Erdogan’s cheap tricks and other things that stood out in the elections in Turkey

In Turkey, ruling ruler Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trembling over his re-election after serving a 20-year term. Ahead of the elections, he announced that he would accept any result – although it currently looks like Erdoğan could still win the second round of the elections on May 18. But now messages are piling up on social media that the elections are not going quite as they should in a democracy.

Deepfake and sex videos

Even before the election, the incumbent’s main competitor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, accused Erdoğan of fraud. He accused the president’s party of planning a smear campaign against opposition politicians using deepfake. However, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) managed to portray the opposition as terrorists without deepfakes – with speeches, stickers, social media campaigns, fake videos or newspaper articles. Because the major media houses in Turkey, where most people get their news, are largely on the side of the government.

Among other things, Erdoğan shot at Kılıçdaroğlu by showing a manipulated video at a campaign rally linking Kılıçdaroğlu to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), classified as a terrorist organization in Turkey. The AKP also made smart use of social media. Among other things, a fake sex video was used to discredit presidential candidate Muharrem İnce, leading to his withdrawal from the race.

Just days before the election, Human Rights Watch and Article 19 published a widely publicized text showing how the government controls the internet to silence dissenting voices.

The AKP trick

And now not only the election campaign, but also the elections are being cleverly manipulated. The anti-government online news portal OdaTV reported that Kılıçdaroğlu said:

Swiss lawyer Emrah Erken writes that the AKP distributed pre-printed objections to the president’s voters. This meant that the ballot boxes in which Kılıçdaroğlu had the majority of votes had to be counted multiple times – and thus would not be included in the interim results. In this way the impression could be created that the election had actually already been decided.

This is a well-known trick of the AKP. According to Erken and other critics of the system on social media, the goal is to discourage and exhaust the opposition from the very beginning of the vote, so that voters don’t go to the polls in the first place.

Switzerland-Turks opt for opposition

Meanwhile, 99 percent of the urns in Germany and 84 percent of the urns abroad have been counted. Election authorities reported that Erdoğan was just ahead — but he likely missed an absolute 50 percent majority. The state news agency Anadolu reported on Monday that the president received 49.40 percent of the vote.

The ballot boxes have also been counted in Switzerland, the Turkish news agency Anadolu reported on Monday morning. Accordingly, 57 percent of Turks in Switzerland voted for Kılıçdaroğlu, about 41 percent went for Erdoğan.

Erdogan and the democracy train

In a 1998 speech, Erdoğan invoked democracy. He quoted the line from a poem:

Meanwhile, he seems to have jumped off this train a long time ago. He suppresses critical media and the opposition, has abolished the separation of powers, brought the institutions into line with him or massively exacerbated the economic crisis with false interventions. Therefore, the people of the Bosphorus countryside can barely afford an onion – let alone the rents. And in a millennium earthquake, people die because disaster relief fails through centralization.

How things will continue in Turkey will become clear by May 28 at the latest. Because if Erdoğan does not get a majority of 50 percent, there will probably be a second round on that date.

(yum)