Turkey Update – Election Results & more– 30th May 2023

th of May: 2023

The election period is officially over and the people elected Erdoğan as the 13th president of the Republic of Turkey. He won the election with 52% of the votes, whereas Kılıçdaoğlu got 47%.

After the results were announced, Erdoğan gave a balcony speech to celebrate his win. During his speech he had his audience boo Kılıçdaroğlu and the LGBTQ+ community.

Speaking of his speech… Erdoğan also invited the leaders of the parties that supported him in the election to the balcony. The leaders held hands and greeted the public. People pointed out that Sinan Oğan, one of the presidential candidates who supported Erdoğan in the second round, was holding the hand of the leader of the Free Cause Party, also known as HüdaPar. Oğan is an ultra-nationalist, and Hüda-Par is an Islamist Kurdish nationalist party that openly opposes and challenges everything Oğan’s ideology holds sacred. Prior to the first elections, Oğan even stated that a Turkish nationalist would, under no condition, be on the same side with HüdaPar. That they were holding hands and celebrating seemed ironic.

Later, on Twitter, Oğan said that the picture was photoshopped and that he was holding another party leader’s hand. However, people pointed out that, holding hands or not, they were in the same alliance and celebrated Erdoğan’s win.

On that note about alliances… Recall that if Kılıçdaroğlu had won, all of the opposition leaders in the main opposition alliance, the Nation’s Alliance, would have been appointed as vice presidents. So, they, including Kılıçdaroğlu, weren’t elected as parliament members. Now, none of them hold a parliamentary status. They will no longer attend parliamentary meetings. They also don’t have political immunity anymore.

The Nation’s Alliance entered the parliamentary election under two parties, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, and the Good Party, even though there were six parties in total. The CHP included members of the other four parties in its own parliamentary candidate lists. Through the CHP, those parties got a total of forty seats in the parliament. This caused a lot of backlash among the opposition voters because if these people hadn’t been candidates under the CHP, those seats would have gone to CHP members. Now more conservative parties got the seats. The four parties barely had enough voters to get them one seat in the parliament, but they cost CHP forty seats in total.

On that note about parliament members…

On Thursday the 25th, Veli Ağbaba, the deputy chair of the CHP, said that the Supreme Election Board hasn’t announced the official results of the parliamentary election to delay the swearing-in ceremony of the new parliament members. He said they were suffering a delay because of HüdaPar’s refusal to take the parliamentary oath. A day prior, a member of the HüdaPar also stated that the parliamentary oath needed to be changed. Ağbaba further said that the HüdaPar’s party program had conflicting ideas with the parliamentary oath, and rhetorically asked them which part of the oath bothered them: Atatürk's principles, the rule of law, secularism, the republic, or democracy. He also mentioned the ongoing allegation that the HüdaPar refused to have female employees in the parliament, slamming the ruling party for bringing these people into the legislature.

Let’s talk about what happened before the elections.

On Friday the 26th, during Süleyman Soylu’s, the interior minister’s, meeting in İstanbul, a youth made a heart sign with his hands. The heart sign has become a symbol of the opposition, and many opposition members as well as supporters use it to show their support for Kılıçdaroğlu in a calm and respectful way. However, the security police in Soylu’s meeting detained the youth for making the heart, and battered him. The police later released the boy. However, the boy said that he got a battery report and that he would file a complaint against the officers.

On Thursday the 25th, during his visit to a bazaar in Istanbul, a shopkeeper accused Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of İstanbul, and CHP’s vice president candidate, of working with the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, which Turkey deems a terrorist organization. The shopkeeper also yelled at and insulted İmamoğlu. Later on, İmamoğlu criticized the man during one of his rallies, saying that he didn’t have to like someone, but they couldn’t go around spreading lies. He called the shopkeeper a ‘poor, deluded person’ and added that the people who deceived him into thinking they were terrorists were the real sinners. He said that he’d file a complaint against the shopkeeper. Reportedly, the shopkeeper also filed a complaint against İmamoğlu.

On Thursday the 25th, Kılıçdaroğlu sent an SMS to the whole country saying that once he took office, he’d have the national treasury take over the citizen’s credit card debts. He also wrote in the message that the 28th of May election was a ‘referendum to get rid of heavy debts or drown in debt.”

Upon this, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, or BTK, warned GSM operators that it was illegal to make propaganda through citizens’ phone numbers or email addresses. However, individuals pointed out that the BTK never interfered when the supporters of Erdoğan texted people.

After this incident, Kılıçdaroğlu said in a video on Twitter that he was in complete blackout, meaning that the government prevented him from making his own propaganda.

Now, let’s hear some good news…

On Saturday the 27th, Merve Dizdar, a Turkish actress, won the best actress award at the 76th Cannes Film Festival for her role in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s newest movie ‘About Dry Grass’. In her acceptance speech, she said that she would have loved to work on getting to know her character, a teacher struggling in life because of her world view, but being a woman in the geography that she lives in, she knows what it feels like to be her by heart since she was born. She dedicated the award to all the women who are struggling to make a place for themselves in this world, and everyone in Turkey, who are fighting to see better days in the country.

With that being said, let’s move on to more politics…

Nureddin Nebati, the minister of finance, commonly known as simply Nebati, took a commercial flight from Istanbul to Ankara. However, he arrived late to the flight. The flight crew told the passengers that the flight was delayed because of bad weather conditions, but when Nebati arrived at the plane later than the scheduled take-off time, passengers speculated that the flight was delayed because of Nebati. They criticized Nebati and the flight crew for holding people off for one person. To this, Nebati told passengers that “Erdoğan won, the Justice and Development Party won. Get over it.” A video footage of this interaction went viral on social media. Of course, this brought out more criticism his way.

Lastly, some international news…

Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician with an anti-migrant and Islamophobic ideology, urged Turks who voted for Erdoğan in the Netherlands to ‘pack up and leave’ the country. He called Erdoğan an Islamofascist. Reportedly, Erdoğan got 70% of the votes in the Netherlands.

Aaaaaand that's it for this week! You may not know it but we do updates for some other countries too. If you know anybody who might be interested, let them know. Ready? Here they are, West to East: Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Nigeria, Poland, Serbia, Malawi, Ethiopia, Georgia, Japan. Think of anybody?

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