Erdogan concedes 'turning point': Top lessons from Turkey's shock election result
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00:00 To tell us a bit more, Leila Jacinto is with me here in the studio.
00:03 And Leila, barely a year ago now, you were in Turkey yourself covering
00:08 the presidential and the parliamentary elections, for full disclosure, I was there as well
00:12 at that time. Now, Erdogan and his party, they did very well, they won those elections.
00:17 Clearly not this time. What went wrong?
00:19 Yeah, I mean, and we've gotten used to describing the Turkish political system as an electoral
00:24 autocracy or a competitive authoritarianism. So like, did the opposition beat electoral autocracy?
00:32 And how did this happen? Well, I mean, because if you go to see the context was the same,
00:36 the economy was bad last year, it's bad this year as well. And the presidential candidate
00:42 for the opposition, the secular opposition CHP party last year, Kemal Kiliç Darulu,
00:49 the presidential candidate ran on the economy, he famously ran on the price of an onion,
00:54 he didn't win. So there are, you know, there are a couple of factors at play over here.
01:02 One, this is a local election. So voters tend to be more bold, and they tend to vote in more
01:07 issues driven way. They concentrate less on values and personality than in presidential elections.
01:16 Two, and I think this is important is personalities matter in Turkish elections, you know,
01:22 given that the economy is was bad, the CHP candidate last year in the presidential election,
01:29 Kemal Kiliç Darulu, you know, septuagenarian, mild mannered, colorless person, he just failed
01:35 to rouse the electorate. The CHP this time had much stronger candidates, Ikram Imamoglu,
01:41 ran for Istanbul, as well as the Ankara mayoral candidate, they're very strong candidates
01:47 that captured the electorate, I would say. Another very interesting thing was a lot of the smaller
01:53 parties in this election, they ran their own candidates, they did not form alliances. Now,
02:00 last year for the presidential and parliamentary elections, you know, the Kurdish party, for
02:05 instance, backed the secular opposition. What is very interesting in this election was what happened
02:10 in the Islamist spectrum, the right Islamist spectrum. Now, we have a small Islamist party,
02:16 it's called the New Welfare Party or the YRP party. It's described as a hardline Islamist
02:22 party, some even describe it as a fundamentalist Islamist party. Last year, they ran in an alliance
02:28 with the ruling AKP in the People's Alliance. For these local elections, they ran their own
02:34 candidates, and they competed against Erdogan's party. And they are really one of the surprise
02:41 big winners of this election. This party, very small party founded in 2018, won more than 6%
02:48 of the vote. It won the third largest vote share of this election. And I think what is interesting
02:55 to look at is this party and its founder, Fatih Erbakan, who's, you know, who put in an interesting
03:02 dynamic in what happened yesterday. So tell us a bit about him and why you think really he's the
03:09 story of the day. Well, Fatih Erbakan is the son of one of Turkey's foremost Islamist politicians,
03:19 Necmettin Erbakan. Necmettin, the father, was actually Erdogan's political mentor. He had,
03:28 he's formed several Islamist parties, but the last party that he formed broke up in 2001. And the AKP
03:34 was one of two splinters that happened. So Necmettin is sort of the doyen of political Islamism
03:41 in Turkey. He's deceased now, but his son is now in politics. Now, I did not watch his son Fatih
03:50 on the campaign trail. And frankly, not many of us did. But I've been speaking to people who did
03:55 watch his campaign, and they say that, you know, he's as charismatic as his father. If that's the
04:00 case, that's a lot of charisma. So once again, we see personality. But what is interesting is the
04:05 platform on which he ran. He consistently attacked Erdogan on the Gaza war, on the fact that Turkey
04:12 has free trade with Israel, on the fact that statistics actually showed that Turkish-Israeli
04:18 trade increased after the October 7th Gaza war began. And so in his victory speech yesterday,
04:26 he acknowledged the fact that, you know, this victory, he said, was decided by the behavior
04:31 of those who continue to trade freely with Israel. So, you know, on the rightward side of the Turkish
04:37 political spectrum, there are also, there's a sense of getting fed up with the AKP, as well as
04:43 on the left secular side. How interesting. Thank you very much, indeed, Leela Jacinto for us there.