In reality, the two autocrats make a very odd couple. Kim is still a youngish man with a few extra pounds on his frame, while Putin is in his seventies and loves to appear shirtless on horses, the better to showcase his judo-trained body. Kim is the dynastic ruler of a small, isolated, homogeneous country that remains formally communist. By contrast, Putin presides over a multiethnic empire that stretches across 11 time zones and has formally turned its back on its communist past. Kim disparages religion but maintains a suffocating cult of personality, while Putin, who embraced religion to boost his own popularity, has yet to force Russian officials to wear pins with his face on them.

Sure, Putin and Kim have some friends in common (China’s Xi Jinping and America’s Donald Trump), some shared enemies (the West, most democracies), and a fondness for making threats (bombastic, sometimes nuclear). But what really binds them together is a seemingly antiquated belief system whose origins stretch back two centuries.

Kim and Putin are both ardent nationalists.

The two of them believe fervently in the supremacy of the nation-state, specifically their own. They also assert the superiority of their particular ethnic groups, with Putin increasingly using russky (ethnic Russians) instead of rosissky (citizens of Russia) in his speeches and Kim following the official North Korean tradition of purging the language and culture of all outside influences.

Above all, those two leaders are united in their opposition to outsiders — other countries, international organizations, non-governmental do-goodniks — having any say over what takes place within their borders. Putin and Kim are, in other words, spokesmen for what I call the sovereignistas, a class of world leaders who insist on their sovereign right to be exceptions to the rules that govern the rest of the planet.

In reality, ultra-nationalists like Putin and Kim hold sway over much of our world and come in all too many shapes and sizes. China’s Xi, for instance, resurrected nationalism to revive the fortunes of a communist system whose ideology no longer seemed to motivate the Chinese masses. In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht has started a new party that officially identifies as left-wing but has right-wing nationalist takes on border controls, globalization, and green politics. Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, India’s Narendra Modi has adapted nationalism to the needs of his right-wing party’s religious chauvinism devoted to making Hindu India great again.

Far from just patrolling the edges of their societies, such nationalists are increasingly prospering at their political centers. Just ask Joe Biden, who tried to counter Trump’s populism by beefing up his own nationalist credentials through new restrictions at his country’s southern border and onerous new tariffs on China. Indeed, such nationalism has been part of the mainstream since revolutionaries took over the kingdom of France in the late eighteenth century and German romantics began championing das Volk (the people) around the same time. Some political scientists have even argued that nationalism was the essential ingredient in the establishment of modern democracies — that, without its ideological glue, a state couldn’t have mustered enough of a consensus to govern.

In today’s world, think of nationalism as a distinctly old-fashioned liqueur, like absinthe, that’s enjoying a burst of renewed popularity. Politicians of all stripes have recently been adding a splash of it to their policy cocktails to get the public’s attention. Worse yet, some of the more aggressive politicians like Modi, Putin, and Donald Trump are drinking the stuff straight. Beware: undiluted nationalism can go right to the head and make you do crazy things like invading neighboring countries or trying to overturn elections.

So, here’s a question to consider: at a time when the most extreme problems facing the world — climate change, resource depletion, and a possible nuclear Armageddon — know no borders, why has such a parochial philosophy once again become the global ideology du jour?

Not So Flat

Like colonialism, nationalism was supposed to be extinct by now, a relic of another century, an ideology that should emit a distinct odor of mothballs. After all, over the past hundred years, the prerogatives of nation-states have been gradually eroded by U.N. treaties, the growth of transnational corporations, and the spread of a global civil society.

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At a time when everyone seems in touch, no matter where we are geographically speaking, borders seem so nineteenth-century. In such a flat world, crisscrossed by TikTok, Facebook, and Zoom, shouldn’t nationalism be your granddaddy’s moldy old philosophy?

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each had its post-nationalist dream. With proletarian internationalism, communism was supposed to leave nationalism in the dust, as was capitalism with its transnational corporations and its borderless business world. The European Economic Community — later the European Union (EU) — came up with an even stronger variation on that theme as European countries began to remove barriers to trade, then to the movement of capital, and ultimately to the movement of people.

In one scenario, the EU was to serve as the building block for a more peaceful, far less nationalist global order. As Richard Caplan and I wrote in an introduction to a 1996 book on Europe’s new nationalism, “National differences — Scottish kilts, Polish hand-kissing, Swiss neutrality — would presumably continue; [however] nationalist differences, which made the continent a killing ground for centuries, would gradually fade into the history books.” The rest of the world, astounded by the tranquil prosperity of European integration, would presumably follow suit.

That, unfortunately, didn’t happen. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, nationalism came roaring back with a vengeance, particularly in Europe. Anti-immigrant fervor spiked in eastern Germany, new independence movements gained ground in Scotland and Catalonia, and, most terrifyingly, the former country of Yugoslavia dissolved into a bloodbath of ethnic groups turning on one another.

In that immediate post-Cold War era, nationalism proved to be an effective tool wielded by the periphery against a domineering center. Decades of formal accommodation within Yugoslavia among Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes produced much intermarriage along with all too many suppressed inter-ethnic resentments, as well as rage at Belgrade for dictating policies to the other Yugoslav republics. Fratricide also surged in the former Soviet Union between Armenians and Azeris, among ethnic groups in Georgia, and most recently, of course, between Russians and Ukrainians. When not directing outright hostility toward the Kremlin, as in Ukraine, these post-Soviet conflicts displaced their anger onto regional power centers like Tbilisi and Baku.

Nor has the supposedly post-nationalist European Union proved immune to such trends. Just replace Moscow or Belgrade with the regulatory “overreach” of the EU’s capital city, Brussels, and the last eight years of political developments make more sense, starting with Great Britain’s Brexit vote in 2016. A disgust with supposedly interfering Eurocrats merged with a hitherto underappreciated nativism to send that otherwise cosmopolitan country skittering into a parochial corner.

Inspired by the British vote, Frexit, Nexit, and Grexit seemed to loom on the horizon until European sovereignistas decided that it was more useful to hijack the EU’s institutions than abandon them completely. The far right not only took over national governments in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and almost France but also challenged Europeanists on their own turf in European Parliamentary elections. In fact, in June, the far right registered its best results ever and has formed both the third and fourth largest voting blocs in that parliament.

Why Nationalism, Why Now?

Nationalism was initially a weapon deployed against imperial centers — with the French rising up against their king, the Greeks revolting against the Ottomans, and virtually all of Latin America breaking away from Spanish or Portuguese colonials. While it can still serve that function today (just ask the Ukrainians), it’s now more often mobilized in response to a different kind of power: globalization and its political, economic, and social avatars.

The growth of the economic version of globalization, which began with steamships and the telegraph and, in our time, accelerated to the container ship and the Internet, has led, not surprisingly, to serious pushback. Nationalists now decry the way the architects of the global economy have lined the pockets of the rich, while robbing nation-states of the tools to steer their own economies. In a classic version of bait and switch, those architects of the world’s economy justified the removal of tariff walls and the construction of a global assembly line by pointing not to the increased wealth of the billionaire class, but to all the millions of people lifted from poverty.

Neglected until recently were the enormous numbers of middle- and working-class people who lost their jobs, savings, and dignity to the tsunami of globalization. Although some of the disgruntled did direct their anger at the “globalists,” they also focused it on that other vector of globalization, the ever-increasing number of desperate border-crossers searching for jobs and better lives. In that way, the rage at being left behind merged with a potent xenophobia, fueling a populist rejection of traditional parties of the center-left and center-right that backed the economic and social transformations of globalization.

But don’t forget the backlash of the sovereignistas, those distinctly nationalistic autocratic leaders like Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and the military junta in Myanmar who continue to fervently defend the inviolability of their countries’ laws and culture. Those sovereignistas have taken aim at international agreements that chipped away at national sovereignty by limiting what countries can produce (not chlorofluorocarbons, thanks to the Montreal Protocol), whom they can discriminate against (not minority groups, according to various human rights agreements), and how many people they can kill (not entire communities, as detailed in the genocide convention).

Donald Trump is, of course, the sovereignista par excellence. He opposes all international treaties that constrain American power, even ones that ultimately serve the country’s national interests like the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord, and the Open Skies arms control treaty. He styles himself an “anti-globalist,” even though his international businesses are anything but that. Like Xi in China, Trump is skilled at adopting and adapting an ideology fundamentally alien to his worldview to cultivate mass appeal and preempt any criticism of his world-spanning narcissism. Sure, Trump’s businesses made millions overseas, even when he was president, and have employed plenty of undocumented workers at home. But no problem, since he wraps himself in an American flag, both literally and figuratively, by promising to impose tariffs on all foreign goods and deport all undocumented migrants.

Donald Trump is riding a real wave. His criticisms of globalization resonate with significant parts of the American public who have indeed suffered because of shuttered factories, bankrupt farms, and deregulated economies.

The Future of the Past

Globalization polarizes societies, enriches plutocrats, and destroys local enterprises. It’s McDonald’s, Microsoft, and McDonnell Douglas all wrapped up in one big gut punch. But the answer to such an assault on the local and the particular shouldn’t be an appeal to nationalism or the grim language of blood and soil.

Backward-looking as it may be, nationalism is also remarkably adaptable. You can find nationalist TikTok videos, nationalist podcasts, and nationalist approaches to climate change. In the case of El Salvador’s young right-wing authoritarian, Nayib Bukele, nationalism even presents itself as “cool.”

But the solutions put forward by nationalists across the political spectrum fail to address the common threats posed by resource depletion, economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, and the desperate overheating of this planet. Whether you slice up the world according to nation-states or “pure” ethnic communities, such divisions can’t deal with force multipliers like pandemics and rising oceans.

The international community not only needs to expand cooperation in this moment of increasingly devastating globalized crises, but individual countries will need to give up a portion of their sovereignty to make anything truly work. Sovereignistas, for instance, would have let the ozone layer disappear. Only the Montreal Protocol, which required every country to alter its production of certain sprays and solvents, saved the planet’s sunscreen. The growing climate disaster needs global coordination of just that sort, but raised by the power of 10.

Yet, all too sadly, nationalism grows in soil well prepared by coercive universalism, whether the allegedly iron-clad laws of supply and demand behind globalization or the legally binding principles of international law like the Geneva Conventions. It’s a terrible paradox that the more the world demands universalism, the more devastating the pushback from the sovereignistas.

Today, the options are few. A technocratic global elite could try to force necessary changes down the throats of everyone, sovereignistas included. Or perhaps the patient organizing of liberal-minded parties could someday succeed in winning back the electoral terrain that the nationalists have been acquiring. The first, however, is likely to generate insuperable resistance, while the second may not happen quickly enough, if at all.

There is, of course, a third option, struggling to grow in the shade of public attention. A new generation of internationalists is trying to extract what’s good from globalization, including human-rights treaties and more generous immigration policies, while offering a sustainable economic model to replace the neoliberal fantasy of a flat world. They are doing so in institutions, in civil society, and even, every so often, in governments.

Here, subsidiarity should play a key role. A clunky word, largely unknown outside the European Union, it basically means that problems should be solved at the lowest feasible level — that is, in your neighborhood, if possible; if not, in your town, state, country, or region. Only truly global problems should be solved at a global level.

The sovereignistas’ claim that they alone can save their countries and cultures is a scam. In truth, they just want power for themselves, not for “the people” they claim to represent. The only truly workable alternative would be democracy in overlapping circles from your neighborhood all the way up to global institutions. Forget the talk about this planet’s nationalists and globalists. Democratic internationalists must now link arms across all those controversial borders and scale up at warp speed to save the future from all the bad ideas of the past.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – I hadn’t expected my book tour in Malaysia to end with a confrontation with men who identified themselves as police in a Kuala Lumpur airport.

I arrived in the Muslim-majority country in early January 2024 to promote the Malay translation of my book “Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment,” an academic analysis of the political and socioeconomic crises facing many Muslim societies today.

But my visit attracted unwarranted attention. Some conservatives and Islamists labeled me in social media a “liberal” – a term used by Malaysia’s federal agency administering Islamic affairs to denote those against the official religion, Sunni Islam. This was followed by the cancellation of my book launch event.

Nonetheless, I continued my program of other talks. Two men who identified themselves as police officers came to my last event and questioned my publisher.

The following day, the same men interrogated me and tried to seize my passport in Kuala Lumpur International Airport as I was due to embark on a flight to Pakistan. Concerned over my safety, I canceled a series of talks planned for Lahore and Islamabad and returned home to the United States.

When the incident became national news, Malaysia’s police inspector-general denied that officers were sent to confront me. Yet, a human rights group has called for a more thorough investigation into my case.

As a scholar of religion and politics in comparative perspective, I don’t see my ordeal as an isolated example of religious intolerance in Muslim-majority countries. Instead, it taps into something wider.

My research shows that there is a rising global trend against dissenting and minority religious views. Analyzing this trend is crucial to understand why right-wing populist leaders are now ruling diverse countries, such as Turkey, Russia, Israel and India, and how they may come to power in other places, including the United States.

All these countries have recently experienced the combination of three movements: religious conservatism, nationalism and populism.

Religion and nationalism: Old enemies, new allies

In both Christian and Muslim history, nationalism emerged in reaction to the religious establishment. Scholars of nationalism such as Benedict Anderson explain its origins in Europe after the 16th century by the expansion of vernacular languages, national churches and nation-states at the expense of Latin, the Vatican and divinely ordained dynasties.

Similarly, in many Muslim-majority countries, there was a tension between Islamists and nationalists. The Islamists pushed for traditional religious education and Islamic law, and emphasized global Islamic identity. Nationalists, however, modernized schools, established secular laws and stressed national identity.

This tension continued throughout the 20th century in Turkey, where nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded a secular republic in the 1920s. There was a similar struggle in Egypt between the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the nationalist military officers who built the republic under the leadership of secularist Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s.

Today, however, religious and nationalist forces are often political allies. For a decade, such an alliance has existed in Russia between the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and President Vladimir Putin. Laws punishing insults to religious feelings have been expanded, and Orthodox Christian values returned to school curricula.

Analysts define Kirill’s strong support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a reflection of the nationalist ideology they share.

In Turkey, the main religious authority is Diyanet, a government agency that controls mosques and pays the salaries of their imams. Although the Diyanet was established by Ataturk to serve secular nationalist policies, it has become an important pillar of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which mixes Islamism with nationalism. While Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party represents Islamism, its coalition partner for a decade, Nationalist Action Party, has an explicitly nationalist agenda.

In the Arab world, there was a wrangling between Nasser’s secular nationalist Egypt and the Islamic state of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s. No longer. Egypt, which has moved to Islamism with a constitution referring to sharia as the source of law since 1980, and Saudi Arabia, which has recently become less Islamist and more nationalist through Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reforms, are now regional allies.

The age of populist leaders

What explains this transformation in the relationship between religion and nationalism? I believe that populism is the glue that brings them together.

Populists often claim that they are defending “the people” against both elites and minorities, especially immigrants.

Recently, populist nationalist leaders have used religious symbols to mobilize their followers. For example, in 2016, Putin established an Orthodox Cathedral in Paris on the banks of the Seine River, near the Eiffel Tower. And in 2020, Erdogan declared the Hagia Sophia a mosque again – it had been a church for over a millennium until the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul in 1453 and a mosque for about 500 years until Ataturk made it a museum.

Most recently, on Jan. 22, 2024, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple in Ayodhya on the site of a mosque that had been built in 1528 but violently destroyed in 1992 by Hindu radicals, after a century of controversies over the land.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

And while former U.S. President Donald Trump did not establish a cathedral, he did give a photo-op holding up a Bible at a crucial moment – during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 – as a sign of his religious politics against the protesters.

In such acts, populist leaders aim to incorporate religion and nationalism to serve their political agenda. Yet, for religious minorities, this symbolism may imply that they are secondary citizens.

The future of religious minorities

In several countries, the alliances between religious forces and populist nationalists have threatened minority rights.

One such case is Malaysia, an ethnically and religiously diverse country, where Muslim Malays are the majority, while Buddhist, Christian and Hindu communities constitute a third of society.

As I learned during my recent visit, Islam is at the center of political debates about nationalism in Malaysia. For example, on Jan. 13, 2024, Mahathir Mohamad, the once powerful former prime minister, said ethnically Chinese and Indian citizens of Malaysia are not fully “loyal to the country” and offered assimilation as a solution.

Assimilation of ethnic minorities into the majority may not be limited by language and culture, because the country’s constitution connects Islam and the Malay identity, stating: “Malay means a person who professes the religion of Islam, habitually speaks the Malay language, conforms to Malay custom.”

For Malays and converts, leaving Islam officially is not an option – both civil courts and sharia courts have rejected that in various cases.

The strong connection between religion and Malay nationalism has helped Islamic authorities, such as sharia courts and sharia police, expand their influence. Increasing Islamization of Malaysian government, however, is a worry for non-Muslim minorities.

Meanwhile, Muslim minorities are worried about their rights in several non-Muslim countries ruled by populist nationalists.

According to democracy watchdog Freedom House, in India, Modi’s government has pursued discriminatory policies against the Muslim minority of about 200 million people. These policies have included the destruction of Muslim properties to the extent that bulldozers became “Hindu-nationalist” and “anti-Muslim” symbols in India.

In the United States, Trump’s anti-immigrant policies included the so-called “Muslim ban” – an executive order that barred nationals of certain Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. While campaigning for the upcoming 2024 elections, Trump vowed to bring back the ban in an expanded manner.

As the experience of many countries around the world shows, the trend of advancing a religious-nationalist agenda restricts minority voices. This trend constitutes a major challenge to the ideals of democracy and equality of citizens worldwide.

These concerns are also personal for me: As a Muslim American, I want to both keep enjoying equal citizenship in the United States and give talks about Islam in Muslim-majority countries without being harassed by the police.

Ahmet T. Kuru, Professor of Political Science, San Diego State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Yet, as any student of history, let alone a diplomat, will testify, conflicts between nations cannot be understood, let alone resolved, without an understanding of their historical roots. Could this also be true of the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians?

The roots of this conflict are often explained with reference to establishment of Israel in 1948, including as it did, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland as well as the killing of thousands more. Although the Zionists who founded Israel were for the most part Labor socialists and often secular-minded, the civil war in which the British Mandate of Palestine collapsed brought out a nationalistic tribalism among the newly minted Israelis. That tribalism among the Zionists was further reinforced by the Nazi mass genocide of Jews in Europe during WW II, i.e., the Holocaust.  Ironically, the Jewish tribalism of the Zionist paramilitaries in late British Palestine also impelled Palestinian and Arab tribalism. Despite the ethical universalism of the Qur’an and Islamic values, extremist Muslim groups have in recent decades become seduced by modern notions of ethnic nationalism, veering into a tribalism of their own, in the face of colonialism and neocolonialism.

A struggle within Judaism between universalism and tribalism can be traced much, much further back, however. This is the time of the author(s) of Second Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament. Among other things, Second Isaiah teaches the universal existence of God, i.e., not just the God of the Jews but of the whole world. It further contains numerous exhortations to ethical behavior and social justice. Ethical behavior includes such things as caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing justice, and treating others with compassion. 

This means that the author(s) of Second Isaiah were one of a small group of religious reformers of the Axial Age, a period given its name by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers identified the Axial Age as a worldwide transformation of religious consciousness that lasted from roughly between 800-200 BCE centered in the Mediterranean, India, and China. Overall, its key features included a new emphasis on ethical living, individual introspection, and universal principles.

“The Axial Age,” Digital: Dream/ Mystical, Juan Cole prompts, 2024

By comparison, the multiple religions of the world’s peoples prior to the Axial Age, including Judaism, were tribal in nature, i.e., focused on what was good for the tribe as a whole rather than the individual tribal member, much less on what was good for those outside of the tribe. While tribes typically spoke of themselves as the “people” those outside of the tribe were regarded with disdain if not fear, as a potential enemy that, when necessary, had to be destroyed in order to ensure the survival of the tribe.

It is attractive, but mistaken, to assume that in the aftermath of the Axial Age after 200 BCE, the old tribal-centric religions, typically described as animistic in character, simply atrophied and disappeared. However, as many subsequent wars have demonstrated, that is not the case. When a tribe, now called a nation, comes under threat, whether real or perceived, the populace of that nation reverts to a tribal mentality if not a tribal morality, i.e., only we are human, the ‘other’ is not. The universal deity is returned, albeit unconsciously, to his/her status as a tribal deity concerned exclusively with the welfare of the tribe. Once tribalized, the deity goes on to bless and protect the tribe, and only the tribe, assuring them of victory. As for the treatment of the tribe’s enemy, anything goes.

In the case of the current conflict in Israel/Palestine this age-old paradigm is all too clear. Thus, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not hesitate to invoke the Biblical image of the Jewish tribal battle against the Amalekites. He claimed Israelis were united in their fight against Hamas, whom he described as an enemy of incomparable cruelty. “They [Israeli Jews] are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” Netanyahu said in Hebrew and then added: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”

Netanyahu’s reference was to the first Book of Samuel in which God commands King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival tribe to the ancient Israelites. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” (1 Samuel 15:3)

Likewise, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed that “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” While Gallant may have initially been referring to Hamas fighters, he went on to call for the collective punishment of all Palestinians in Gaza, stating, “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”

The tribal nature of Netanyahu and Gallant’s comments could not be clearer, just as their dismissal of the shared humanity of Israelis and Palestinians alike. It should be underlined that they are members of the secular Likud Party, so that despite their appeal to the Hebrew Bible, they are not exemplifying Judaic values. Stripped of any religious conscience, their naked tribalism became astonishingly cruel.

Yet, at the same time there are Jews, including in Israel, who recognize their shared humanity with Palestinians.  Admittedly in Israel itself, groups like “We Stand Together” are numerically few in number. However, among Jews outside of Israel, groups like “Jewish Voices for Peace” and “Not in Our Name” number in the many thousands. These groups are supported by leading Jewish intellectuals like Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Noam Chomsky, Avi Shlaim, Miko Piled and Ilan Pappe. While it is common to describe these groups and individuals as “left-wing” or “progressive,” their stances are not so much political as they are a continued recognition of the universal Judaic values of caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing justice, and treating others with compassionate based on their shared humanity.   

At this point readers may be thinking, if this analysis is correct, it certainly doesn’t apply to adherents of Judaism only.  Don’t all of today’s major religions teach recognition of our shared humanity, the need to be compassionate to others, i.e., some version of ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’?  In response, I would certainly agree they do. We are fortunate indeed that all of today’s major religions share these basic values at least doctrinally. But what of the historical practice of these religions?

William Blake, “The prophet Isaiah,” from Isaiah, liii, 7-12; seated figure with right arm raised.” c.1821″ British Museum, Museum number 1940,1012.1

While limitations of space don’t allow me to go into detail, let me give but one example that has particular relevance to the current situation in Israel/Palestine. I refer to the role played by “Manifest Destiny” in American history. First coined in 1845, this term represented a collective mindset that viewed the expansion of the US as both necessary and ordained by God. As the US gained more territory, proponents of Manifest Destiny used it to justify the forced removal, enslavement, and even elimination of Native American tribes, as well as the expansion of slavery into newly acquired territories.

I suggest the tribal mindset of Christians of European heritage that was manifested in Manifest Destiny is similar to the far-right Zionist commitment to the forced removal and/or elimination of the Palestinian people as part of the current, extremist Israeli government’s drive to create Greater Israel, which it sees as comprising all the lands promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible.

Compare these actions with the words that both Christians and Jews claim to believe in as contained in the book of Leviticus 19:33-34: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

What is one to make of the vast difference between the practice of many Christians and Jews in comparison with the teachings they both claim to believe in? Should their practice be regarded as simple hypocrisy, i.e., do as I say, not as I do? And were there space, I could give similar historical examples from all the major religions of the world. Hypocrites all?

I suggest not. Instead, I point to what is as yet an unresolved split in all religions, i.e., between their tribal heritage, based on tens of thousands of years of past history, versus their Axial-period awakening of less than three thousand years ago. This awakening was of profound importance in that it led to a recognition of the universal nature of their teachings based on their shared humanity. This in turn led to a feeling of mutual compassion in which others are recognized as extensions of themselves, extensions who have the same human needs and fears as they themselves.

Although the present conflict in Israel/Palestine may yet claim untold thousands of lives, at some point it will end, at least this time around. It is safe to say, however, that the battle for the soul of Judaism will continue on. The battle, that is, between those the sort of Judaism that sees itself  in other peoples versus the kind that retains a tribal mentality in which its own well-being is the predominate if not exclusive concern. Inevitably this dichotomy will lead to further hostilities in the future and yet more bloodshed, possibly even among Jews themselves.

At the same time, we already see the emergence of groups like the Jewish Voices for Peace and Stand Together that show the universal values of the Axial age being increasing embraced, especially by young Jews living outside of Israel and even some inside of the country. Which side will prevail remains to be seen.

Yet, it is critically important for non-Jews not to assume this is a conflict that only involves the Jewish people. As recorded history all too graphically reveals, the struggle between a narrow tribal mentality versus a universal mentality truly accepting of the other, is one that transcends all ethnic, racial, national, and even religious, boundaries. In the US, the slogan “America First!” is currently embraced by millions, demonstrating that the tribal mentality remains firmly in place.   Likewise, we have seen the recrudescence of a narrow Hindu tribalism in India, which betrays the Axial Age ethical universalism of Buddhism and the Upanishads.    

As brutal and destructive as religion-endorsed tribal warfare was in the past, humanity as a whole was endangered. Today, however, things have changed, not simply because of the very real possibility of nuclear-induced “mutual assured destruction” but because of the ever-increasing dangers resulting from phenomena like global warming. None of the problems increasingly facing humankind as a whole can be solved by one or even a group of nations. They require concerted the efforts, including necessary sacrifices, of all nations and peoples of the world.

Thus, the question of “the battle for the soul of Judaism” is, in fact, the same battle that adherents of all the world’s religions face and even of those who identify with no faith. Adherents of Islam face the same dilemma. That is to say, can we homo sapiens collectively awake to, and transcend, the historical practices associated with our tribalized pasts or are we bound to continue to fool ourselves into believing that we are pursuing universal truths even as we betray such truths in practice. Thus, the battle for the soul of Judaism is in reality the common struggle of all who believe in human equality and dignity, now encompassing even the very survival of the human species.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – What does it mean to be European? This is a complex but legitimate question. Still, one is unlikely to find an answer to the conundrum in the numerous billboards paid for by the EU Commission in Munich and many other European cities under the motto “You are Europe”.

There are four different models of EU-funded billboards. They all put focus on three different concepts, which give us a total of twelve ideas: freedom, peace, energy independence, democracy, diversity, climate protection, stability, respect, green transition, unity, security, and renewable energy. In every model of the billboard, there is a different single individual in the picture alongside a reference to renewable energies, with an electric car, solar panels, and a windmill appearing.

Billboard at Giselastrasse Subway Station. Munich, November 21, 2023.

By examining the billboards, we understand that the message the EU tries to convey is that the EU is a value-based community. The promotional site of this new campaign calls Europeans to “stand up for our values, to protect your and your family’s future, the climate and the planet.” But one does not need to do more than search online “EU billboard” to see how fragile these values can be. Because the billboards that are catching the headlines in Europe are not the ones promoted by the EU Commission but those found in one particular EU country, Hungary, and paid by Fidesz, the political party of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

These billboards depict President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen alongside Alex Soros, the son of the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, under the slogan “Let’s not dance to their tunes”. This is not a first for Orban’s party, as they had already been responsible for similar billboards in 2019 featuring von der Leyen’s predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker and George Soros.

In the recently published book “Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project”, Hans Kundnani, an associate fellow at Chatham House, examines from a critical perspective how the EU has come to define itself and its values. The EU is often understood as a project united by the rejection of nationalism, which led to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

This discourse can be found in, for instance, the address to the European Parliament in November 2018 by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel said that “nationalism and egoism must never have a chance to flourish again in Europe. Tolerance and solidarity are our future.” Kundnani begs to differ and presents a more complex picture of the EU, writing that “we should think of the EU as an expression of regionalism, which we should in turn think of as being analogous to nationalism—something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale.”[1]

Internal borders and nationalistic competition between EU countries might have lost importance, but the borders and adversarial relations between Europe and the rest of the world remain there and have even hardened. It is difficult to disagree with Kundnani when we see how, despite their internal differences on the topic, EU countries are currently discussing how to further cooperate to establish harsher EU policies towards migrants and asylum seekers.

Kundnani’s key idea, namely that the EU represents a form of regional nationalism, helps understand the current rise of the European far-right from a different perspective. Increasingly, “the far right in Europe does not simply speak on behalf of the nation against Europe, but also on behalf of Europe”, notes Kundnani. Contrary to what many would think, the far-right can also be pro-European in its own specific way.

Hans Kundnani Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project. Hurst, 2023. Click here.

On December 3, European far-right parties held an international meeting in Florence, Italy, to co-ordinate in advance of the European elections to be held in June 2024. During the meeting, Reuters reports, “Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, won applause speaking in Italian and saying that Europe cannot become a “5-star hostel for Africa”, and linking mass immigration to violence and crime.”[2]

Instead of hiding his Italian family background, which would have made sense from a French ultra-nationalist perspective, Bardella used his Italian language skills to appeal to his audience in Florence and demonize the non-European as violent and criminal. Inner European borders lose part of their importance when the main frame of reference is civilizational. And this is increasingly the case. European far-right parties share a belief in racist doctrines such as the ‘Replacement Theory’, which posits that white people around the world are being replaced by nonwhite people.

Kundnani argues that the regional nationalism we currently find in the EU is largely the result of its history. At the time the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), two of the six founding members – Belgium and France – still had colonies. This is what Kundnani calls the EU’s “original sin”.[3]

More important than that, however, is probably the way the EEC and its successor organizations, the European Community and the European Union, failed to come to terms during the following decades with this legacy of European colonialism and violence. Consequently, “the emerging official narrative of the EU was based on the internal lessons of European history, i.e. what Europeans had done to each other, but not the external lessons, i.e. what Europeans had done to rest of world—in particular colonialism.”[4]

There was an important sense, however, in which European regionalism could promote civic values. Kundnani mentions how many who described themselves as pro-Europeans saw “the social market economy and the welfare state as a more humane alternative to a more brutal American form of capitalism.”[5] Such an understanding of being European, which Kundnani names ‘civic regionalism’, reached its high-water mark in the decades following the Second World War. It became increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of the neo-liberalism of the 1980s and 1990s and the austerity measures imposed by the EU after 2008 during the Eurozone crisis.

This neo-liberal turn, and the increasing role of the EU in setting economic policies with little democratic oversight, argues Kundnani, was partly responsible for the rise in Euroscepticism. If the Eurozone crisis split the EU in terms of the better-off North versus the struggling South, the sudden increase in the arrivals of migrants and asylum seekers to Europe in 2015 led to important divergences between a more welcoming West and a closed-doors East. This double split, according to Kundnani, undermined the EU’s self-confidence. During the last years, the civic regionalism of the social market economy and the welfare state has receded even further in favor of a more exclusionary understanding of what it means to be European.

In this context, “centrists began to adopt far-right tropes and integrate them into the EU itself”.[6] Examples of this dynamic are abundant. After becoming President of the European Commission, the center-right politician Ursula von der Leyen announced the creation of a Commission Vice-Presidency for protecting ‘the European way of life’, which would include responsibility for topics such as migration. Von der Leyen, facing outrage, substituted the word ‘protecting’ for ‘promoting’, but little else changed. Meanwhile, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, from the Socialist Spanish Party, pronounced a speech in 2022 where he defined Europe as a garden and added that “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden”.

There are two significant weaknesses in “Eurowhiteness”. The first one is related to the very title of the book. Kundnani explains that “Eurowhiteness” is an “ethnic/cultural version of European identity”[7] but does not develop the concept extensively enough to justify why the term has such prominence in the title. The second shortcoming is the lack of a proper concluding chapter in the book. The last chapter deals with Brexit instead of pointing out some key ideas on the way forward if we want an EU that strengthens civic regionalism.

Catherine de Vries, the dean of international affairs at Bocconi University, has recently published an op-ed for the Financial Times that quotes Kundnani’s work and offers some significant reflections regarding the problems identified in “Eurowhiteness”. Reflecting on the recent electoral victory in the Netherlands of the far-right Party for Freedom (VVP) led by Geert Wilders, de Vries explains that we would be mistaken if we seek to understand the success of the European far-right only through its anti-migration rhetoric.

De Vries notes that “research has shown that cuts to public services play an important role in explaining the rise of the far right”. “Concerns about reduced access to public services”, she adds, “leads people to question the extent to which their government cares about people like them. Waning public services may also fuel immigration concerns out of fear of more congestion and overcrowding.”[8]

Kundnani’s book represents a major contribution to a better understanding of how nationalism, far from fading away with the emergence of a European Union that now covers most of Western and Central Europe, has adopted a new shape in the form of exclusivist European nationalism. “Eurowhiteness” is not without its faults, but it offers an intellectually stimulating and policy-relevant departing point to any discussion about the future of Europe.

[1] Hans Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 3.

[2] Armellini, Alvise. “Far Right Parties Eye Gains in next Year’s EU Parliament Elections.” Reuters, December 3, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-parties-eye-gains-next-years-eu-parliament-elections-2023-12-03/.

[3] Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, p. 75.

[4] Ibid., p. 94.

[5] Ibid., p. 84.

[6] Ibid., p. 126.

[7] Ibid., p. 6.

[8] De Vries, Catherine. “Migration Crackdowns Won’t Help Europe’s Moderate Right.” Financial Times, December 4, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/6b3e2ee0-189e-47f4-95df-375d79dd6266.

(The Conversation) – Thirty-five years ago, more than 100,000 Armenian protesters took to the streets to convince Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that Nagorno-Karabakh – an ethnically Armenian enclave stuck geographically in the neighboring republic of Soviet Azerbaijan – ought to be joined to Armenia.

In recent days, more than 100,000 people have taken to the streets again. But this time it is Karabakh Armenians fleeing their homes to find refuge in Armenia. They have been decisively defeated by the Azerbaijanis in a short and brutal military operation in the enclave. Their dream of independence appears over; what is left is the fallout.

As a longtime analyst of the history and politics of the South Caucasus, I see the chain of recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh as depressingly predictable. But that is not to say they weren’t avoidable. Rather, greater flexibility from both sides – and less demonization of the other – could have prevented the catastrophic collapse of Artsakh, as Armenians called their autonomous republic, and with it the effective ethnic cleansing of people from lands they had lived in for millennia.

A legacy of Lenin

What began as a struggle to fulfill the promise of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin, that all nations would enjoy the right to self-determination within the USSR, turned into a war between two independent, sovereign states that saw more than 30,000 people killed in six years of fighting.

The 1988 demonstrations were met by violent pogroms by Azerbaijanis against Armenian minorities in Sumgait and Baku. Gorbachev, wary that a shift in territory would foster similar demands throughout the Soviet Union and potentially enrage the USSR’s millions of Muslim citizens, promised economic aid to and protection of the Armenians, but he refused to change the borders.

The dispute became a matter of international law, which guaranteed the territorial integrity of recognized states, in 1991 – with Azerbaijan declaring independence from the Soviet Union and rejecting Nagorno-Karabakh’s autonomy vote. The legal principle of territorial integrity took precedence over the ethical principle of national self-determination.

This meant that under international law, state boundaries could not be changed without the mutual agreement of both sides – a position that favored Azerbaijan. All countries in the world recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, even, eventually, Armenia.

An unsolved diplomatic problem

But that didn’t mean the status of Nagorno-Karabakh was ever settled. And for all their efforts, outside powers – Russia, France and the United States most importantly – failed to find a lasting diplomatic solution.

The First Karabakh War, which grew out of the pogroms of 1988 and 1990, ended in 1994 with an armistice brokered by Russia and the Armenians victorious.

Moscow was Armenia’s principal protector in a hostile neighborhood with two unfriendly states, Azerbaijan and Turkey, on its borders. In turn, Armenia was usually Russia’s most loyal and dependable – and dependent – ally. Yet, post-Soviet Russia had its own national interests that did not always favor Armenia. At times, to the dismay of the Armenians, Moscow leaned toward Azerbaijian, occasionally selling them weapons.

Only Iran, treated as a pariah by much of the international community, provided some additional support, sporadically, to Armenia.

The United States, though sympathetic to Armenia’s plight and often pressured by its American-Armenian lobby, was far away and concerned with more pressing problems in the Middle East, Europe and the Far East.

What might have been

The disaster that has befallen Nagorno-Karabakh was not inevitable. Alternatives and contingencies always exist in history and, if heeded by statespeople, can result in different outcomes. Analysts including myself, advisers and even the first president of independent Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, proposed compromise solutions that might have led to an imperfect but violence-free solution to the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Yet the triumphant Armenian victors of the 1990s had few immediate incentives to compromise. Instead, after the First Karabakh War, they expanded their holdings beyond the borders of Nagorno-Karabakh, driving an estimated one million Azerbaijanis out of their homes and making them hostile to Armenians.

The greatest error of the Armenian leaders, I believe, was to give in to a fatal hubris of thinking they could create a “Greater Armenia” on territory emptied of the people who had lived there. After all, wasn’t this how other settler colonial states, such as the United States, Australia, Turkey, Israel and so many others had been founded? Ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with forced assimilation, have historically been effective tools in the arsenal of nation-makers.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijani nationalism smoldered and intensified around the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh. Many decision-makers in Azerbaijan viewed Armenians as arrogant, expansionist, existential enemies of their country. Each side considered the contested enclave a piece of their ancient homeland, an indivisible good, and compromise proved impossible.

Armenian leaders also failed to fully comprehend the advantages that Azerbaijan held. Azerbaijan is a state three times the size of Armenia with a population larger by more than 7 million people. It also has vast sources of oil and gas that it has used to increase its wealth, build up a 21st-century military and finesse into greater ties with regional allies and European countries thirsty for oil and gas.

Armenia had a diaspora that intermittently aided the republic; but it did not have the material resources or the allies close at hand that its larger neighbor enjoyed. Turks and Azerbaijanis referred to their relationship as “one nation, two states.” Sophisticated weapons flowed to Azerbaijan from Turkey – as they did from an Israel encouraged by a shared hostility with Iran, Armenia’s ally – tipping the scales of the conflict.

Democracy versus autocracy

Armenians carried out a popular democratic revolution in 2018 and brought a former journalist, Nikol Pashinyan, to power. A novice in governance, Pashinyan made serious errors. For example, he boldly, publicly declared that “Artsakh” was part of Armenia, which infuriated Azerbaijan. While Pashinyan tried to assure Russia that his movement was not a “color revolution” – like those in Georgia and Ukraine – Vladimir Putin, no fan of popular democratic manifestations, grew hostile to Pashinyan’s attempts to turn to the West.

While Azerbaijan had grown economically – with the capital city of Baku glittering with new construction – politically, it stagnated under the rule of Ilham Aliyev, son of former Communist Party boss Heydar Aliyev.

The autocratic Ilham Aliyev needed a victory over Armenia and Ngorno-Karabakh to quiet rumbling discontent with the corruption of the family-run state. Without warning, he launched a brutal war against Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2020 – and won it in just 44 days thanks to drones and weapons supplied by his allies.

The goal of the victors then was equally hubristic as that of the Armenians a generation earlier. Azerbaijan’s troops surrounded Nagorno-Karabakh and in December 2022 cut off all access to what was left of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, starving its people for 10 months. On Sept. 19, 2023, Baku unleashed a brutal blitzkrieg on the rump republic, killing hundreds and forcing a mass exodus.

This ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh – first through hunger, then by force of arms – completed the Azerbaijani victory. The defeated government of Artsakh declared it would officially dissolve the republic by the end of 2023.

Learning from defeat and victory

War sobers a people. They are forced to face hard facts.

At the same time, victory can lead to prideful triumphalism that in its own way can distort what lies ahead.

Aliyev appears to have tightened his grip on power, and Azerbaijanis today speak of other goals: a land corridor through southern Armenia to link Azerbaijan proper with its exclave Nakhichevan, separated from the rest of the country by southern Armenia. Voices have also been raised in Baku calling for a “Greater Azerbaijan” that would incorporate what they call “Western Azerbaijan” – that is, the current Republic of Armenia.

Armenians might hope that Azerbaijan – and the international community – take seriously the principle of territorial integrity and protect Armenia from incursions by the Azerbaijani army or any more forceful move across its borders.

They might also hope that the U.S. and NATO, which proclaim that they are protecting democracy against autocracy in Ukraine, will adopt a similar approach to the conflict between democratic Armenia and autocratic Azerbaijan.

But with Russia occupied with its devastating war in Ukraine and stepping back from its support of Armenia, a power vacuum has been formed in the Southern Caucasus that Turkey may be eager to fill, to Azerbaijan’s advantage.

A chance for democratic renewal?

The immediate tasks facing Armenia are enormous, beginning with the housing and feeding of 100,000 refugees.

But this might also be a moment of opportunity. Freed of the burden of defending Nagorno-Karabakh, which they did valiantly for more than three decades, Armenians are no longer as captive to the moves and whims of Russia and Azerbaijan.

They can use this time to consolidate and further develop their democracy, and by their example become what they had been in the years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union: a harbinger of democratic renewal, an example of not just what might have been but of what conceivably will be in the near future.

Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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ANKARA, TURKIYE- JUNE 3: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan first received his mandate from MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli, as the temporary chairman of the Parliament, and then took the oath at the General Assembly on June 3, 2023 in Ankara, Türkiye. Re-elected President once again in the 28 May election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s duty, which he will continue until 2028, has officially started. The first ceremony was held in the Turkish Grand National Assembly.(Photo by Ugur Yildirim/ dia images via Getty Images).

Türkiye finds itself in a deep economic crisis, which most analysts agree has been worsened by Erdoğan’s unorthodox economic policies and his spending spree before the election. The months before the electoral contest were also marked by the earthquake that shook south-eastern Türkiye and northern Syria, leaving over 50,000 people dead on the Turkish side of the border alone. In the aftermath of the natural disaster, multiple reports showed that the low construction standards condoned by local authorities and the Turkish government resulted in avoidable deaths.

Erdoğan and his center-right AKP have worked over the years to create an institutional and media environment that facilitates their repeated electoral successes. According to an observation mission of the Turkish elections conducted by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), “biased media coverage and the lack of a level playing field gave an unjustified advantage to the incumbent.” However, the strategic mistakes of the opposition also need to be considered to understand why they failed to unseat Erdoğan at his moment of maximum weakness. It has been noted that Kılıçdaroğlu’s promises to assign vice presidential positions to the different party leaders of the opposition coalition sent a confusing message to the Turkish population regarding who would be in charge if the opposition won. The contrast with Erdoğan’s personalist platform was certainly stark. Even so, if skillfully communicated along the lines of “unity in diversity”, the collective leadership of the opposition platform could have proven a strength rather than a weakness.

In contrast, it was known long before the election campaign started that Kılıçdaroğlu was not the best presidential candidate for the opposition. Different polls from early 2022 to early 2023 showed that CHP politicians Ekrem Imamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş, the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara respectively, were far more popular than Kılıçdaroğlu. In December 2022, a judicial ruling banned Imamoğlu from politics (he has been able to stay in office while appealing the decision) for referring to members of the Turkish supreme election council as “fools.” Imamoğlu’s accusations came after the members of the council forced a repetition of the 2019 local elections in Istanbul, which Imamoğlu won by a wider margin than the initial elections that were declared void. Imamoğlu’s legal problems clearly affected his chances of running for president, but Yavaş did not have any obvious impediment.

If Erdoğan was the personification of victory, in discursive terms the triumph went for anti-immigration positions. In fact, the reason Erdoğan failed to win the election in the first round, as he had done in 2014 and 2018, was the strong showing of the ultra-nationalist Sinan Oğan, who received 5.2% of the votes. Oğan’s campaign largely revolved  around promises to send back Syrian refugees living in Türkiye – according to the Turkish government, 3.7 million Syrian refugees out of a total of 5.5 million foreigners live in the country. Oğan found fertile ground in a country that has seen the emergence of deadly assaults on refugees and immigrant neighborhoods during the last years. When recently polled on the subject of Syrian refugees, more than 88.5% of Turks demonstrated that they want them to return to their country.

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Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu attends a swearing-in ceremony at the Turkish parliament in Ankara, June 2, 2023. (Photo by Adem ALTAN / AFP) (Photo by ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Images)

The runoff contest had almost become a formality after the first-round results: 49.5% of the vote went for Erdoğan and 44.9% for Kılıçdaroğlu, which put the AKP leader half a point away from victory. The impressively high turnout, at 87.4%, meant that the opposition’s options to mobilize citizens who had not participated in the first round were very limited. To complicate matters further, after the first round the opposition lost a few key days involved in recriminations, the restructuring of the election campaign team, and carving up a new strategy for the runoff. The despair within the opposition camp was closely related to the high expectations generated by the majority of pre-election polls, which suggested Kılıçdaroğlu would emerge on top after the first round.

Once the soul-searching came to an end, the next step was the pursuit of Oğan’s votes to have a slight chance in the runoff. There were rumors that the opposition offered Oğan to head a new migration ministry or even the vice presidency if he were to support Kılıçdaroğlu in the second round. At the end, he sided with Erdoğan although the Turkish President did not appear to make any concession to him. Oğan probably saw Erdoğan was going to win regardless of his decision and preferred to back the strongest force. The opposition had to content itself with the support of Umit Ozdag, the leader of the far-right Victory Party, which had been the main party in the alliance that backed Oğan’s candidacy in the first round.

Although both the government and the opposition coalition promised to send refugees back to Syria, the anti-refugee discourse has been “much more prominent” in the opposition camp, explains Chatham House Associate Fellow Galip Dalay. During the two weeks between the first round and the runoff election, Kılıçdaroğlu stepped up his anti-refugee messages. Six days before the second round, in a rally in the province of Hatay, which borders Syria, Kılıçdaroğlu exhorted his audience to “make up your mind before refugees take over the country.” Hatay would go on to become the only province in Türkiye where there was a shift of winner: Kılıçdaroğlu won the first round, Erdoğan the second.

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ISTANBUL, TURKEY – MAY 29: Members of the public are seen near the Hagia Sophia the day after Erdogan was re-elected to presidency on May 29, 2023 in Istanbul, Turkey. On Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won another 5-year term after he was forced into a runoff election with the opposition politician Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan prevailed despite criticism of his management of the country’s economy and the government’s response to the devastating earthquakes earlier this year. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images).

The roadmap to gain Oğan’s vote was not a complete failure, but the opposition needed around 90% of Oğan’s votes to win the election if turnout had remained constant – a possibility that became even more distant as turnout fell by 3.1% in the second round. This meant Erdoğan needed a lesser number of votes to overcome the 50% mark in the runoff election. In fact, the 27.13 million votes Erdoğan received in the first round (as compared to 27.83 million votes in the second) would have been enough to win the second round with over 51% of the valid votes.

Three different provinces illustrate the limited success of the opposition in winning over Oğan voters. In both Kayseri and Bilecik, Oğan received more than 8% of the vote, far above the national average of 5.2%. In the second round, the share of the vote for Kılıçdaroğlu increased at the same rate as Erdoğan’s in Kayseri while Kılıçdaroğlu’s gains in Bilecik were only slightly bigger – 1.6% more than Erdoğan. Something similar happened in Bursa, a far more important province in electoral terms as it is Türkiye’s fourth in number of population. In this western region, Oğan received 7.4% of the vote in the first round. In the second round, Kılıçdaroğlu’s share of the vote increased by 4.5% and Erdoğan’s by 3%.

The opposition did a better job in Istanbul and Ankara, the two largest metropolitan areas, where its margin of victory doubled, but the differences remained too small to compensate for Erdoğan’s overwhelming wins in Central Anatolia and the Black Sea region. Furthermore, Ozdag’s Victory Party support for the opposition proved to have negative consequences in the Kurdish-majority areas of Türkiye. This is something several analysts had expected given the Victory party’s strong anti-Kurdish views. In Diyarbakır, Van, and Mardin, the most populated Kurdish provinces won by Kılıçdaroğlu in the first round, the opposition’s candidate lost between 0.3 and 1% of the vote in the runoff election. The number of votes for Erdoğan in these provinces hardly increased, but the fall in the turnout rate was higher than the national average of 3.1% – 6% in Diyarbakır and Van, 4% in Mardin – suggesting the opposition failed to re-mobilize some of the voters who had previously voted for Kılıçdaroğlu.

Part of the problem for Kılıçdaroğlu was that most of the support he received in the Kurdish areas in the first round consisted of tactical voting. The first round of the presidential election was held together with the parliamentary elections, which the opposition lost to the AKP and its ultra-nationalist ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The pro-Kurdish and left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) called for HDP supporters to back Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential election, forgoing putting up their own presidential candidate as they had done in the past. In the parliamentary elections, however, the HDP put forward its candidates under the umbrella of the Green Left Party (YSP), which gained close to 9% of the vote and was the strongest political force in 13 south-eastern provinces. It is reasonable to assume that a significant number of Kurdish voters who had split their vote for Kılıçdaroğlu and the YSP in the first round decided to stay at home for the second round, especially considering Kılıçdaroğlu’s reach-out to the anti-Kurdish Victory Party.

Erdoğan and his AKP had probably never been weaker than they were in the run-up to these recent parliamentary and presidential elections. Consequently, the opposition has strong reasons to believe it has missed an incomparable opportunity. Under the new presidential system, Erdoğan will not be allowed to run for president again in 2028 due to a two-term limit. Even so, the difficulties for the opposition arising from “the lack of a level playing field” in Turkish elections will likely only have increased by 2028. Considering the results of the second round of the presidential election, the CHP is in a good position to maintain the mayorships of Istanbul and Ankara in the 2024 local elections. But even if these good prospects for the opposition materialize, these wins will have a sour taste with four more years to go until the next presidential and parliamentary elections.

The unequal playing field gave the incumbent an unjustified advantage

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

( Globalvoices.org) -Showing up at a polling station, as one of the two presidential candidates, in a country-wide election with a pocket full of cash may not occur to leaders of democratic countries, but in Turkey, that is what the newly re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did on May 28. The incumbent president was seen handing out TRY 200 banknotes (USD 10) to his supporters amid cheering and blessings.
In Turkey, campaigning on an election day is prohibited, but given the unequal playing field in the run-up to both elections on May 14 and May 28, it is unlikely that President Erdoğan will face any repercussions. The same applies to countless violations documented by the Turkey-based Human Rights Association (İHD). According to their report, there was violence and vote rigging observed across Turkey on May 28. In Hatay, observers documented mass voting, while in other provinces, representatives of the main opposition CHP faced violence. According to the association, there were also instances in provinces where men voted on behalf of women or pre-stamped ballots were brought from outside. The association said:

In the light of the initial data Human Rights Association (İHD) has received and those reported in the press, it has been determined that violations including mass and open voting, obstruction of observers and party representatives, and physical violence took place in the presidential election runoff. İHD calls on all public authorities, especially the Supreme Electoral Board, to fulfill their duties in accordance with human rights standards in order to ensure fair elections.

On June 1, the Supreme Electoral Board announced the official results of the second round of presidential elections. According to the results, President Erdoğan received 52.18 percent of the votes while his opponent, Kılıçdaroğlu received 47.82 percent.

Predictions for the next five years

Already, a day after the election on May 29, the country witnessed a price hike on gas and alcoholic beverages as well as reports of medical professionals looking to leave the country. According to the Turkish Medical Association (TBB), an independent medical and health professional association, data from March 2022, some 4,000 doctors have left the country in the last ten years. The new data shared by the association showed the number of medical professionals wanting to leave in the first five months of 2023 reached 1,025. But it won’t be just the doctors leaving. According to a survey by Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung conducted among Turkish youth to evaluate their social and political opinions, “a significant proportion, 63 percent of young people, expressed a desire to live in another country if given the opportunity,” citing worsening living conditions and declining freedom in Turkey as main reasons for this decision.

Already, there are signs that Turks, from all walks of life — especially those with little children — intend to seek opportunities abroad. Among those wanting to leave are those fearing persecution by the new leadership.

Supporters of the ruling party celebrate the victory on May 28. Image by Aziz Karimov. Used with permission.

There is also the economy and the slumping of the national currency, the Turkish Lira, against the dollar. According to Morgan Stanley analysts, lest President Erdoğan reverses his policy of low-interest rates, the lira could face a 29 percent slump by the end of 2023. On June 3, Erdoğan is set to announce the new cabinet. Among them, is former Minister of Finance, Mehmet Simsek, who is expected to take over all of Turkey’s economic policies, according to reporting by Bloomberg. Pundits say Simsek’s inclusion within the new cabinet is a move that could help prop up Turkey’s struggling economy:

The economy is not the only area where Turkey is likely to see further problems, according to Daron Acemoğlu, a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In a detailed thread on Twitter, Acemoğlu noted judicial independence “was very bad and probably cannot get much worse.” There is also the media environment. According to Acemoğlu while he does not anticipate “a complete ban on all dissident voices,” the conditions may worsen if the state anticipates introducing further “controls on social media.” Acemoğlu also anticipates further erosion of “autonomy and impartiality of bureaucracy and security services,” as well as challenges imposed against civil society and freedoms more broadly.

Some of the restrictions on media were quick to follow. On May 30, The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) also known as the chief censor in Turkey, launched an investigation against six opposition television channels over their coverage of the elections.

After securing another victory, President Erdoğan delivered a divisive election speech. Speaking to his supporters who gathered at the presidential palace in Ankara, he called the jailed leader of the Kurdish HDP party a terrorist and promised to keep Demirtaş behind bars. During the speech, his supporters began calling for Demirtaş’s execution. In December 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey must immediately release the Kurdish politician. The politician was placed behind bars in November 2016, and if convicted, could face 142 years in prison. The charges leveled against him are being a leader of a terrorist organization, an accusation Demirtaş has denied.

There is also the case of Can Atalay, the newly elected member of parliament, representing the Workers Party, who remains behind bars, despite Atalay’s lawyers’ attempts to free him. All newly elected parliament members are expected to attend the swearing-in ceremony on June 2.

Journalists Union of Turkey (TGS) President Gökhan Durmuş was closely watching the President’s victory speech and released a statement expressing his concern about the divisive nature of the next government and the implications on press freedom in the country.

However, in an atmosphere where the society is divided exactly in two, it will only be possible to continue to be in power by continuing the oppressive policies. And President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has already signaled to the whole society in his balcony speech that this will be their choice.

The future of the opposition alliance

While at first, it was unclear what will happen to the opposition alliance, also known as the Table of Six, the past few days indicate divisions within the group. Uğur Poyraz, the Secretary General of the IYI Party and one of the members of the Table of Six said on June 1, “The name of this alliance is the electoral alliance; when the election is over, the alliance will also disappear. As of May 28, the electoral alliance ended.” But not all members of the alliance share the same sentiments. In a video address shared via Twitter, the leader of Gelecek Party Ahmet Davutoğlu encouraged supporters of the alliance “not to fall into despair or possible provocations,” adding, that those who supported the ruling government and its alliance did so not because they accepted the status quo but due to an environment of fear.

Other members of the alliance, such as the leader of the Felicity party Temel Karamollaoğlu took it to Twitter, where he criticized the ruling government for the polarization, asking whether it was all worth it. “Was it really worth it, declaring half of our nation ‘terrorists, enemies of religion, traitors,’ in return for this result you have achieved? Was it worth all the lies, slander, and insults,” wrote Karamollaoğlu.

The latter was also reflected in a joint statement issued by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA), and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) observers:

The second round of Türkiye’s presidential election was characterized by increasingly inflammatory and discriminatory language during the campaign period. Media bias and ongoing restrictions to freedom of expression created an unlevel playing field, and contributed to an unjustified advantage of the incumbent.

The blame game

Many blamed the opposition alliance and its leader for failing to secure victory in these elections but according to Gönül Tol, the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program and a senior fellow with the Black Sea Program it is not as simple as that and that fear factor played a significant role. In a Twitter thread, Tol alluded to a handful of complexities that determined the outcomes of these elections. From elections being unfree and unfair, to both pro-democracy and President Erdoğan’s alliance having “existential anxieties,” with both sides seeing the elections “as a war of survival.”  Tol explained:

In such polarized contexts, people do not change their voting behavior easily based on policy preferences, incumbent’s performance or opposition’s promises. Going for the other guy rather than sticking with the devil you know is too big of a risk to take, especially in the face of such dramatic uncertainty. That is why Erdoğan continues to polarize the country.

As for the fear factor, Tol noted that President Erdoğan’s victory speech, was “the most aggressive” to date, “because that is how autocrats cling to power against unfavorable odds. They stoke fear and frame elections as a war for survival. That is how they prevent defections. That is how they can still muster majorities even when they fail to deliver.”

Writing for T24, academic and journalist Haluk Şahin explained that the outcomes of these elections were “determined not by economics and sociology, but by social psychology. In other words, a choice driven by subconscious and subconscious fears, identities, denials, jealousies, desires for worship, and ambitions to dominate.”

Others like political scientist Umut Özkırımlı explained that in order to “to topple an authoritarian regime at the ballot box” two things are needed, “sizeable electoral majorities” and “populist and ethnonationalist strategies” referring to an essay by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s The New Competitive Authoritarianism. In the essay, the authors argue:

Tilting the playing field in countries such as Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and Venezuela requires greater skill, more sophisticated strategies, and far more extensive popular mobilization … Prospective autocrats must first command sizeable electoral majorities, and then deploy plebiscitarian or hypermajoritarian strategies to change the constitutional and electoral rules of the game so as to weaken opponents. This is often achieved via polarizing populist or ethnonationalist strategies.

With local elections months away (Turkey is to hold mayoral elections in March 2024) academic Orçun Selçuk said the opposition should stick to “playing the long game”:

Calls for solidarity

On the night of election, as Erdoğan supporters, roamed the streets of Turkey, celebrating into the early hours of the morning, the other half of the country, did not hesitate in shaking off the outcome and calling to keep on fighting.

 

Acclaimed musician, Fazil Say, tweeted on May 29, “No demoralizing, friends, let’s embrace life. Keep up the goodness. Life goes on, music goes on, the world goes on, endless continuation to create and produce beauty.”

 

Well-known entrepreneur Selçuk Gerger, posted on his Instagram, that despite all the struggle, things did not change. “As of today, I will continue to live as I was living in Istanbul in the previous months and years, without regrets or stepping aside. I will not give up even for a moment. We won’t hide. The majority of people born and who grew up in this country are on our side. And yes, today we are really just starting our fight. Let’s not get hide!”

Via Globalvoices.org

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

( Globalvoices.org ) – The results from the May 14 general elections in Turkey were a surprise for some, a disappointment for others, and for those who rallied behind President Erdoğan and his coalition, a victory. These elections also showed how the main opposition coalition underestimated the societal split and the priorities that mattered — nationalism, big infrastructure projects, identity, religion, and security, to name a few. The financial crisis, graft, deterioration of rights and freedoms, as well as mishandling of the devastating February 6 earthquake did not matter in the end — especially as eight of eleven provinces affected by twin earthquakes backed President Erdoğan in the presidential votes.

The results were also a testament to the ruling state benefiting from the full control of the media landscape  — “for comparison, Erdoğan got 32 hours of air time on state TV compared with 32 minutes for Kilicdaroglu,” wrote journalist Amberin Zaman — making it much harder for the opposition to reach those who remained undecided or voters who were skeptical of their promises in the run-up to the election. This was also reflected in a statement by the International Election Observation Mission, according to which, “Public broadcasters clearly favored ruling parties and candidates.”

But the outcomes of the May 14 vote reflect more than just an uneven playing field. In fact, many observers got it wrong, as well as the pollsters, the opposition coalition itself, and the opposition’s presidential candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who, on the night of the election, tweeted:

We are leading.

On May 14, the numbers shared by the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) party indicated that Kılıçdaroğlu was clearly leading in the polls. But the enthusiasm of Ekrem İmamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş — the municipal mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, respectively — who appeared on television screens in the first hours of the polls assuring voters that the opposition coalition and Kılıçdaroğlu were leading in the polls, disappeared as hours went on.

It turned out there were discrepancies. For that, Onursal Adıgüzel, the party’s vice president who was also responsible for ballot box data entry, was let go. It turned out the algorithmic system used to count votes was faulty — it was missing input from 20,000 polling stations where the CHP did not have observers, according to the findings of journalist Nevşin Mengü.

The disappointment among opposition supporters was short-lived especially as reports of voter fraud began to galvanize the momentum needed to ensure a second round of presidential voting.

Starting on May 16, a hashtag on Turkish Twitter space was trending, #OylarYenidenSayilsin as reports of massive fraud in processing election results started trickling in. In some cases, the votes for the opposition party CHP and its ally Iyi Parti were dismissed by the Supreme Election Council (YSK) while in others, it was clear that votes for the opposition coalition were transferred to the parties within the ruling alliance.

At the time of writing this story, YSK is yet to announce the official results of the election.

Via Pixabay

In a series of tweets, academic Timur Kuran attempted to explain what was happening:

Kuran also urged the High Election Council or the Supreme Election Council (YSK) to “investigate who voted and how results from local polling stations compared with those in its own database.”

The discrepancies and CHP’s weaknesses in vote count led volunteers to offer their support in the second round:

I am ready to assist the team of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the Presidential Candidate of the National Alliance, for statistical simulation, data analysis and campaign communication in the second round. (Here are) my diplomas. Everything is going to be beautiful.

Grandfather ask us for help; what do you need? Observer, IT person, social media person, advertiser, graphic designer, influencer? We’ll be crowding at your door.

Eğer “Abi, değmez bu insanlara. Ben hayatıma bakarım. Olmadı yurtdışına çıkarım” diyen varsa etrafınızda, onlara söyleyin. Öyle bir hayat olmayacak. Saklanacak bir “sahil kasabanız” bile kalmayacak. Yurtdışına çıkarım meselesi de öyle kolay bir şey değil. Her gün içiniz yanar.…

— Ece Temelkuran (@ETemelkuran) May 16, 2023

If you have those around you thinking ‘man, its not worth it. I will move on. Or better yet move abroad,’ tell them this. There wont be a life like that. You may not even find a small sea shore cottage to hide at. As for moving abroad — its not as easy as you may think. You will burn on the inside every day.

According to YSK data, out of 64,190,651 registered voters, 53,993,714 voted in total. Among them were 4,904,672 first-time voters. With over 3.5 million registered overseas voters, 1,416,000 voted at the end. The turnout was the highest from all previous elections, with official numbers indicating a 88.92 percent voter turnout. In previous general elections held in 2018, this number was 86.24 percent. Historically Turkey has a high voter turnout. Many analysts say this is largely because elections are the only remaining democratic institution where people can influence the country.

What’s next

Since neither of the leading presidential candidates was able to secure over 50 percent of the vote, the country is headed to a run-off scheduled for May 28, which will also be the first time Turkey will have a run-off presidential vote under the country’s new electoral system. Many observers and pundits view the chance of the second round as a positive development for President Erdoğan.

Meanwhile, while the ruling government coalition secured 323 parliament seats out of 600, it still lacks the majority it needs to, say, introduce constitutional changes, which require 360 votes. There are fears that some of the newly elected members of the parliament represented among the opposition coalition may switch sides, especially as many of them are former members of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) or the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). It remains to be seen whether this will actually happen in the weeks and months to come. 

As for election propaganda in the next round, there are notable differences in the tone of the political messaging. In a video shared by Kılıçdaroğlu on May 17, the 74-year-old presidential candidate looked tired but still determined to win the second round. As explained by academic Timur Kuran:

Kılıçdaroğlu and his opposition alliance must also take into account what may have prevented more support in the previous round. According to columnist Atakli, it was not that the voters who supported the ruling government coalition agreed with theft. “Societies pushed into poverty and ignorance believe they cannot prevent theft,” wrote Atakli. Moreover, Kılıçdaroğlu accused some powerful people of graft — people who employ tens of thousands of people who think they might soon find themselves unemployed if Kılıçdaroğlu won and went after these business owners. Others, like journalist Ismail Saymaz say people believed the AKP propaganda that the opposition was in cohorts with apparent terrorist groups like the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK). In this case, according to Saymaz, Kılıçdaroğlu and his team must break this cycle in less than ten days.

But addressing people’s needs is not the only item on the to-do list. According to journalist Murat Aksoy, the opposition must have observers at each polling station to ensure the safety of the ballot box. It will also have to convince its voters to go back to the ballot boxes as well as some 8.5 million voters who did not vote in this election at all.

Scores of Turks, took to social media platforms, reminding peers to show up on May 28 and help shift the tides if not for their own future then at least for a 20-year-old Kübra Ergin, who committed suicide two days after election. In a note Ergin left behind, the young woman said, “I’m tired. They stole my youth. As a woman, I have never felt free. Because of the people of this country, I could not live my childhood, and I could not live my youth.”

Via Globalvoices.org

 

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

Turkey has two historic events on the horizon. On May 14, 2023, voters will go to the polls for presidential and parliamentary elections, and in October, the country will celebrate the centennial of the Republic.

In 1923, military leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk led the foundation of the Republic of Turkey as a secular and Turkish nationalist state, unlike its forerunner, the Ottoman Empire, which had Islamic laws and was ethnically diverse.

Since taking power in 2003, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has challenged Atatürk’s legacy. Erdoğan was prime minister from 2003 to 2014, after which he became president – a position that was largely symbolic in Turkey until a series of constitutional amendments in 2017 made the president the head of government.

During his 20 years leading the country, Erdoğan has tried to revive the Ottoman era in various ways, from the conversion of Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque again to a wildly popular historical TV series glorifying Ottomans broadcast on a state-run TV network.

As a professor of political science, I have analyzed Turkish politics for many years. The upcoming elections are truly historic because voters will choose which vision they prefer in the second centennial of Turkey – Erdoğan’s or Atatürk’s.

The presidential race

Four candidates are running in the forthcoming presidential race. But public surveys suggest that it is a two-man race between President Erdoğan and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, founded by Atatürk.

Erdoğan seeks to win the election to present himself as the founder of “a new Turkey,” where populist Islamism prevails. Kılıçdaroğlu, on the other hand, wants to revive Atatürk’s secular vision, with certain democratic revisions.

Via Pixabay.

Erdoğan and populist Islamism

In his first decade in power, Erdoğan received the support of the Atatürkist establishment’s discontents. This included many Kurds, members of an ethnic minority in Turkey, who want cultural recognition and therefore resisted Turkish nationalism.

He also garnered the support of Gülenists, followers of the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, who supported an Islamization of Turkey, as well as liberal intellectuals who wanted to make Turkey a member of the European Union.

By 2013, these groups succeeded in weakening Atatürkists’ grip on politics and the bureaucracy. Then, old rivalries between them resurfaced and the alliance fractured.

Erdoğan established a new partnership with certain Turkish nationalist groups. He went back to the Turkish state’s old policies of discriminating against Kurds. For instance, Selahattin Demirtaş, the former leader of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, has been held in prison for more than six years.

Erdoğan also declared Gülenists, his former main allies, to be terrorists, and had over 100,000 of them jailed. This crackdown escalated after a failed coup attempt in 2017, for which he held Gülenists exclusively responsible.

Erdoğan’s oppressive rule also led to the imprisonment of many liberal intellectuals, which pleased his new nationalist partners.

This recent alliance with nationalists, however, does not suggest that Erdoğan has converted to Atatürkism. On the contrary, he has wooed nationalists to his populist Islamist regime.

For the upcoming elections, Erdoğan’s alliance includes his Justice and Development Party, the Nationalist Action Party, and two smaller nationalist and Islamist parties. All four of these parties agreed to withdraw Turkey from an international treaty on preventing violence against women, commonly called the Istanbul Convention. They argued that it threatened “family values.”

They also all support statism by way of Erdoğan’s one-man rule over the economy. And they share anti-Western attitudes, from promoting anti-Western conspiracy theories to proposing Turkey’s exit from NATO.

The Atatürkist alternative

As the leader of the CHP, Kılıçdaroğlu represents the Atatürkist alternative to Erdoğan’s populist Islamism.

Yet Kılıçdaroğlu has been an exception among the Atatürkist elite. He was born in the provincial town of Tunceli, which is mostly populated by Alevis, members of a Muslim minority that has historically been discriminated against by Turkey’s Sunni Muslim majority.

Via Pixabay.

Unlike Erdoğan, Kılıçdaroğlu has defended women’s rights. For example, he has promised to return Turkey to the Istanbul Convention if he is elected. Turkey’s only female political party leader, Meral Akşener of the nationalist Good Party, is Kılıçdaroğlu’s main ally.

To oversee the economy, Kılıçdaroğlu is reportedly eyeing two candidates – a former economy minister and a University of Pennsylvania finance professor. Both support liberal market policies, which signals a turn away from the centralized state programs of Erdoğan’s tenure.

Candidates’ advantages and hurdles

Both candidates have strengths and weaknesses heading into the presidential race.

Erdoğan will rely on aspects of the authoritarian administration he has built over the last two decades. His system includes a widespread patronage network, near-absolute control over the media, a religious affairs agency that runs 80,000 mosques and serves his political agenda, and imposed loyalty in various state institutions.

But Erdoğan faces hurdles related to his authoritarian style, too, particularly the many discontented citizens his 20-year rule has produced. Over 1.5 million Turkish people have faced terror charges in the past seven years.

The ongoing economic crisis – with an inflation rate over 80% – is another hindrance to his reelection. And his vote could take a hit from the fallout of the recent earthquake that killed over 45,000 people in Turkey. The tragedy highlighted Erdoğan’s disastrous deregulation of the construction industry and his ineffective emergency response.

Meanwhile, Kılıçdaroğlu is likely to benefit from a large percentage of the Turkish nationalist vote, along with the support of Akşener, and a bulk of Kurdish votes. While the pro-Kurdish HDP’s support for him is only implicit – the party chose not to field its own candidate, which would divide opposition votes – the former HDP leader Demirtaş explicitly supports his candidacy, from prison.

Kılıçdaroğlu’s main weakness is that he has lost many elections to Erdoğan since he became the CHP’s leader in 2010. The majority of Turkish voters are conservative Muslims who tend to oppose the CHP’s assertive secularist policies.

To lessen opposition from conservatives, Kılıçdaroğlu has revised the authoritarian secularism of Atatürkists. He declared that the CHP will not reimpose a headscarf ban in universities and public institutions, and also asked forgiveness from female students for that previous policy.

Kılıçdaroğlu has also established a broad-based alliance. Under his leadership, the CHP has established a coalition with five right-wing parties, three of which are run by conservatives and Islamists.

Additionally, Kılıçdaroğlu has promised to appoint two popular CHP politicians who can appeal to conservative voters – Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, and Ankara’s mayor, Mansur Yavaş – as vice presidents if he is elected.

A global impact?

The outcome of the upcoming presidential election will determine whether Turkey will continue to be ruled by a populist Islamist regime, or return to a path of secular modernization and democratization.

This has international implications.

An Erdoğan win will signal that the global rise of right-wing populists is still robust enough to dominate a leading Muslim-majority country.

A victory for Kılıçdaroğlu, meanwhile, may be celebrated by democrats worldwide as a defeat of a populist Islamist leader, despite his control over the media and state institutions.

Ahmet T. Kuru, Professor of Political Science, San Diego State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.