Turkey
Why Erdogan Wins Elections — with Nicholas Danforth
“He's created an image of redressing the wrongs in the global order.” Nicholas Danforth joins New Lines magazine’s Kareem Shaheen to talk about how Recep Tayyip Erdogan won reelection as Turkish president and why, despite the challenges his leadership has faced, his political project continues to resonate.
A Fetih Accompli
Where observers focused on the divide between religion and nationalism, Erdogan grasped how effectively they could be wielded together. And he proceeded to fuse these overlapping traditions through a series of real and imagined battles against such common enemies as Western imperialism, Greeks and left-wing Kurds. The result is a potent ideological current that will continue to bedevil Turkey’s democratic aspirations and relations with the West long after Erdogan exits the scene.
Turkey’s Election and Its Malcontents
Rather than campaign, they should let their journalists write, uncovering the truth and bearing witness, letting the facts — like Turkey’s economic ruin, the dozens of journalists on trial, the country’s misadventures abroad, the hundreds of thousands of civil servants fired without cause and oppressed civil society — speak for themselves. The facts laid bare are also good for democracy.
Kurds Are Poised to Vote for a Kemalist
That Demirtas, a political prisoner, is not electable doesn’t seem to bother his Kurdish fans. Many of them believe that Demirtas wants them to vote for Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), even if they neither trust nor like him. To the Kurds, anyone with a chance to defeat Erdogan is a win.
Election Day in Turkey Is This Sunday and Erdoğan and the AKP Are on Shaky Ground
Erdoğan’s AKP now represents the ossified, authoritarian establishment, and its rule has, if anything, pushed the youth toward a more liberal mentality. Turks of the rising generation — 5 million of whom are set to vote for the first time this Sunday — are by all accounts less conservative and more desirous of personal liberties than their forebears.
Turkey’s Cataclysmic 1999 Earthquake Foretold a Future Catastrophe
The collective trauma inflicted on Turkish society by the Marmara quake never disappeared. It’s too early to say what the repercussions of the Feb. 6 earthquakes will be, or if any lessons will be learned this time. If they are, substantive changes may be made. These must be radical and sweeping, which scares people and threatens powerful structures and entrenched interests.
As Turkey Counts Its Dead, a Reckoning Is Still To Come
To have built homes with earthquake-resistant concrete would have cost around $3,000 more for a 120-square-meter apartment. For an extra $3,000, someone could be alive today.