan has won the second round runoff against his opponent, Kamal Kirich Daragou.
0:44.9	His party, the AKP and its right-wing nationalist coalition partner, won a parliamentary majority
0:49.8	in the first round. Erdogan has governed or ruled Turkey since 2003 and now looks set to stay in power
0:56.1	till at least 2028. Was there ever a chance he might lose, Izzy? Well, Erdogan's government
1:01.9	likes to pay very close attention to the symbolism of dates. So the decisive runoff was held on
1:09.4	the 28th of May, exactly two years to the day after his government fulfilled, long-held Turkish Islamic ambitions of building a place of worship on Istanbul's central Taksim Square, the 28th of May, 2021 was the day that that was inaugurated. And one of the reasons that the location and the date of
1:28.7	that mosque were significant was that it was on the very same day, the 28th of May in 2013,
1:34.9	i.e. 10 years to the day before Erdogan's election victory, that the Getty Park protests
1:40.7	broke out about the future of that square. Those protests, if you remember,
1:45.5	were, well, they grew into what remains the largest popular uprising that has ever threatened
1:50.6	the Erdogan regime and therefore in the leader's mind, I think, formed one of its most
1:55.7	terrible and terrifying challenges, at least until the 2016 failed coup attempt. But in fact, he did refer to those protests as a coup at the time.
2:04.9	So winning on that day on the 28th of May, I think, has meant a kind of revenge for Erdogan against the forces that would hold him.
2:14.2	And by extension, Turkey back from greatness.
2:18.2	So no, in a word, I don't think that there was ever much of a chance that he would lose
	...

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