* Part II here
* Part III
* Part IV
* Part V

Our ‘OUTLOOK 2019 Turkey’ report contended: “The Erdogan administration must be keenly aware that a wheel has come off. Consumers have been rocked by the hard landing. So how will the populist president (Turkey’s first near-all-powerful “executive president” since his June 2018 re-election was secured and triggered constitutional changes) keep a majority of the electorate on his side as he approaches two decades at the top?

Erdogan’s popularity sinking

Opinion polling is rather unreliable in Turkey but there are enough pointers to conclude that there is a good case that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s popularity with voters has sunk below 40%. But Erdogan is a master at pressing the right buttons with Turkish constituencies, opportunistically appealing to nationalist instincts when it’s to his advantage, such as by blaming Turkey’s economic woes on “foreign plots” or whipping up sentiment around Turkish military adventures chasing Kurdish “terrorists” in Syria and Iraq.

At the local polls held on March 31, it became clear that Erdogan has lost his ability to claim a majority in most of the major cities although he declared a 51.6% countrywide score for his alliance with his vital crutch, ultra-nationalist Devlet Bahceli and his Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) party.

Erdogan had the opportunity to simply anchor his rule in the countrywide majority and follow a path of gradually limiting the powers of opposition municipalities. However, when the strongman decided he couldn’t stomach the loss of Istanbul to the opposition and successfully pressed election watchdog YSK to call a ‘revote’ based on purported irregularities in the first vote, it became clear that attempts were under way to try and regenerate his political authority with new polls.

But Erdogan was hoist by his own petard. The revote resulted in a humiliating landslide loss on June 23 and confirmed that Turkey’s leader of 17 years has lost his ability to always somehow claim an election victory in the end.

Since then, economic conditions in the country have deteriorated further and the anger felt towards Erdogan and his son-in-law Finance Minister Berat Albayrak has grown as they failed to acknowledge the extent of the crisis and talked up even modest signs of recovery as if the country was turning the corner.

It seems the Erdogan administration was not averse to entirely running Turkey as a banana republic, but that course has proven a dramatic failure. The country is in dire straits economically and the powers that be have no sustainable solutions for setting things to rights.

Discussions over legitimacy

By stepping up Turkey’s offensive against the Syrian Kurds with the early October invasion of northeast Syria, Erdogan managed to halt post-election discussions over his legitimacy. But keeping Turks distracted with this nationalistic military adventure is a tough proposition. By now, the big headlines have faded away, the incursion has become an everyday reality and something of a slog and just about everyone’s attention has returned to their economic woes.

While continuing to open the loan taps, officials have been busy banning cyanide (when three families in quick succession committed collective suicide with cyanide, ministers refused to countenance talk of the depth of economic despair said to have driven them to it, but instead blamed the easy availability of the poisonous compound) and demonstrations, cracking down on the media and attempting to put the lid on anything else that might bring the economic troubles into focus. Cheaper money seems to be the name of their only substantial game, but how can an unemployed person already struggling with a debt overload benefit from bank loans?

Erdogan’s only way around the growing threats to his continued power might, however, be inextricably linked to the success of otherwise of efforts to create fast and major—though short-term—economic growth that will give him the space to rally support to overcome his increasingly bold adversaries in snap elections. But the ‘good times’ are not yet here and calling early polls as things stand would be self-destructive. Rebels in his governing Justice and Development (AKP) party, the emerging Future Party formed by his former right-hand man and ex-PM Ahmet Davutoglu and a new party being put together by another ex-ally, former economy czar Ali Babacan as well as Istanbul ‘revote’ victor Ekrem Imamoglu are just some of Erdogan’s opponents. The serious illness of ‘spare tire’ Bahceli also helps to produce a clock now loudly ticking on his hold on power.

Under the current rules—although in today’s Turkey the rule of law appears rather malleable—the president can call early presidential and parliamentary polls at the same time or a three-fifths majority in parliament is required.

In the 600-seat parliament, 11 seats are presently empty. The AKP has 290, while the MHP has 49, giving the coalition partners 339 altogether. The opposition parties have a combined 250. They seem far away from securing the 354 votes needed to call early elections, but there is some prospect of AKP lawmakers switching to the Davutoglu and Babacan parties. Erdogan could thus lose his parliamentary majority.

The pro-Kurdish HDP became the first opposition party to call for early polls after Erdogan’s officials pushed out swathes of its mayors, citing alleged “terrorist” connections, and replaced them with government appointees. However, acting alone, the HDP hasn’t the weight to sway the direction of domestic politics.

Other opposition parties have hesitantly joined discussions on going for a snap vote, but they worry that responsibility for an economically wrecked Turkey could end up on their doorstep. Spring 2020 or the autumn are suggested as possible periods for dusting down the ballot boxes, some speculate that Erdogan could go to the people in 2021, but nobody believes he can stall until 2022.

Terrible own goal

Back to that Istanbul revote. It is fair to say this terrible own goal by football fan Erdogan didn’t just produce a stinging defeat, it delivered to the national stage the politician seen as most likely to become the president’s nemesis. If elections are called, the CHP candidate could very well be Istanbul mayor Imamoglu. And if Imamoglu is backed by a CHP-Iyi Party (Good Party) coalition, supported by the Kurds and other minor opposition parties and individuals, the game looks up for Erdogan.

Imamoglu’s profile in the Globalists vs. ‘Patriots’ clash taking place around the world was given a lift when Bloomberg included him among its Top 50 People in 2019, while Donald Trump’s ‘pals act’ with Erdogan remains a big curiosity as observers doubt the American president will stick with his Turkish counterpart through thick and thin—Erdogan’s fate, as well as those of Imamoglu and Turkey, will to a big extent be determined by movements in world politics and markets, of that there can be no doubt. A President Imamoglu that makes Turkey a more Western and market friendly nation may never see the day if the global tectonic plates do not move in his favour.

Nevertheless, Imamoglu can certainly be marked out as the most clear and present danger to Erdogan, thus the president will go on with efforts aimed at eliminating him and/or separating the opposition alliance. Perhaps, he is planning to call early polls after concluding this make-or-break ‘business’.

Davutoglu may grab a few points from Erdogan among the electorate while Babacan is seen as having the potential to take a maximum 10% share of the vote, or perhaps a little more. It’s a double-horned dilemma—Erdogan has little chance of reducing Davutoglu and Babacan’s vote shares to inconsequential figures, while at the same time he must crucially direct his main attention to the alliance led by main opposition party CHP, and, very likely, eventually Imamoglu.

There are those in the Iyi Party that would consider a deal with Erdogan but the party’s voter base would not allow it, and Iyi is anyway demanding a shift back to a parliamentary republic. Actually, just about everyone, perhaps even executive president Erdogan himself, would like to see the parliamentary system rehabilitated and re-established.

Discussions on this issue continue everywhere, except in the Turkish media. In the wake of the all-powerful Erdogan regime, a return to the parliamentary system is almost certain. Even if Erdogan somehow managed to keep his post, a situation in which a single person decides everything for a population of 82mn no longer seems tenable.

Finally, one other thing to look out for is whether chickens may come home to roost for Erdogan when it comes to the jihadist networks he has allowed to grow and fester in Syria since its civil war broke out in 2011. There is no visible sign of a Kurdish uprising on the horizon, but there are palpable worries that these networks, which Erdogan has used to his advantage in jockeying for position south of the Turkey/Syria border, have become a ticking bomb that could explode in unpredictable fashion.