Listen to the full conversation with Joost Lagendijk here
Turkey will elect a new president on May 14. Incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or his opposition leader Kilicdaroglu will be re-elected. The latter remains below 50 percent of the vote in all polls and this would mean that a second round would have to be held. However, the opposition fears a possible scenario in which Erdogan does not accept his loss.
Trump-Bolsonaro scenario
According to Turkey expert Joost Lagendijk, the president and extremists of the ruling AKP party are already preparing for this. ‘You can already see the disturbing trend of the last few days, whereby Erdogan himself, but also some of his hard-line ministers, are saying: ‘These entire elections are actually one big coup attempt by the West. And we cannot accept it. And if the elections are won by Kurdish votes, then we cannot accept that.’ In other words, this already looks a bit like the Trump-Bolsonaro scenario where the incumbent president doesn’t agree to lose.”
“This already looks a bit like the Trump-Bolsonaro scenario where the incumbent president doesn’t agree to lose.”
According to Lagendijk, many people hold their breath for this and therefore hope it will end after the first round. He does not consider it improbable that in those two weeks between the first and second rounds Erdogan will take to the streets “with all kinds of deception, threats and perhaps even violence”. “Unfortunately you can’t rule it out.”
Western coup
Lagendijk says he’s actually more afraid of the days after the election than of their run. In recent days he has signaled a change in the discourse and slogans used. For example, he points to the statements of Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu who, in a meeting in Istanbul, described the elections as “an attempted coup in which all the preparations to eliminate Turkey converge”.
According to Lagendijk, this indicates one thing: ‘that internal AKP polls also don’t look good, because otherwise you wouldn’t say that the elections are a coup. But it also indicates that the idea is being played with, let me say so carefully, especially if the differences are small in the first round, not to accept the election result. Erdogan and his party did not do it in Istanbul in 2019 ”.
“The AKP polls also don’t look good internally, because otherwise you won’t say that the election is a coup”
Lagendijk does not rule out possible violence, although this is not explicitly stated or threatened anywhere. “We know that in recent years Erdogan himself has created armed private militias, of which no one knows exactly who controls them except Erdogan. There are people, and I fear they are right, who fear being sent out into the streets to create unrest, chaos. Unfortunately, it cannot be ruled out that in a country like Turkey, certainly not with the mental state of Erdogan and some of his hardest-line supporters right now.”
“We know that in recent years Erdogan himself has created armed private militias”