Turkey’s Election Board on Sunday confirmed that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won Turkey’s 2023 presidential election. Extending his rule into its third decade in power after facing the tightest race of his career.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will undoubtedly read his latest election victory as a mandate to continue his pugnacious foreign and economic policies. Both he and Turkey would be better off steering a more pragmatic course.
Erdogan has reason to feel vindicated. Despite nosebleed inflation and anger over the government’s feeble response to a devastating earthquake in February, he triumphed easily in Sunday’s runoff, winning approximately 52% of the vote. Turnout in the first round neared 90%. Among Turkey’s conservative, nationalist majority, Erdogan remains genuinely popular.
At the same time, his systematic elimination of rivals, dominance of the media, and control over the levers of state afforded him huge advantages over opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The fact that nearly half the country still voted to oust him is striking.
The results of Sunday’s runoff will decide not only who leads Turkey, a NATO-member country of 85 million, but also how it is governed, where its economy is headed after its currency plunged to one-tenth of its value against the dollar in a decade, and the shape of its foreign policy, which has seen Turkey irk the West by cultivating ties with Russia and Gulf states.
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Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban congratulated Erdogan via Twitter for an “unquestionable election victory,” and Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani wished the Turkish president success in a tweet. Other congratulations poured in from Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Libya, Algeria, Serbia and Uzbekistan.
Erdogan, 69, is set to remain in power until 2028.
A devout Muslim, he heads the conservative and religious Justice and Development Party or AKP. Erdogan transformed the presidency from a largely ceremonial role to a powerful office through a narrowly won 2017 referendum. That scrapped Turkey’s parliamentary system of governance. He was the first directly elected president in 2014 and won the 2018 election that ushered in the executive presidency.