How will the Turks abroad decide the results of the 2023 presidential elections?
Turkish voters abroad play a major role in the Turkish
presidential elections, as they represent about 5.3% of the total electorate,
which is undoubtedly capable of tipping the favor for one of the candidates,
especially current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, taking into account the high
rate of voter turnout from abroad in the presidential elections in 2014, when
the turnout rate was only 18.9%, which then rose to 50.1% in 2018. Thanks to
them, Erdogan was able to win the elections, obtaining 59.4% of their votes.
The elections for Turks abroad began on Thursday, April 27
and will continue until May 9, with about 3.42 million expatriates participating
who are entitled to vote.
Four candidates for the presidency
Four candidates are competing in the presidential elections:
current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu,
Homeland Party candidate Muharrem İnce, and Ancestral Alliance (ATA Alliance)
candidate Sinan Oğan. Parliamentary and presidential elections are scheduled to
be held at home on May 14.
Erdogan relies a lot on the votes of the Turks in Germany,
which alone includes about 50% of the voting bloc abroad. The biggest evidence
of this is the referendum on the constitution in 2017 to switch from a
parliamentary system to a presidential one, in which about 63% of Turks in
Germany voted in favor of the constitutional amendments proposed by Erdogan,
while the percentage in Turkey was just under 51%. In the 2018 presidential
elections, 64.8% of the votes abroad went to Erdogan, while in Turkey he only
got 52.6% of the votes.
Conservative position on Erdogan
According to Yunus Ulusoy, a researcher at the Center for
Turkish Studies and Integration Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen,
most of the immigrant Turks are from conservative rural areas in Anatolia, so
they continue to develop the values that they bring with them, and they adhere
to their more conservative religious positions in exile, so their decision is
to elect the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Ulusoy added in a statement to the Reference that in the
presidential elections in 2018, in which 3.04 million
citizens were registered to vote abroad, Erdogan won an overwhelming
majority of them, as 64% in Germany, 63% in France, 72% in the Netherlands, and
74% in Belgium, and 71% in Austria supported the incumbent, with an average of
64.8% of the total vote of Turks abroad.
Playing on internal political contradictions
For her part, Dr. Ghada Abdel Aziz, a researcher
specializing in international relations, said, “The current Turkish president
enjoys the charisma of a political leader, and his biography is full of
experience and achievements, in addition to his conservative Islamic identity,
which makes him popular with a wide spectrum of voters, and it is likely that
conservative and nationalist grassroots will vote for him.”
She added in a statement to the Reference that Erdogan has
experience and skills in addressing the public and convincing them that he is
the best, which enabled him to win ten elections in a row thanks to his skills
in playing on internal political contradictions and turning the major crises he
faced into opportunities. In these elections, Erdogan's electoral wager is not
limited to containing the repercussions of the earthquake and resolving the
economic crisis, but also includes playing on the weaknesses of the opposition.
Abdel Aziz stressed that Erdogan's Justice and Development
Party is the strongest in Turkey, as it has achieved many accomplishments and
development in various fields over two decades, so Turkey was able to play a
prominent role at the regional and international levels, which gives it
strengths in the face of its competitors. Therefore, the AKP enjoys the support
of Turks abroad, which was witnessed in all the previous elections, as they see
the election of the incumbent president and his party as their only way to
preserve the future of Turkey.
Real threat to Erdogan
Abdel Aziz noted that the real threat that may shake
Erdogan’s throne is the worsening economic problems as
a result of his policies that have exhausted the economy and with it the
decline in the exchange rate of the lira, as it recorded the highest rate of
inflation in 24 years, reaching 85% last year. Erdogan therefore announced one
economic package after another as the election date approached to gain more
support for him, most notably announcing an unprecedented public spending plan
that includes energy subsidies, doubling the minimum wage and increasing
pensions, as well as providing opportunities for the retirement of more than
two million people. The government also surprisingly announced its intention to
increase the salaries of officers and non-commissioned officers a month before
the elections in an attempt to restore part of the
popularity he lost.
