Turkey resists Erdoğan on social media as snap election approaches
Rabia
Karakaya Polat, The Conversation, June 19, 2018
Turkey
will soon go to the polls for the fifth time in less than four years.
President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced them on the same day that parliament extended the
national state of emergency for the seventh time since the botched coup
attempt of July 2016.
Erdoğan brought these elections forward to June 24 for his own political
ends: to pre-empt an expected economic downturn, to take his rivals by
surprise, and to ride a surge of nationalism stirred up by the recent military
offensive in Afrin, Syria. This will be the first national vote since the controversial
constitutional referendum of April 2017, which resulted in a narrow
vote to establish a presidential system without any checks and balances. Should
Erdoğan win this latest election, he will consolidate
his power futher: the office of the prime minister will be abolished and taken
over by a powerful executive presidency.
The
election is taking place under the state of emergency’s restrictions, which
have greatly distorted the campaign – but there are also signs that this time,
Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) may
find it more difficult to control events thanks to a highly motivated
opposition and a lively social media environment.
Predicting
the result is difficult, but the deteriorating
economy, an unexpected alliance among four
opposition parties, and the energy brought by the candidacy of
Republican People’s Party’s Muharrem Ince undoubtedly will make life difficult
for AKP.
Could
Erdoğan ever be beaten? Perhaps – but if only there were
a fair election campaign. Instead, the election is taking place under Turkey’s
state of emergency, which compromises democratic freedoms and the rule of law.
Before
the state of emergency was imposed, the High Electoral Board could penalise TV
stations that failed to give opposition parties fair airtime. That provision
has now been revoked, and the consequences are already visible: according to a recent report,
TRT Haber, the publicly-owned and financed national broadcaster, has covered
the AKP-Nationalist Movement Party alliance for 37 hours and 40 minutes, and
allotted all opposition parties and their presidential candidates a combined 3
hours and 13 minutes. And to make matters worse, in March 2018, one of Turkey’s
leading media groups, Dogan Media, was sold to a
pro-government Turkish conglomerate.
This is
all forcing the opposition to take its campaign elsewhere – and in particular,
to social media.
Intimidation
and resistance
None of
the parties has done so more effectively than the pro-Kurdish Peoples’
Democratic Party (HDP) and its imprisoned former co-leader, Selahattin
Demirtaş. In the face of a de facto embargo by mainstream news
sources, the HDP depends on social media to announce its parliamentary
candidates, to mobilise supporters for its rallies, and to share its policy
positions. The internet and the social media in particular also provide a space
for many well-known journalists who’ve lost their jobs for criticising the
government. They are launching new online newspapers and TV channels to provide
alternative sources of information.
Meanwhile,
everyday Turks are making a noise on their own, and using Erdoğan’s words against him. The president himself declared a few weeks
before the vote that if the nation one day said “tamam” – meaning “done” or
“enough” – he would step aside. Seizing upon this statement, the hashtag #TAMAM has been tweeted
almost 2m times in various creative ways. The campaign has revived the spirit of the 2013 Gezi
Park protests – the biggest popular challenge to the AKP’s rule to
this day.
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The HDP’s
Selahattin Demirtaş campaigns from prison. EPA/Sedat
Suna
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Civic
groups are also using social media platforms to recruit and train volunteers to
increase electoral turnout and transparency in vote counting. These volunteers
could be critical on polling day; recent changes in electoral law have introduced
some controversial
measures, such as allowing security forces to attend polling
stations if they are invited by a voter. Clearly this provision can be abused
to intimidate voters, especially in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish south-east –
and all experts agree that the size of the
Kurdish vote will be crucial in determining the fate of Erdoğan and his party.
In fact,
a recently
leaked video shows Erdoğan instructing AKP’s local
organisations to put “tight marking” on voters in every district in Istanbul to
push the HDP below the national 10% threshold. The national threshold is the
highest in the world, and has been criticised
for many years for disenfranchising millions of voters, as happened most
dramatically in 2002.
The
online battle
Turning
to social media is not without its risks. Since the 2016 coup attempt, Turkey
has arrested thousands of people for allegedly supporting terrorism or
insulting government officials on social media. According to the Turkish
Interior Ministry, between January 20 and February 26 2018, authorities detained 648
people over social media posts criticising Turkey’s military
operations in Afrin.
But Erdoğan’s distaste for social media dates back to the 2013 Gezi Park
protests, when Twitter and other social media platforms were used extensively
to bring people into the streets. Realising the potential of these platforms to
disseminate information and enable collective action, he decried
Twitter at the time as the “worst menace to society”, and in March
2014, Twitter was temporarily blocked in Turkey
altogether.
But
technology has also come to Erdoğan’s rescue before. During the
failed coup in 2016, he gave an
interview via FaceTime to CNNTurk and called on the people of Turkey
to take to the streets against the apparent putsch. Through this last-ditch
call and harnessing social media, messaging services, as well as the creative use
of mosques calling people on to the streets, he survived the night
and continued consolidating his power.
Should an
opposition candidate somehow defeat him, Erdoğan might well try to mobilise his
supporters to delegitimise the election result. If he does, technology will
certainly be one of his most important tools. But equally, all the major
challenges to his rule in the last few years relied on social media to some
extent. Each time, Erdoğan has managed to take control
of the information environment and repel his rivals, tightening
control on internet users, blocking social media platforms, harassing bloggers,
and manipulating
online discussions. But the internet still offers some hope – and
this election will be a crucial test of its power to challenge Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule.
