The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo came under fire from top Turkish officials today after putting Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on its cover with the caption “Only death will allow us to get rid of him.” The cartoon shows the Turkish leader convulsing in a bathtub in his birthday suit as he touches a live lightbulb — the emblem of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
“One of the biggest centers of provocation, insults and blasphemy in world media, the ugly publication Charlie Hebdo, has again proved how disgusting it is with its latest inhumane caricature of our president,” fumed Fahrettin Altun, Erdogan’s communications director, in a series of tweets denouncing the weekly.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu chimed in as well. “Shameless Charlie Hebdo has yet to possess an ounce of humanity [and] continues to insult the Turkish people,” the top diplomat said on his Twitter page.
Attacked by terrorists three times for its irreverent depictions of the Prophet Mohammed, the weekly was alluding to Erdogan’s victory in Sunday’s landmark presidential and parliamentary polls. The illustration will have hit an even rawer nerve with the opposition. Many were left feeling that Turkey’s strongman, who has enjoyed more than two decades of uninterrupted power, will die in his bed while in office.
Rendez-vous sur https://t.co/5SPrx5Rgmh ! pic.twitter.com/c0DEcJA86M
— Charlie Hebdo (@Charlie_Hebdo_) May 17, 2023
Most pollsters had widely predicted that the main opposition’s candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, would beat Erdogan either in a first round or in a runoff. The high cost of living and the government’s botched response to the Feb. 6 earthquakes that killed more than 50,000 people and pulverized large swathes of southern Turkey were expected to spell an end to Erdogan’s rule. Not only did the president prevail, but the AKP and its Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) allies also won a majority in the parliament.
Kilicdaroglu’s pro-secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) said on Wednesday it had filed complaints over suspected irregularities at thousands of ballot boxes, even after an Organization of Peace and Security in Europe observer mission gave the elections a clean if heavily caveated bill of health.
Muharrem Erkek, one of the deputy chairmen of the party, said the CHP had challenged the results of 2,292 ballot boxes nationwide, conceding, however, that they represented a fraction of the total. The largest pro-Kurdish bloc that ran under the newly formed Green Left Party (YSP) in a bid to skirt potential closure over specious terror charges against their Peoples’ Democratic Party has also cried foul.
The party noted in a statement that “in hundreds of ballot boxes, our votes were assigned to other parties by the Supreme Electoral Council,” adding that the council, “which boasts about the integrity of the elections, must rectify this fraud immediately.” Most of those votes were allegedly transferred to the MHP, which has little if any support in the mainly Kurdish southeast provinces and is viscerally opposed to granting the country’s large Kurdish minority any political or cultural rights. The party, whose ratings have been steadily melting, made an astonishing comeback on Sunday, pulling in third with 10% of the votes.
Yet both opposition groups acknowledged that the irregularities would likely not affect the final outcome of the results, which gave Turkey its most right-leaning and religiously conservative parliament in its modern history and saw Sinan Ogan, an ultranationalist novice who campaigned on an anti-Kurdish and anti-refugee platform, win more than 5% in the presidential race.
Türkiye için #KararVer pic.twitter.com/4uqBubVCRb
— Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (@kilicdarogluk) May 17, 2023
The hard rightward tilt poses a dilemma for Kilicdaroglu. The 74-year-old former bureaucrat tried what Erdogan did in the early days of his rule, which is to pitch a broad tent of nationalists, pious conservatives, urban liberals and Kurds. But he ended up where Erdogan did in the 2015 parliamentary elections after two rounds of peace talks with imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan and his outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Facing a fierce nationalist backlash, the AKP lost its majority for the first time. A consummate survivor, Erdogan did a swift U-turn, ditching the talks, striking up an alliance with the MHP and sharply escalating the war against the PKK after a two-and-a-half-year-long cease-fire, carrying it across the border to Syria and Iraq.
Throughout the campaign, Erdogan portrayed Kilicdaroglu as a PKK puppet over his informal alliance with the YSP, using doctored footage showing the CHP leader with rebel commanders in the background to hammer home the message that he was one of them — a terrorist. Erdogan also claimed that if Kilicdaroglu were elected, gays and queers would run amok and humans would mate with animals.
“People prioritized security over freedom and family values over bread on their table,” said Imdat Oner, a policy analyst at the Jack D. Gordon Institute in Florida who has closely studied authoritarian regimes in Latin America.
“The West’s portrayal of Erdogan as an autocrat is significantly different from how masses of people perceive him in Turkey,” Oner told Al-Monitor.
The lesson came too late for Kilicdaroglu, who has yet to appear in public after Sunday’s upset. The CHP leader has since posted a pair of videos, one in which he vows to win as he bangs his fist rather unconvincingly on a wooden table, and another where he plays on anti-refugee sentiments. His strategy for winning in the second round is clearly based on drawing nationalist votes and winning Ogan’s endorsement, all the while hoping that the Kurds remain onboard.
It’s a very long shot.
Still, Kilicdaroglu came closer than any to unseating Erdogan, winning 44.88% of the vote versus Erdogan’s 49.52%. The AKP’s share of the vote — it garnered 35.63% — marked an all-time low.
“This was not a failure for Kilicdaroglu,” Oner argued. “He ran against a ruthless leader who massively used government resources to run his campaign and who has full control over the judiciary, the security forces and the mainstream media,” Oner added. “The separation of powers in Turkey is fully undermined.”
