Nand new presidential elections are scheduled for May, now they can be postponed What political consequences a powerful earthquake in Turkey will have In Turkey, one of the most destructive earthquakes in recent history occurred. The consequences of the disaster will overlap with the ongoing economic crisis, but are unlikely to have an impact on the outcome of the upcoming elections, experts believe
More than 3.7 thousand people, according to the Turkish authorities, died as a result of two earthquakes and more than a hundred aftershocks that occurred on February 6 in the provinces of Gaziantep and Kahramanmarash; the number of injured exceeded 20 thousand people, more than 6 thousand buildings collapsed.
The main region affected by the earthquake was Southeastern Anatolia. The destruction affected at least 11 of the 81 Turkish provinces: in addition to Gaziantep and Kahramanmarash, these are Hatay, Adiyaman, Diyarbakir, Malatya, Osmaniye, Elazig, Kilis, Sanliurfa and Adana. On February 7, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan introduced a three-month emergency regime in ten of them. According to him, the disaster affected 13 million people.
The Turkish government calls this earthquake the strongest in modern history, surpassing the 1939 Erzincan earthquake with a magnitude of 7.9, which killed more than 30 thousand people. The tragedy occurred during a difficult period for a country experiencing one of the strongest economic crises,— inflation in 2022 was 64.3%.
The problem of elections
The main political event of 2023 in Turkey was to be the presidential and parliamentary elections, which are held on the same day. Last year, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag announced that they would be held on June 18. However, experts and the opposition have suggested that the elections will be held earlier. In January, Erdogan said that they would be on May 14. However, this date has not been approved.
According to national legislation, the date of the elections is determined by the parliament, but if the deputies do not agree, it is possible to appoint it by presidential decree. In principle, the transfer of elections to an earlier date was beneficial to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), as it left the opposition less time to mobilize the electorate. However, it is still possible to hold elections in June, as originally planned, or to postpone them to a later date.
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If Erdogan wins, he will take the highest post in the country for the fourth time. Since 2014, the President of the Republic of Turkey has been directly elected, his term of office is five years, one person cannot hold this post for more than two terms. However, Erdogan’s re-election became possible due to a change in the Constitution in 2017, which “reset” his previous terms. He will run as a representative of the AKP.
The alliance of six opposition parties has not yet named its candidate. The head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kemal Kilicdaroglu, said that a decision could be made at a meeting of the six leaders on February 13, the day after the end of national mourning in connection with the earthquake. But whether this meeting will take place is not yet reported. Opposition politicians have left for the affected areas.
The date of the elections will depend on whether there will be conditions for their holding in the destroyed provinces and whether Erdogan considers this time appropriate or decides to use the emergency regime to postpone them for the period after June 18, writes the US-based Al Monitor.
“You can forget about the elections this year,” Zia Meral, an expert at the British Royal United Services Institute, is sure.
“These tragic events had a great impact on the whole of Turkey, on the economy, on the population. People are in a state of shock, so the question arises as to how morally correct it will be to conduct campaigning and election events at this time, it may not be well received,” explained the director of the Center for the Study of Modern Turkey, Amur Hajiyev. He assumes that some compromise solution will be found – the authorities will either limit campaigning activities, or the election date will be postponed.
The earthquake in Turkey is unlikely to lead to the cancellation or postponement of the presidential elections scheduled for May 2023, President of the Institute of World Politics, Professor of the Department of International Relations of the Middle East Technical University of Turkey Huseyin Bagji told RBC. “It will definitely have an impact on the election process, but I don’t expect them to be postponed or canceled. They will take place because only one region of Turkey was affected (Southeastern Anatolia.—RBC),— said Baggi.Turkey has accepted international assistance, and we will survive this catastrophe over time. But it will have a significant and lasting economic, political and social impact on the country.
Disasters and politics
As for the forecasts regarding the results of the parliamentary elections, the affected areas, with rare exceptions, support the President’s party or the Nationalist Movement Party allied with it. The largest number of deputies to the 600-seat national Parliament are elected from districts located in the provinces of Adana (15) and Gaziantep (14). At the last parliamentary elections of 2018 in Adana, five deputies were elected from the AKP, four from the Republican People’s Party, in Gaziantep, eight deputies from the AKP, the rest from various, including opposition, parties.
Currently, the AKP has 290 parliamentary mandates, the Nationalist Movement Party has 49, and the largest opposition Republican People’s Party has 144.
At the local elections held in 2019 in seven of the 11 provinces where voting took place, the AKP received the majority, in one (Osmania)The party of the Nationalist Movement. In Adana and Hatay, the Republican People’s Party enjoys support, and in Diyarbakir, the Democratic Party of Peoples, which supports ethnic minorities, primarily Kurds.
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Al Monitor points out that after the Izmit earthquake of 1999, when, according to official data, more than 17 thousand people died, the inability of the ruling alliance to cope with the consequences of the disaster led to an increase in the popularity of the AKP, which won the elections for the first time in 2002. This time, the population will also be very attentive to how the government will provide assistance, the publication warns.
The end of the 1990s was a period of unstable government, it was not exclusively associated with an earthquake, so this is a strained example, Hajiyev disagrees. According to him, it is premature to predict now whether political preferences in the country will change. “Turks, as eastern and emotional people, are united by such events; it is premature to say that the political race will intensify or someone will change their political views,” the expert concluded.
Reconciliation on the external front
On Monday, the Turkish President had his first conversation with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis since March 2022. Relations between the countries are going through a protracted crisis, and after the visit of the Greek prime minister to Washington, where, according to media reports, he complained about Turkey’s behavior in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Turkish president said that his colleague “no longer exists”. On February 6, the Turkish President accepted Mitsotakis’ condolences and an offer of assistance.
The Swedish Government also sent its condolences and expressed its readiness to help. Sweden currently holds the presidency of the European Union. Stockholm’s relations with Ankara are also not in the best condition after Turkey reiterated its disagreement with Sweden’s membership in NATO.
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