 People and a security member stand on a roof next to banner with an image of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday. (Dylan Martinez/Reuters) |
A day before Turkey’s elections, liberal pundits and analysts inside and outside the country sensed the possibility of an epochal turning point. After two decades in power, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed weak — his image of competent, stable leadership diminished by years of economic dysfunction and a backlash over poor governance and corruption that followed the devastating earthquake which ravaged a huge tract of southern Turkey. Polls showed opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu firmly ahead in the first round presidential race. Erdogan’s time, it seemed, was running out. A day after the vote, the sense of deflation among backers of the opposition was palpable. Rather than trailing Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan had a comfortable lead by nearly five percentage points and was in a whisker of a contest-clinching victory with almost 50 percent of the vote. Instead, the two will face each other in runoff election May 28, though most experts now think the incumbent’s return to power is a fait accompli. Meanwhile, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its allies retained control of parliament. Much like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Erdogan’s years in office have given the president a fine-tuned understanding of how to consolidate an electoral advantage among voters — and how to leverage his tremendous power and influence to do so. The template was already on show in previous elections in 2015 and 2018, when Erdogan demonized the opposition, stoked fear over the spectral threats that they would unleash and weaponized the deep-seated resentment harbored by his pious, nationalist supporter base against Turkey’s traditionally secular, coastal elites. After the dust settled, international observers declared the vote to be largely free and devoid of major irregularities. But they noted the country’s quasi-authoritarian subtext: “The continued restrictions on fundamental freedoms of assembly, association and expression hindered the participation of some opposition politicians and parties, civil society and independent media in the election process,” assessed a commission led by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “Nonetheless, the campaign itself was competitive and largely free for most contestants but characterized by intense polarization, and marred by harsh rhetoric, instances of misuse of administrative resources, and the pressure and intimidation faced by one opposition party.”  | | |
The result demonstrated how Erdogan is able to maneuver the levers of the Turkish system over which he holds sway. Preceding the election, key political opponents were already imprisoned or dogged by the threat of prosecution on spurious cases. Erdogan has spent years seeding state institutions with his loyalists. Allies in the business sector turned once-independent media companies into pro-government outlets — creating an information space heavily skewed in his favor. The left-wing, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, has faced years of targeted attacks and legal warfare; both its two main leaders are now in jail, while many of its parliamentarians and municipal officials have been disbarred or also subjected to politically charged criminal proceedings. HDP candidates joined the electoral lists of the Green Left Party, which also faced a government-backed pressure campaign that saw some of its candidates and supporters arrested. “Without question, the election was technically free, if practically unfair,” wrote Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman, a veteran journalist covering Turkey. “Erdogan has used the one-man-rule system imposed in the wake of a controversial referendum in 2018 to stack the system in his favor, castrating the media and stuffing the judiciary and other key institutions with yes-men. His vast propaganda machine has been pumping out lies about the opposition. In April, Erdogan got 32 hours of air time on state TV compared with 32 minutes for Kilicdaroglu.” “Erdogan used other tactics in the weeks before the vote, including raising salaries for public workers and providing free gas to households,” my colleagues reported from Istanbul. “As the president’s speeches were given blanket coverage on Turkish news outlets, Kilicdaroglu spread his messages to the public largely through his Twitter account, in speeches recorded at a kitchen table on topics like the economy.” Beyond the tilted political landscape, Erdogan also could trust in a loyal voter base. “The poll-defying performance underlined the enduring appeal of the president, and the resonance of his political offer to a base of conservative, pious voters with a strong nationalist bent,” the Financial Times noted. Meanwhile, the Table of Six parties that had united around Kilicdaroglu may not be able to maintain their solidarity for much longer. They represent a mix of secular, religious and nationalist factions, whose ability to come together was a major feat in and of itself and symbolic of the widespread desire of the opposition to end the Erdogan era. But, sensing failure, their own ideological divisions and political rivalries may come to the fore. All of this sets up Erdogan nicely as he prepares for the runoff. “First, his coalition’s control of parliament makes it easy for him to argue that a Kilicdaroglu victory would lead to a political stalemate,” wrote Howard Eissenstat, nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute. “Second, and perhaps more importantly, the election results evince a surge in nationalist sentiment. While both Kilicdaroglu and Erdogan can make reasonable claims on this portion of the electorate, Kilicdaroglu’s success is reliant on the Kurdish vote. Without them, he cannot win, but with them, many nationalist voters will not support him.” Erdogan has spent years traipsing across this fraught seam of Turkish politics. His government two decades ago helped push through major reforms that scrapped draconian laws prohibiting the instruction of the Kurdish language and suppressing Kurdish identity. But in more recent years, he took a more nationalist line, scapegoating pro-Kurdish politicians as “terrorist” sympathizers and stepping up a bloody counterinsurgency in southeastern Turkey against a separatist group. On the campaign trail, Erdogan also channeled the fears among religious Turks of a return to an earlier era of militant secularism, championed for decades by the predecessors to Kilicdaroglu’s Republican People’s Party, or CHP. The scaremongering and culture warring seemed to work in Turkey’s hinterlands, where Erdogan draws the bulk of his support. Apparent wariness among some conservative voters of Kilicdaroglu’s identity as an Alevi — a more mystical, universalist sect of Islam that was persecuted in the past in what is a heavily Sunni Muslim nation — also appears to have been a factor. Outside major coastal cities, the capital Ankara and Kurdish-majority areas, the opposition left-right alliance “failed in the rest of the country,” tweeted Soner Cagaptay, senior fellow at the Washington Institute, adding that it was in these places “where Erdogan demonized HDP support for Kilicdaroglu and his Alevi identity to shuffle the electorate along a right vs. left split, benefiting his right-wing block.” Nor did anger about shoddy construction projects in the Erdogan era that collapsed after February’s earthquake have much of an electoral impact. “Economic mismanagement and endemic corruption did not have as wide appeal as many (including myself) thought,” wrote MIT professor Daron Acemoglu. “These mattered in metropolitan areas, but not in places where AKP built and used its patronage networks.” The lesson seems stark: In this moment in Turkish democracy, perhaps in democracies everywhere, identity politics trumps all. |
Talking Points• A group of Washington Post reporters and editors sat with President Volodymyr Zelensky at the presidential office building in Kyiv for a wide-ranging interview about the expected counteroffensive, leaked U.S. intelligence documents that revealed sensitive information about Ukraine, and whether he worries about how the U.S. presidential election will impact support for his country. • A barrage of strikes in recent days shows Kyiv using new, longer-range weapons to hit deep inside Russian-held territory. Luhansk sits 60 miles east of the front line and has been out of reach of most Ukrainian weapons, making it a place of relative calm. Since Friday, however, the Russian-held territory has come under regular attack, report The Post’s Adam Taylor and Serhiy Morgunov. • A leaked intelligence document reported that Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer: If Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions. His mercenary forces had been dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city, and he had been publicly feuding with Russian military commanders over his claims that they failed to equip and resupply his forces. Prigozhin dismissed the report as “yet another hoax.” • Brown University researchers attempted to calculate the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen — impacts “so vast and complex that” ultimately, “they are unquantifiable." The accounting, so far as it can be measured, puts the toll at 4.5 million to 4.6 million. |
Robusta's revenge Thuan Sarzynski, who helps lead coffee sustainability efforts in Vietnam for ECOM Agroindustrial, shows off a robusta coffee plant in Vietnam, on April 14. (Thanh Hue for The Washington Post) |
BAO LOC, Vietnam — For decades, the world of coffee has had one star: the arabica bean. It is “complex” and “deliciously refined,” according to companies such as Starbucks that have refused to use any other bean. It has engendered obsession among Java aficionados. But climate change, as it tends to do, is shifting fortunes. The sophisticated arabica is hypersensitive to fluctuations in temperatures and faces dim prospects in a warming world. Once spurned as its “ugly stepsister,” the bulkier robusta plant — so named because it grows robustly in tough conditions — is mounting its revenge. Vietnam is responsible for more than half of the global robusta supply, and it plays an increasingly vital role in efforts to rescue coffee from the effects of climate change. The robusta farmed here is more resilient and has higher yields than virtually anywhere else, scientists say, with some varieties producing two or three times more beans than varieties in other parts of the world. “Arabica is no longer enough to satisfy appetites,” Nguyen Nam Hai, chair of Vietnam’s Coffee and Cocoa Association, said one recent afternoon in a Ho Chi Minh City neighborhood crowded with trendy coffee shops. “And Vietnamese robusta, everyone knows, is number one in the world.” Much of the pivot to robusta is by necessity. In 2021, a severe frost in Brazil damaged up to 200,000 hectares worth of predominantly arabica coffee crops, leaving behind scars that may take years to heal. Back-to-back hurricanes have battered arabica coffee fields in Honduras, while unpredictable changes in rainfall have devastated coffee farmers in Colombia. “Climate change has made many issues, mostly for the arabica-producing countries,” said Vanúsia Nogueira, executive director of the International Coffee Organization. Last year, low output from Brazil, the world’s biggest producer, helped to drive Vietnamese coffee exports to a record $4 billion, more than 30 percent higher than the year before. More than 93 percent of the coffee Vietnam produces is robusta. In Bao Loc, a quiet agricultural town two hours from the tourist city of Dalat, Vietnamese and European researchers are experimenting with ways to replicate the phenotype of native robusta varieties that have proved exceptionally resilient to pests and heat. Communities are “preparing,” said Toi Nguyen, a local farmer. “Because the future of coffee,” he added, “is here.” Using new farming and processing techniques, Nguyen, 48, has produced some of the first robusta coffee accepted by international judges as high-quality. His beans, which he sells for three times the market price of regular robusta, deliver brews with a clean taste and none of the bitter, rubbery flavor that have typically relegated robusta to instant coffee, he said. He’s found fans in Vietnam, France and Japan, and is part of a small but buzzy movement to remake the reputation of robusta. – Rebecca Tan and Nhung Nguyen Read more: Vietnam is going all-in on a climate-change resistant coffee bean |
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