After months filled with controversy and a national economic shake-up, Turkish President Recep Tayipp Erdogan has been reelected and will further continue his 15-year position. This past election has been his most challenging one yet, as the Turkish population recently became more aware of the inefficient and overly-authoritative way in which Erdogan has ruled the country, especially when it comes to managing its economics.
During the past couple of months, his opposition had been gaining followers and they had publicly blamed him and his administration for the weak state of the Turkish lira. Despite that and with 97.7% of the votes already counted, Erdogan managed to win over half of the population, with 52.5% of votes going to him. He addressed the nation after his victory and stated that “the winners of the June 24 elections are Turkey, the Turkish nation, sufferers of our region and all oppressed in the world.”
The win has been particularly hurtful to his opposing party since its members focused their campaign into explicitly targeting Erdogan and exposing the many instances where he has abused of his power. They particularly highlighted the fact that the president has used all of his years in office to overpower himself, and is now in charge of the legislative power, the executive, the judiciary and has a huge influence in the Central Bank, which manages the country’s economy. According to them, said overload of power has left Turkey as a “one-man rule” and made it depart from its democratic values.
Erdogan will start a new five-year term, one that will bring a major change to legislation in Turkey since, after a referendum last year, the president’s powers will be much more expansive and cover even more fields. With the new legislation, there will no longer be a Prime Minister office and the parliaments’ powers substantially reduced. This caused concerns for his critics, who have stated that if he were to win and follow through with this legislation, the country could fall into an economic crisis.
However, Erdogan’s win has also been celebrated by the Turkish population, as many believe that the country’s current state has been caused by the intervention of other countries and traitors. That is an argument that Erdogan himself used to justify the falling state of the Turkish lira during his campaign. According to the president, the election received a notable level of participation from the nation, with 90% of the Turkish people voting.
The president had controversially asked for the elections to be held over a year before planned. While he didn’t publicly state a reason behind this decision, it is believed that his request was done to avoid an upcoming economic shake-up in the country. Holding elections before it happened could have helped him to not have to deal with the backlash of such a crisis. However, if these were truly Erdogan’s intentions, this plan did not go through as planned, as weeks after his request the Turkish lira had its most significant recent decrease in value, leaving it at a 20 percent drop this year. It was also quite controversial that Erdogan’s response to the fall in the currency’s value was to ask for his citizens to change their savings from dollars to liras.
His reelection was particularly opposed by business leaders, who see the man as someone who has held the nation’s economy for too much time. Several financial analysts and opponents believe that the changes in the lira’s value may have been caused by Endrogan himself, since he did not respond to requests by banks and financial officers proposing to raise interest rates, which has been defined as necessary to ease the pressure on the country’s currency and lower its inflation, which is now over ten percent.
