After Turkey’s longtime leader was reelected for another five years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s supporters partied late into the night.
He told the jubilant crowds outside his vast mansion on the outskirts of Ankara, “The entire nation of 85 million won.”
But as he mocked his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu, attacked a jailed Kurdish leader, and attacked pro-LGBT policies, his cry for togetherness rang hollow.
The leader of the opposition did not formally declare victory.
Mr. Kilicdaroglu blasted “the most unfair election in recent years,” claiming the president’s political party had enlisted all of the resources of the state to work against him.
According to nearly all unofficial results, President Erdogan won with slightly more than 52% of the vote. In this sharply divided nation, about half the electorate opposed his authoritarian agenda for Turkey.
Even while Mr. Kilicdaroglu took the president to a run-off second round for the first time since the position was became directly electable in 2014, he ultimately couldn’t compete with the well-prepared Erdogan campaign.
He lost by more than two million votes, scarcely making a dent in the first-round lead held by his competitor.
In Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, the president gave a speech to supporters from atop a bus. Later that evening, he addressed a crowd of admirers on the balcony of his palace, which he estimated to be made up of 320,000 people.
He proclaimed, calling it one of the most significant elections in Turkish history, “It is not just us who won, Turkey won.”
The chorus “Bye, bye, bye, Kemal” was used by him to mock his opponent’s defeat and was also adopted by his supporters in Ankara.
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The main opposition party’s gain in MPs during the two-week-old parliamentary poll was derided by Mr. Erdogan. He claimed that because the party had given away hundreds of seats to its partners, the actual number had decreased to 129.
Additionally, he criticized the opposition alliance’s pro-LGBT policies, saying they ran counter to his own emphasis on families.
The Supreme Election Council stated that there was no question regarding the outcome even though the official results have not been verified.It is quite unusual for the royal complex to be opened to the public, but this outcome, which increased his reign to 25 years, was also unusual.
To experience the victory, supporters traveled from all across Ankara. There were Islamic chanting, and some others prayed with Turkish flags spread out on the field.
Turkey’s economic crisis was temporarily forgotten, and one admirer, Seyhan, said that everything was a lie: “Nobody is starving. We are pleased with his economic policies greatly. In the following five years, he will perform even better.
But the president acknowledged that Turkey’s top priority was to address inflation.
The issue is if he is willing to make the necessary preparations. Inflation infiltrates every aspect of life at a rate that approaches 44% annually.
The rising cost of food, rent, and other necessities has been made worse by Mr. Erdogan’s refusal to follow conventional economic theory and hike interest rates.
“If they continue with low interest rates, as Erdogan has signaled, the only other option is stricter capital controls,” warns Selva Demiralp, professor of economics at Koc university in Istanbul. “The Turkish lira has hit record lows against the dollar and the central bank has struggled to meet surging demand for foreign currency.”
Erdogan has been the supreme leader of Turkey for 20 years.
The focus of Erdogan’s followers, who spoke with satisfaction of his leadership role in the world and his tough stance against “terrorists”—by which they meant Kurdish militants—was far from economics.
President Erdogan has criticized his counterpart for offering to release a former co-leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP, Turkey’s second-largest opposition party, and accused him of cooperating with terrorists.
Selahattin Demirtas has been imprisoned since 2016 despite a release order from the European Court of Human Rights.
Mr. Demirtas would remain imprisoned, according to Mr. Erdogan, as long as he was in power.
The “voluntary” return of one million Syrian refugees was another pledge he made, along with giving priority to rebuilding in the regions affected by the February twin earthquakes.
Istanbul’s Taksim Square was crowded with people, many of whom traveled there from the Middle East and the Gulf.
Jordanian Palestinians draped Turkish flags around their shoulders, and Alaa Nassar, a Tunisian guest, claimed that Mr. Erdogan had not only improved his own nation but also “is supporting Arabs and the Muslim world.”
Despite the festivities, the concept of unification in this bitterly divided nation appears further away than ever.
Since a failed coup attempt in 2016, Mr. Erdogan has eliminated the position of prime minister and accumulated significant power—which his rival had promised to curtail.
On Sunday, a voter expressed his desire to put a halt to the brain drain that started with the post-coup purge in front of a voting location in Ankara. There is a chance that it will now get worse.
The opposition in Turkey will now need to reorganize in preparation for the 2024 local elections.
One of Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s party’s two well-liked mayors, who respectively oversee Ankara and Istanbul, may have had a greater chance of winning the presidential election.
