Turkish Presidential Election: August 10, 2014

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It would be most helpful if the opposition ceased to suck so mightily.

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While it is no longer true to say that the AKP are clearly 'better' than the (non-Kurdish) opposition,* we have not yet reached the point where the (non-Kurdish) opposition is clearly 'better' than the AKP. The CHP remains a rather distasteful outfit interested mostly in protecting the position of elite groups and (very mild) attempts to change that are (as palandio points out) running into difficulty. The MHP - an actual open and unashamed fascist party - is even worse.

_{*Or Erdogan's faction of the AKP anyway.}

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Because the realities of Turkish politics are quite different to the assumptions of Western journalists.

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How so?

Observe:



As for Istanbul specifically, while middle class 'Westernised' neighbourhoods like Besiktas voted overwhelmingly for Ihsanoglu, most working class districts (which are generally less 'Westernised') voted solidly for Erdogan.

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You may also look on it the other way round. Many of Istanbul's working class districts are 'Anatolianized' in the sense that often most inhabitants in one neighborhood stem from the same village in Anatolia, they still identify with their ancestral village and its (e.g. religious) traditions, they travel there every summer for several weeks. In many senses they are rural folks displaced to the suburbs of a mega-city. They live in Istanbul, but they vote like their cousins 500 miles away.

You can look at it the other way, but you have to be careful to avoid absurdity when doing so (i.e. it is important to avoid implying - as often seems to happen - that the city really 'belongs' to the educated middle classes). All of those patterns are entirely typical of first generation urbanisation, of course.

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Notably hilarious result in Sultanbeyli where Ihsanoglu actually came third, hahaha.

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A majority of those Turks living in Germany that are still interested in Turkish politics seem to be rather fervent AKP supporters, but I think that there is no strong correlation between the opinion on Turkish and on German party politics (except for the radical left, of course.) Many Turkish guest workers and ex-guest workers see the SPD (or the Greens) as their natural political home in Germany, while they would never vote for its Turkish sister party, the CHP.

It is an interesting tendency, that one. The most extreme case here would be all those Irish immigrants who tended to vote Labour here but supported Fianna Fail back home (given the recent collapse in FF's political standing I presume that the latter part of that is no longer true... but we can be fairly sure that they don't back Irish Labour, lol). The Indian diaspora here is also interesting because so much of it comes from Gujarat; they might mostly vote the same way here, but they certainly don't support the same side wrt India...

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The far north-east (Kars, Ardahan, Artvin, Iğdır) seems to be leaning more to the CHP (also MHP and in the past DSP and DYP) than neighboring regions. Any reason for that? Armenia?

Yeah, that's a strange one. Iğdır at least is pretty heavily Azeri, so maybe that's a factor?