The Most Important Election This Year. By Srdja Trifkovic.

Turkey, with a population of 85 million, and GDP per capita of $41k, is bigger than any nation in the EU.

In arguably the momentous electoral contest in the world in 2023, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has secured another five-year term in office. Erdoğan won his third term after narrowly winning the runoff vote on Sunday, beating challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu by 4 percentage points, securing 52.1 percent of the vote with a turnout of 84 percent.

The Erdoğan era will continue, and now it will be backed by the most conservative and nationalist legislature in Turkey’s modern history. …

This is a remarkable feat, given Turkey’s protracted economic downturn, its inflation rate of 43 percent in April (down from a whopping 85 percent in 2022, but still high), the near collapse of its currency, the lira, and the government’s general slide into authoritarianism. …

A little over one-half of the electorate sees Erdoğan as a messianic figure with infallible qualities — especially Turkey’s religious conservatives, who had long felt marginalized under the prior consecutive secular rulers.

Just under one-half of the Turkish electorate, however, sees Erdoğan as the destroyer of democracy and the Kemalist legacy of secularism. His critics at home and abroad claim that over the years Erdoğan has undermined political rights and institutions to such an extent that Turkey can hardly be called a democracy. Kılıçdaroğlu complained of the “most unfair election in years.” …

Erdoğan’s critics fail to grasp that his blend of nationalism, Islamism, and neo-Ottoman visions of imperial grandeur has been an enormously successful mix. His supporters do not care about the alleged erosion of Western-style “rights” — his opposition to the LGBTQ+ psychosis is actually hugely popular.

And, despite the recent weakness in the economy, Erdoğan is seen as a champion of economic social justice. During the first decade of his rule, the average per capita income of Turks tripled, while the income redistribution mechanisms introduced by the AKP government meant that the less well-off classes benefited disproportionately from the increase in income. …

Turkey’s leaders and elites share the Turkish public’s distrust of America. A 2017 survey found that 72 percent of Turks view the United States as a security threat to their country. As I have recently noted in these pages, anti-Americanism in Turkey is at an all-time high …

Secularist “progressives” have lost for good:

Following Erdoğan’s victory this weekend, the old Kemalist elite is likely to suffer a terminal loss of confidence. The change within the Turkish state and society, of its ethos and institutional culture, is irreversible.

The secularist elites are paying the price of helping Erdoğan in the crucial early years of his mandate. Turkey’s activist foreign policy had seduced the Kemalists with the vision of Turkey as a resurgent great power. It had enabled Erdoğan to co-opt into the project many senior civil servants, diplomats, and generals who were not sympathetic to the ideological assumptions of his paradigm, but who were ready and willing to support its seemingly “realist” aspects in geostrategic terms.

This was a Faustian pact. For the sake of Turkey’s status as a first-rate regional power — pleasing to their nationalist sensibilities — the secularist elite were prepared to close their eyes to the fact that Islam had always been the all-encompassing denominator of the project. But once the political clout of the Army was broken, it was over.

There is a historical parallel to what has happened in Turkey with pre-war Germany. Officials who were not supportive of Hitler were willing during the crucial early years of the Third Reich to offer their services to his revolutionary project in the name of promoting traditional German national interests and objectives. In early 1938 they were duly swept away …

After the failed coup of 2016, Erdoğan was finally able to do the same to the remaining Kemalist civil service and army cadres. Their replacements, steeped in Islamism and neo-Ottomanism, had been groomed at the lower levels of the hierarchy. …

Kemal Ataturk hoped to impose a strictly secular concept of nationhood, but political Islam has reasserted itself. The near-impossible task facing Turkey’s Westernized intelligentsia – long before Erdogan’s rise – had been to break away from the lure of neo-Ottoman irredentism abroad, and at home to reform Islam into a matter of personal choice: in other words, to make it separate from the State and distinct from the society. The Kemalist edifice, always unstable, is largely an empty shell today. It will be completely so if and when Erdogan retires, at the end of his third presidential term in 2028, or even some years later (barring an act of Allah!).

Visionary, boastful, and megalomaniac, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is not the leader of the Turks because he wins the elections. He wins the elections because he is the leader of the Turks. Winning the elections did not make Erdoğan a democratic leader, just as the toughening of his leadership does not make him a “dictator.” Like other great Turkish leaders of the past, Erdoğan does not rule against the will of the majority of his people — but that does not make him a democratic leader. The adoption of democracy would undermine the paternalistic relationship which has always characterized the relationship between Turkey’s leader and the Turkish people. In Turkey, the sovereignty of the people must be subordinated to the sovereignty of the nation.

Nationalism plus socialism is also known as fascism. But Islam is the strongest ideology around, and is reasserting itself in Turkey.

hat-tip Stephen Neil