Elections 2023: Turkey, Thailand, Polynesia, Karnataka (India)
Turkey goes to a runoff as Erdogan fends off an historic loss … the military is unseated in Thailand (for now) … French Polynesia delivers a slap to Macron…and a big blow to Modi in India.
Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, in the latest round, voters go to the polls in Turkey, Thailand, French Polynesia, and the critical Indian state of Karnataka (Bangalore).
Turkey
Turkish voters failed to settle on a decision that has riveted much of the rest of the world—whether to break President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 20-year stranglehold on their country that has dealt a blow to efforts to expand NATO and curb Russia’s ability to pursue its war in Ukraine, while suffocating Turkey’s free press and vibrant democracy.
With four candidates on the ballot, the latest still unofficial results with 99.9% of ballot boxes opened, showed Erdogan with 49.5% of the vote, his principal challenger Kemal Kiliçdaroglu with 44.9%.
One opposition candidate, Muharrem Ince, withdrew at the last minute, leaving only Sinan Ogan, who accumulated 5.2%. While Erdogan, in a post-midnight declamation from his balcony in Istanbul still held out hope of a 50% finish on Sunday, Kiliçdaroglu said he’s ready for a final, utterly unprecedented in Turkish history, head-to-head second round contest. One candidate must reach 50% in the first round to avoid a two-man finale in two weeks. With Ogan reflecting a nationalist view, more in step with Erdogan, it would appear he is indeed well positioned for a second-round victory.
The country’s electoral map was especially striking.
Kiliçdaroglu appeared to have snagged most of the major population centers including Istanbul, the capital Ankara, the region surrounding the Bosporus Strait, all of Turkey on the western or European side of the Bosporus, and much of the zone that was devastated by an earthquake earlier this year that Erdogan was seen to have failed to deal with at all adequately. The vast, more sparsely populated interior of the country went to Erdogan. If Turkey had an American-style Electoral College system, he would appear to have won in a runaway. This did not happen.
Erdogan has largely failed to capture the imagination of most of the nation’s elite. In addition to pushing an increasingly autocratic rule and pushing an extreme Islam on a nation that had long been a secular model in the Arab world, “Erdogan has destroyed everything during the last four or five years,” Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, told the French daily Le Monde in an interview. “When we imagine Erdogan as a powerful person, it is not because of Islam, but of the authoritarianism that he has put in place.”
This authoritarianism has let Erdogan run roughshod over institutions that have long been a treasured part of Turkey’s deeply held DNA. With the 11th largest standing army in the world, it has a larger military force than any other nation in NATO after the United States—larger than the forces of France and Britain combined. But it has sought to chart its own independent course within the alliance, often sidling up to Putin’s Russia to the dismay of its western allies. Turkey also has the 19th largest GDP in the world, outranked by only five European nations, and the second largest in the Middle East, outranked by Saudi Arabia and then only by 3%.
But it is many of these figures, that have been contracting sharply under Erdogan that could still play a major role in his downfall. Turkey’s GDP has been falling steadily for a decade since peaking in 2013. Inflation is running more than 40% a year, nearly triple the rate four years ago. And unemployment is hovering above 10%. In two weeks, Turkish voters will decide what is most important to them in the end.
Thailand
Thailand’s liberal political opposition has steamrollered to victory over the right-wing military-backed incumbents in parliamentary elections that could help determine the shape of the new government. The Pheu Thai party led by Paetongtarn Shinawatra, daughter of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was edged out narrowly by another populist party, Move Forward, a magnet for young voters, led by Harvard-educated, 42-year-old Pita Limjaroenrat. While the two have some differences, in the end many observers believe they will join in a coalition, perhaps with a third party, Bhumjaithai, which spearheaded a campaign to legalize marijuana in Thailand. Official government figures showed Move Forward [Go Far] Party with 152 seats; Pheu Thai, victor in every election since 2001, had 141; and Bhumjaithai [Proud Thai] won 70 seats. Two right-wing parties linked to the military accounted for a combined total of 77 seats in the 500 seat National Assembly.
The Move On party snagged all but one seat in the entire Bangkok metropolitan area.
But the current ruling junta established a constitution that gives the military the right to appoint the entire 250-member Senate. Since a combined majority of both houses is necessary to form a government and choose a prime minister, it appeared as though the center and left, though the overwhelming choice of voters, could in the end fail in their bid to oust the military and its control over the government. In any case, weeks of maneuvering lie ahead.
Thaksin Shinawatra, one of the nation’s wealthiest businessmen, was the founder of Thailand’s leading cell phone company before entering politics as a populist candidate. He became the first democratically elected prime minister in Thai history to serve a full term and win reelection. But he was ousted by a military coup in 2006 and forced to flee into exile where he oversaw the launch of the People's Power Party that ruled until 2008, and its successor Pheu Thai Party, which his daughter led to a victory of sorts in Sunday’s balloting.
The upstart Move Forward Party leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, seemed ideally positioned for the role of prime minister.
Much of Move Forward’s populist surge was a tribute to the nation’s growing voting-age population of young people who want radical change in a nation that is suffocating under military rule. Their priorities are an end both to compulsory military service and the antiquated lèse majesté laws that prohibit criticism of the ruling royal family and by extension the monarchy’s close alliance with the military.
Of course, this is a song we’ve heard so many times in the past—the Thai people vote for a center-left government overturning the military only to find victory snatched away by a military coup, backed by the king, that eventually installs a right-wing puppet government that in turn is rejected—but briefly—at the ballot box, only to see the process begin again.
The biggest question is whether the military will ever really relinquish power in this Asian monarchy—a reality that I recall back to 1977 and a military coup that was launched just up the block in Bangkok from my home and office off Pahonyothin Road.
Another Thai military coup a decade later would cost the life of my dear friend, Neil Davis, the brilliant NBC cameraman, caught in crossfire from a truck-mounted cannon—a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
French Polynesia: a slap to Macron
This vast territory of 121 islands and atolls scattered across 1,200 miles of the South Pacific, northeast of New Zealand, chose a new president on Friday after an election earlier this month for the legislature, a sharp break with the past and a slap by its 279,000 residents at French President Emmanuel Macron.
Moetai Brotherson will assume leadership of the archipelago, described by Radio France International (RFI) as “a fierce advocate of independence” has been elected president by the new parliament with 38 votes, defeating Edouard Fritch of the Tapura Huiraatira party with 16 votes. RFI continued: The results will enable pro-independence forces to push the French authorities to negotiate a referendum on the status of the territory….French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who is responsible for the overseas territories, admitted that the vote by Polynesians is a “vote for change"….The result is also a blow to Macron, who has been trying to establish France as a major power in the Pacific region.” Indeed, this followed the decision two years ago by Australia to scrap a $90 billion contract with France for a fleet of new submarines which was taken over by the United States, a huge diplomatic flap at the time and a challenge as to which power could most effectively confront Chinese expansionism in the region.
Karnataka [India]
While normally Andelman Unleashed confines itself to national elections, the voting in this southern India state, home to India’s tech capital of Bangalore, has such profound national implications, it’s hard to ignore. Here voters gave a resounding raspberry to India’s powerful right-wing prime minister Narendra Modi, propelling to a landslide victory over his BJP the center-left Congress Party led by Rahul Gandhi.
It was also the first major test for Congress among five major state elections likely to set the stage for national elections next year. Moreover, the blow to BJP was especially brutal as Karnataka was “its only bastion in southern India,” observed Nistula Hebbar in the national daily The Hindu.
Congress won an overwhelming 135 seats compared with 66 for BJP in the 224-member legislature. But the sweeping nature of the outcome becomes clearest in this graphic from The Times of India:
Karnataka has been ruled by the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] since Modi developed an electoral stranglehold nationally in 2014. Indeed, before Saturday’s elections in Karnataka, Congress had won only one of 24 states since 2019, when Modi swept national elections for a second term.
Now Rahul and his Congress party appear to have begun to chart a path back, though Modi still enjoys substantial support in other regions of this vast nation that has just surpassed China as the world’s most populous country.
Rahul Gandhi is the scion of India’s leading political family. His father Rajiv Gandhi was a prime minister of India as was his grandmother Indira Gandhi, and his great grandfather, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Both his father and grandmother had their rule ended by assassination. Rahul’s political career was put on hold when he was convicted for “defamation” of Modi in a clear act of political revenge and sentenced to two years in prison. This led to forfeit of his seat in Parliament, dealing a blow to the Congress Party he was heading and that had been run by his father, grandmother, and great grandfather before him.
Sanjay Raut, a leader of the Modi opposition, told The Hindu, “The Modi wave is over in the country, and now it's our turn. The Karnataka election has opened a door for the party in the whole country. The people of Karnataka have shown how dictatorship is defeated.” Still, there is much electoral chaos ahead before any of this can be resolved.
If there is a common thread through each of these elections across 18 time zones it is a growing sentiment by voters to dispense, in one fashion or another, with a status quo that is no longer working for so many. Instead, they are eager, or at least willing, to chart new directions for their nations, largely on more populist grounds. The defining moment, however, will come on May 28 when Turkish voters make their final choice. Andelman Unleashed will be prepared to chronicle it.
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