Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lags behind several opposition candidates in a potential head to head election, but voters expect the two-decade incumbent to remain in power regardless.
In new survey results from Yöneylem Social Research Center and shared with Bianet English, Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) fell behind opponents from the main opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP) and the center-right Iyi, or Good Party. The survey was conducted among 3,040 people in 230 locations in July.
What is particularly troubling for Erdoğan are his poor approval ratings with survey participants. In a direct question on whether or not they will vote for Erdoğan, 55 percent said “absolutely not” versus 33 percent who expressed the opposite sentiment.
Asked who they would back at this time in a hypothetical election, Turkish voters ranked Erdoğan behind CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Istanbul’s CHP mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu, and Iyi leader Meral Aksener in a direct election match-up. Among his potential challengers, the Turkish president fared the worst against the popular Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş, where he scored 36.6 percent of the vote against Yavaş’ 52.8 percent.
What seemed to drag Erdoğan down the most among survey participants remains his handling of the Turkish economy with its high inflation and unemployment, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared to other issues that include corruption, migration and terrorism, economic worries far outpace any other issue for the surveyed Turks.
Asked for their views on how the Turkish economy is being governed, 58.3 percent said it was being run badly versus only 23.3 percent who said it was well-governed. Another 16.8 percent of participants describes the economy as neither badly or poorly managed.
This appears to directly benefit the president’s rivals, who are not saddled with the challenges that pile up from an uninterrupted incumbency of twenty years. Participants rated the opposition’s handling of the economy ahead of Erdoğan and the AKP’s, with 42.4 percent saying it would be run better as opposed to 33.5 percent who expressed confidence in the current government.
However, there are important caveats to what would otherwise be considered favourable data for Turkey’s opposition parties. While individual candidates did well in direct competition with Erdoğan, his AKP was still ranked as the single most popular party at 28.5 percent. When undecided voters are distributed in the final tally, this number rises to 34.6 percent.
Perhaps the most indicative sign of Turks’ low faith that elections will be run fairly, Erdoğan is still ranked as the candidate most likely to be Turkey’s president. Despite losing to the four named opposition candidates in the survey, 40.9 percent of participants said that Erdoğan will an election “in any event”.
After two decades in power, Erdoğan and his government have dramatically squeezed the space for opposition members to effectively compete in elections. This has been achieved through a lack of judicial independence in Turkish courts, a highly concentrated and pro-government media ecosystem, and Turkey’s possession of one of the highest party election thresholds in Europe.
Ahval