January 20, 2023 | The National Interest
Ekrem Imamoglu Is the Best Chance for Turkish Democracy
If the opposition is interested in seeing Turkey restore democracy and the rule of law, it would do well to nominate Imamoglu as its candidate.
January 20, 2023 | The National Interest
Ekrem Imamoglu Is the Best Chance for Turkish Democracy
If the opposition is interested in seeing Turkey restore democracy and the rule of law, it would do well to nominate Imamoglu as its candidate.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hinted at holding what the Washington Post has described as the “world’s most important election in 2023,” on May 14. This would put the date of the election just over one month earlier than the mandated June 18 deadline. It is also a symbolic date, representative of Turkey’s first free and fair elections in 1950 when the nascent Democrat Party of Adnan Menderes defeated the Republican People’s Party (CHP, the party of Ataturk) in a landslide. Seventy-three years later, the irony could not be louder: Sevket Sureyya Aydemir, a veteran chronicler of the early republic and author of biographies of both Ataturk and his successor, Ismet Inonu, wrote that the Turkish Armed Forces in May 1950 stood ready to uphold the leadership of the CHP, regardless of the electoral outcome. According to Aydemir, it was Inonu who insisted that the CHP’s greatest defeat (at the ballot box) would also be its greatest victory—facilitating, for the first time, the peaceful transfer of power from the founding party of the republic to the popularly elected party chosen by the people.