Recep Tayyip Erdogan will continue his authoritarian rule well into its third decade. International observers confirmed elections were neither free nor fair. Those who claim Erdogan won fairly focus on balloting, but what preceded it tipped the scales: arrests of opposition candidates, state media amplifying Erdogan while largely ignoring his competitors, and local authorities approving Erdogan’s rallies while denying opponents equal access to the public square.
Nor should the West take the fairness of balloting at face value. Just as balance-of-payments errors gave early insight into the illegal financial plays of Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party two decades ago at a time when most diplomats and journalists praised his economic stewardship, so too does demographic data raise serious questions about the veracity of voter rolls. Simply put, analysts should never trust data from dictators.
A DEBT LIMIT WIN FOR THE GOP
Some analysts called foul about questions regarding the voting numbers of naturalized Syrians, Afghans, or other recent immigrants to Turkey. While opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu’s anti-Syrian populism especially ahead of the second round was nativist if not racist, this does not diminish real problems in the demographic data. The basic problem is that the increase in voting rolls does not appear to coincide with international estimates of birth and death rates over the same period. Even these are uncertain.
Turkish demographers identify the error in population statistics as between 1.5 and 6.7 million, but this depends on at which date between 2007 and 2018 they stop taking Turkish statistics at face value and begin to track problems, especially with statistical manipulation by the Turkish Statistical Institute after the COVID-19 outbreak. What is clear is few Turks believe TUIK; its own employees privately warn not to, and so it is curious that so many outside analysts do. The question then becomes what explains the extra population on the voting rolls. Officially, there are fewer than 200,000 new naturalized Syrians. The error, though, suggests a much larger number of new voters.
Some Turks explain that supposed new citizens do not live in the towns where they are registered. On Election Day, busloads of young male foreigners arrived to vote in towns before returning to larger cities where they actually reside. Turks say this might explain why the vote count in certain areas was 2-3% above predictions for Erdogan. The problem is, since locals did not know these new voters in the locations they voted, it was hard to sniff out legitimacy.
A greater problem is voting with fraudulent IDs, borrowed either from the dead or simply with ghost names. To be fair, while this was a problem anecdotally, it is hard to assign a number to the votes cast by Syrian, Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, and African citizens. Compounding this problem was the fact that the opposition (let alone outside, neutral observers) were not present in many polling stations. A few thousand boxes from these voting stations apparently had votes only for Erdogan. In some cases, voters expressed surprise the results showed 100% for Erdogan when they had voted for Kilicdaroglu, though not everyone would publicly say so due to fear of retaliation. Such questions about Election Day are important given that a swing of just 1.2 million votes could change the outcome.
That said, the outcome of Turkey’s elections was never in doubt; to pretend otherwise only bestows false legitimacy on the process. The question now is how to proceed.
Erdogan’s stewardship has been an economic disaster. Turkey increasingly looks to follow Venezuela’s path into hyperinflation and financial implosion. This will be tragic for Turks, but neither Washington nor Brussels should snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. There should be no F-16s for Turkey. Erdogan will sooner use them against his neighbors than for defense. Just as with Iran today, the United States and NATO should differentiate between the repressive regime and the people whom it represses.
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Turkey one day will have its color revolution. Repression does not last forever. Sometimes countries must fail before they can rebuild.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.