Turkish opposition remains in denial of its failed strategies

On Aug. 10, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the first directly elected president of the country with 51.8% of the vote. While Erdogan consolidated his victory with the support of his loyal constituency, voters opposed to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) policies did not rally behind Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the joint candidate of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Action Party (MHP). In fact, the two opposition parties saw a significant drop in votes compared with the March 30 local election. In denial that their strategy had failed, CHP and MHP blocs blamed the low turnout of 75% — compared with 89% in March — and the more than 15 million people who chose not to vote in this election as being co-conspirators in taking Erdogan to the country’s highest office.

“If people had bothered to vote, the result of this election would have been very different,” MHP leader Devlet Bahceli said Aug. 10 in an angry tone. CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu echoed the same thing. “If it had not been for vacationers, those boycotting the election and others who did not go to the ballot box for their own reasons, [Erdogan] would not have won that 51% and this election would have gone to the second round,” he said.

Many on social media also feverishly reacted with an insulting and demeaning narrative, arguiing that those who did not vote preferred their summer vacation on the beach to preventing Erdogan from becoming the next president, and that they no longer had the right to speak about the country’s present and the future. However, Adil Gur, head of the Istanbul-based A&G public survey firm, which has built a strong reputation for accurately forecasting election results, disputed this theory. “When you study the results of the polling data, it is outright clear that had turnout been higher, Erdogan would have won the election by a bigger percentage,” Gur told Al-Monitor. “In places such as the Aegean, where the opposition is stronger, for example, 81% of the people voted, which is higher than the national average. Also, there is no difference between the voter turnout of the people in Kadikoy [opposition leaning] or Umraniye [government leaning] in Istanbul. This indicates that the public opinion polls that showed an easy victory for Erdogan prior to the election actually caused the AKP constituency to become complacent — not the other way around.”

IPSOS, another public survey firm, released a detailed report about those who did not vote in this election that backs Gur's argument. A chart based on its data shows a calculation presuming that the 7.7 million people who chose not to vote in the March 30 local election declined to vote again this time around, and apportioning the likely choices of the rest of those who chose not to vote in the presidential election. The chart indicates that Erdogan would have received an additional 2.4 million votes, or 52.7% of this theoretical vote, to Ihsanoglu's 2 million (1.1 million from CHP voters and 900,000 from MHP ones) and Demirtas' 150,000.