If Turkey’s strongman wins, don’t give up on Turkish democracy

This Sunday, Turkey’s long-dominant leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is poised to win another five-year term in a run-off for the presidency, extending his 20-year tenure in office into a third decade.

In the election’s first round on May 14, Erdoğan stunned pollsters and pundits by winning 49.5 percent of the vote, securing an unambiguous lead over the 44.9 percent won by his main rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Now that the third-place presidential candidate has endorsed Erdoğan ahead of the run-off on May 28, Erdoğan has gone from “clear favorite” to very likely victor.

Among opposition circles in Turkey and foreign affairs practitioners in Washington, hope of democratic change is now on life support. Instead, the mood vacillates between depression about Turkey’s political prospects and anger at the politicians, pundits and pollsters who promised Erdoğan’s demise. Political analysts claim that Turkey “is now on the brink of descending into fully unfree authoritarianism.” Officials in the U.S. and Europe — not least on Capitol Hill — are reportedly exasperated at the prospect of five more years of dealing with Erdoğan, though he has been a key partner on issues such as hosting Syrian refugees.

This pessimism about Turkish politics must not discourage international support for civil society and human rights during a third Erdoğan presidency. As troubled as the rule of law may be in Turkey today, it could get appreciably worse in several specific domains. That means that sustained international engagement on human rights issues — not a punitive approach that plays into Erdoğan’s hands — will only be more essential to keep political freedoms in Turkey alive.

In much analysis of Turkey, the consensus view is that the rule of law there is already dead and gone. As the director of a Turkish civil society organization lamented to us, understandably, “Nothing works in Turkey. There is no rule of law.”

Most notably, two dissidents in Turkey, the philanthropist Osman Kavala and Kurdish political leader Selahattin Demirtaş, have been behind bars for years, despite judgments from the European Court of Human Rights that they should be released.

Yet as gloomy as the outlook for the rule of law may be today, a third term for Erdoğan would mean that Turkey’s president will be subject to fewer constraints than ever. For one, the president’s coalition has already won an outright majority in parliament, with 54 percent of seats.

Erdoğan’s party, the AKP, is more personalistic than ever, because so many officials from his party have left or been forced out. Worse still, especially if Erdoğan wins a larger vote share than he did in the 2018 presidential elections, he will feel vindicated and may double down on his political and economic tactics.

How, specifically, could the rule of law deteriorate in a third Erdoğan term? There are three specific areas for concern.

To begin, Turkey’s upper judiciary could ban from politics the opposition mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, ahead of local elections in March 2024. Already, a lower court has sentenced İmamoğlu to years in prison for “insulting” public officials, but the mayor remains free pending appeal. Although banning İmamoğlu from politics would likely spark backlash with voters, Erdoğan may calculate that doing so is necessary to neutralize an opposition leader who has been uniquely capable of winning over the president’s pious voter base.

An equally worrisome scenario is that Turkey’s Constitutional Court could ban the main pro-Kurdish opposition party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), and its offshoot, the Green Left Party (YSP). Some independent-minded judges, including the chief justice Zühtü Arslan, remain on Turkey’s high court — mostly those appointed by Erdoğan’s predecessor as president. But a third term for Erdoğan would cement a pro-government super-majority on the court, which could hobble opposition parties and even ban pro-Kurdish parties outright.

Finally, despite two decades of Erdoğan’s rule, Turkey’s civil society, universities, and media continue to struggle for their independence. With another term in office, Erdoğan will chip away at institutions, such as Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, that remain battered strongholds of independence.

Given this sobering picture, it would be easy for foreign affairs and democracy practitioners to feel defeated. This past month, Erdoğan’s government has doubled down on anti-Western rhetoric, with Erdoğan hailing his “special relationship” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and one cabinet official describing the elections as a “political coup attempt” orchestrated by “the West.” Amid this pushback, the temptation in Western capitals will be to disengage from human rights concerns and settle for a transactional relationship that prioritizes security issues, especially the war in Ukraine.

But such disengagement would give up what leverage the international community still has to protect human rights.

Even today, the European Court of Human Rights remains quietly influential in protecting some minimal rule of law in Turkey, especially in lower-profile cases — for instance, by pushing Turkey’s Constitutional Court to strike down a long-standing ban on Wikipedia. Burning bridges would remove this remaining leverage and play directly into Erdoğan’s narrative that the West does not respect the will of Turkey’s voters.

Of equal importance, if Erdoğan prevails this Sunday, Turkey’s civil society will go through a wrenching period, as individuals and organizations evaluate whether they can and should continue their work. International support for civil society, media, and universities will only be more essential to show these groups that they will not be abandoned and to help a fragmented civil society come together and find strength in greater unity.

To be sure, international support for human rights will not be enough to reverse the damage to Turkey’s democracy. But by partnering with Turkey’s deeply rooted civil society, international engagement can help keep the flame of democracy alive.

Andrew O’Donohue is the Carl J. Friedrich Fellow in Harvard University’s Department of Government and co-editor of Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization. Cem Tecimer is a doctoral candidate in law (SJD) at Harvard Law School.