Tens of millions of Turks voted today in an election that may determine whether Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s two decades at the centre of Turkish politics continue. Erdoğan first became prime minister in 2003 and later president, transforming both Turkey and the presidency itself. His principal challenger, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leads an unusually broad six-party opposition alliance ranging from social democrats to nationalists and conservatives. As counting continues tonight, the presidential contest remains unresolved, and neither side should be declared victorious before the official process is sufficiently complete.
That uncertainty is itself politically important. Turkey is not holding the kind of election in which the governing party’s victory is predetermined administratively and opposition candidates exist merely to create an appearance of competition. Erdoğan faces a genuine possibility of defeat, opposition parties govern major cities including Istanbul and Ankara, voters have mobilised in enormous numbers, and the opposition possesses extensive networks capable of monitoring the count. Yet describing the election simply as free competition would ignore the substantial institutional advantages accumulated by the incumbent over twenty years in power.
This distinction matters because democracy requires more than uncertainty on election night. The quality of an election depends on what happens during the months and years before ballots are counted: whether opposition parties can organise, whether journalists can criticise government, whether courts apply rules impartially, whether public resources are used for partisan advantage and whether citizens encounter competing political arguments. A perfectly counted ballot can still occur at the end of an unequal political process.
Turkey therefore occupies an analytically difficult space between straightforward democracy and straightforward authoritarianism. Elections remain politically meaningful enough that Erdoğan has to campaign seriously and could lose, but institutions surrounding those elections have become less balanced during his rule. This is sometimes described as competitive authoritarianism, although labels can obscure as much as they clarify. The important point is that political systems can preserve real electoral competition while gradually changing the conditions under which that competition occurs.
Media illustrates the problem particularly clearly. Voters do not make decisions only inside polling booths. They spend years receiving information about governments and alternatives. If incumbents receive overwhelmingly favourable exposure while opposition politicians struggle for comparable access, the ballot itself remains secret while the information environment shaping the ballot becomes asymmetric. Press freedom should therefore be understood as part of electoral infrastructure rather than an unrelated liberal luxury.
This does not mean Turkish voters supporting Erdoğan are manipulated or somehow voting incorrectly. Erdoğan possesses genuine and substantial popular support. For many conservative and religious Turks, his governments represent a period in which groups previously marginalised by Turkey’s strongly secular political establishment gained greater cultural and political representation. His early years in power also coincided with major economic expansion, improvements in infrastructure and rising living standards. Erdoğan’s political durability cannot be explained merely through institutional manipulation because leaders do not dominate national politics for twenty years without constructing a significant social coalition.
That coalition is one reason the election remains so close despite Turkey’s severe economic problems. Official consumer-price inflation exceeded 80% during 2022 before declining, while the lira has lost enormous value and households have faced severe increases in living costs. Erdoğan has also championed an unconventional monetary approach in which interest rates were reduced despite high inflation, contrary to the standard prescription of tighter monetary policy. For many economists, Turkey provides a striking example of how political interference with monetary institutions can weaken credibility and intensify inflationary pressure.
Yet economic voting is not mechanical, as the American midterms demonstrated last November. A citizen can be worse off economically and still support the incumbent because religion, nationalism, security, party identity or distrust of the opposition matters more. Voters possess multidimensional preferences. The opposition cannot simply point towards inflation and assume citizens will translate economic dissatisfaction automatically into support for Kılıçdaroğlu.
Erdoğan has also used the powers of incumbency to shape the distribution of economic costs and benefits. Governments can increase wages, pensions or public spending before elections, while infrastructure projects provide visible evidence of state activity. These policies may have substantive economic justifications, but their timing can also create electoral advantages. This is one reason incumbency matters even in established democracies: governments control policy while challengers can only promise it.
The difference becomes more serious when state and party begin overlapping. A governing party inevitably uses its record to campaign. It should not be able to treat public institutions as though they belong to the party itself. Democratic institutionalisation depends partly on maintaining that boundary: Erdoğan may control the government because he won previous elections, but the Turkish state should remain an institution that any legitimate electoral winner can inherit.
This is the same distinction Brazil tested when Bolsonaro lost last October. Democratic alternation requires incumbents to understand that temporary control of the state is not ownership of it. The most meaningful test of an electoral system is therefore not whether incumbents can win repeatedly but whether they can genuinely lose.
Turkey has experienced transfers of power before, but Erdoğan’s extraordinarily long dominance makes that question unusually consequential. Twenty years allows political networks to become deeply organised around one leader. Senior officials build careers under the same political movement, business relationships adapt to the governing coalition, media structures change and younger voters grow up knowing no other national leader. Even without explicit authoritarian direction, longevity itself can blur the boundary between leader, party and state.
This is why term limits and alternation can have institutional value independent of whether the incumbent is competent. Repeated turnover teaches bureaucracies, businesses and citizens that political authority is temporary. When one party remains dominant for decades, institutions can gradually begin optimising around the assumption that it will continue governing. An electoral defeat then becomes more disruptive because networks built around permanence have to adapt suddenly.
That does not mean voters should remove Erdoğan simply because he has governed for a long time. Democratic rotation cannot mean citizens are prohibited from repeatedly choosing the same politician. The relevant question is whether institutions remain sufficiently independent that voters retain a genuine option to choose someone else.
Kılıçdaroğlu’s coalition demonstrates another feature of elections under dominant incumbents: opposition parties often need to become extraordinarily broad to compete. His six-party alliance contains groups that disagree significantly on ideology, economic policy and national identity. Their principal point of convergence is that Erdoğan’s concentration of presidential power should end and Turkey should return towards a more parliamentary system.
This resembles the coalition that defeated Bolsonaro in Brazil. Negative coalitions can be electorally powerful because opposition to one leader provides a common objective across ideological differences. The difficulty arrives after victory. Removing Erdoğan could unite Turkish opposition parties today while governing without Erdoğan would immediately expose disagreements that the campaign allows them to postpone.
This creates a paradox for dominant-party systems. The stronger and more personalised the incumbent becomes, the broader the opposition coalition required to defeat them. The broader the coalition becomes, the harder it may be to govern coherently afterwards. Dominant leaders can therefore weaken opposition not only through institutional advantages but by forcing opponents into alliances whose internal contradictions become future liabilities.
The Turkish opposition has attempted to manage this through institutional rather than ideological agreement. Instead of pretending six parties share one political philosophy, they have emphasised restoring parliamentary government, strengthening institutional constraints and then allowing ordinary ideological competition to resume under a different constitutional framework.
That is an interesting democratic strategy. Parties can disagree about what government should do while agreeing first about how governments should be allowed to do it. Constitutional rules become the minimum common denominator beneath substantive politics.
Whether voters find that convincing is another question. Erdoğan can argue that Turkey’s presidential system provides decisive leadership, particularly in a region facing war, migration and security threats. Fragmented parliamentary coalitions can produce instability, and Turkey experienced periods of weak coalition government before Erdoğan’s rise. Concentrating executive authority therefore has a genuine governability argument behind it.
The trade-off is familiar: decisiveness versus constraint. A powerful presidency can implement policy rapidly and provide clear responsibility. The same concentration of authority reduces the number of institutions capable of correcting presidential mistakes. If monetary policy, appointments and administrative decisions increasingly depend on one political centre, errors can propagate further before another institution stops them.
Turkey’s inflation problem illustrates this institutional dimension. Central-bank independence is not valuable because central bankers are always correct. It is valuable partly because monetary decisions benefit from some insulation from electoral incentives. Governments naturally prefer strong growth, cheap credit and low unemployment before elections. Central banks are supposed to place greater weight on long-term price stability.
Removing that constraint can make policy more responsive to elected leadership while simultaneously reducing market confidence that inflation will be controlled. Democracy and expertise therefore interact rather than simply compete. Voters should determine the government’s broad economic objectives, but some institutions may need enough independence to make credible commitments governments themselves struggle to make.
The February earthquakes add another layer to today’s election. More than 50,000 people were killed in Turkey, and millions were affected by enormous destruction. The disaster raised questions about construction standards, regulatory enforcement and the speed of the government response. Erdoğan has promised rapid reconstruction, while the opposition argues that institutional failures magnified the catastrophe.
Again, voters face a problem of causal attribution. Nobody blames Erdoğan for tectonic plates moving. The political question is how much of the resulting destruction could have been reduced through stronger regulation and preparedness. Citizens need to evaluate an enormously complex counterfactual while simultaneously grieving and rebuilding.
This is what democratic accountability demands from ordinary voters constantly. They have to distinguish global inflation from domestic monetary policy, earthquake magnitude from building regulation, refugee pressures from government migration policy and genuine security threats from political rhetoric. No citizen can become an expert in all of these subjects.
Voters therefore use heuristics: party identity, trusted media, personal economic experience, community networks and perceptions of leadership. That does not make democracy irrational. It means political institutions need enough informational competition that citizens can compare several interpretations rather than receiving one authoritative explanation.
This brings us back to the importance of the playing field. If government controls enough of the information environment, voters’ ability to evaluate government performance becomes weaker even when voting itself remains free. Electoral integrity therefore has upstream and downstream components. Upstream integrity concerns information, organisation and candidate access before voting. Downstream integrity concerns ballot secrecy, counting, certification and transfer of power afterwards.
A democracy needs both.
International observers should also resist another temptation: treating the opposition’s victory automatically as a victory for democracy. Kılıçdaroğlu and his allies should be judged according to their own commitments and behaviour rather than simply because they oppose Erdoğan. Opposition to a leader accused of democratic backsliding does not automatically make every opponent liberal or democratic.
This is particularly important in a coalition containing nationalist and ideologically diverse parties. If the opposition wins, its democratic credentials would be tested by how it uses the institutions it inherits. Would it strengthen judicial and media independence even when those institutions criticise the new government? Would it redesign presidential powers in ways it would accept if Erdoğan’s party later returned to office?
The veil-of-ignorance test applies equally to both sides.
The election also matters internationally because Turkey occupies an unusually independent strategic position. It is a NATO member that maintains substantial economic and diplomatic relationships with Russia. It has supplied Ukraine with military equipment while simultaneously mediating between Kyiv and Moscow. It controls access between the Black Sea and Mediterranean through the Turkish Straits and plays a major role in migration, Syria, the Caucasus and NATO enlargement.
Erdoğan’s foreign policy has therefore increased Turkey’s strategic autonomy, sometimes frustrating Western allies while also making Ankara difficult to ignore. Kılıçdaroğlu may pursue a somewhat different relationship with Europe and the United States, but geography ensures that Turkey will remain more than an ordinary NATO ally regardless of who governs.
This is another reminder that elections can alter foreign policy without eliminating structural national interests. Leaders matter. Geography remains. Turkey will still border Syria, Iraq, Iran, Georgia and the Black Sea. It will still depend on energy imports and possess leverage over migration routes. It will still have complicated relationships with Russia and Europe.
The international excitement around today’s vote should therefore not reduce Turkey’s political future to whether it becomes “pro-Western” or “pro-Russian”. Turkish voters are choosing a government according to domestic priorities that extend far beyond great-power competition. Their country possesses its own interests rather than existing merely as a piece on someone else’s geopolitical board.
As of tonight, the election remains unresolved. That uncertainty is not evidence of democratic weakness. In one sense, it is evidence of meaningful competition. Authoritarian elections are predictable because the institutional purpose is often confirming power rather than risking its transfer.
The more important question will come if the result becomes unfavourable to whoever currently controls the state. Do institutions continue counting transparently? Do parties use legal procedures to challenge irregularities? Do political leaders distinguish evidence of problems from rejection of outcomes they dislike? If a runoff becomes necessary, does competition continue under credible rules?
Those behaviours will tell us more about Turkish democracy than turnout alone.
Turkey’s election therefore should not be reduced to the question of whether Erdoğan wins or loses. The deeper test is whether twenty years of increasingly personalised political power have left enough institutional independence that the possibility of losing remains real.
Democracy does not require incumbents to lose.
It requires that they can.
