OPINION - The Turkish general elections: The Western press versus the Turkish voters

By Dr. Adam McConnel

- The author teaches Turkish history at Sabanci University in Istanbul. He holds an MA and Ph.D. in history from the same university.

ISTANBUL (AA) - “The actuality is… that journalists, news agencies, and networks consciously go about deciding what is to be portrayed, how it is to be portrayed… nearly every American journalist reports the world with a subliminal consciousness that his or her corporation is a participator in American power…. All of this converges around a common center, or consensus, which all the media organizations almost certainly feel themselves to be clarifying, crystallizing, forming … in the end, because they are corporations serving and promoting a corporate identity -- “America” and even “the West”- they all have the same central consensus in mind.”[1]

The wave of aggressively negative, even hateful coverage that the Western press greeted the impending Turkish elections with, would be astonishing if it were not actually banal. The Western press’s attitude towards Türkiye and its prominent politicians is a topic that I have written about for many years, and the scene has never changed. Orientalism, chauvinism, racism, political interests, arrogance, fear, malevolence, and ignorance all played a part in creating the detestable articles and images that appeared in abundance over the past month. Charlie Hebdo’s most recent disgusting and racist cover image is only the distilled, puerile version of what the New York Times’s (NYT) coverage of Türkiye has always consisted.

- Turkish voters defend democracy with their lives

Turkish voters know far better than most modern societies what democracy means. Starting in 1877, Ottoman, then Turkish Republican citizens endured elections that were not democratic. Only in 1950 did Turkish elections become democratic, but Turkish citizens then suffered through repeated military interventions -- some of them violent, all of them traumatic -- into their democracy. Most recently, on the night of July 15-16, 2016, more than 250 Turkish citizens sacrificed their lives to preserve their democracy against another illegitimate actor, US-based leader of Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO) Fethullah Gülen’s cult,[2] that attempted to use violence to take Turkish citizens’ democratic rights away from them.

Turkish voters know how precious their democracy is, and the turnout in Turkish elections[3] exhibits the value that Turkish voters place on having their will reflected in Turkish political decision-making. Even more remarkable, hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens traveled long distances, even internationally, simply to vote. Because the presidential contest went to a second round, that meant traveling twice!

- The Western press condescends to Turkish voters

Türkiye’s democratic history makes the behavior of the Western press towards Turkish elections all more shocking. If you ask the NYT, the Washington Post,[4] the Economist, Le Point, Der Spiegel, or any of the many other Western press outlets that published articles aggressively attacking Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the days and weeks before the May 14 election why they publish such scandalous nonsense, they would claim to be defending democracy, rule of law and so on. In reality, these Western press outlets condescend to the Turkish voters; like latter-day admirers of Gustave Le Bon, they see Turkish voters as unable to discern the “correct” decisions.

Let us cast aside all pretenses and state the reality: Turkish elections are more democratic than US elections. Turkish elections are held on Sundays, so the greatest percentage of voters can participate, and the Turkish state bends over backwards to facilitate voting abroad, establishing voting facilities in dozens of countries around the globe, in airports, and at the borders. The voting process is extremely transparent, done completely on paper, and no anti-democratic institutions, such as the US’ Electoral College, prevent the voters from directly electing their representatives. The Turkish political landscape is diverse and pluralistic, with half a dozen parties represented in the Turkish parliament. All Turkish citizens can surf a variety of TV stations of every political stripe[5] every night in the months before the election and watch journalists, pundits, academicians, and various experts fervently debating every detail of that particular day’s political developments.[6] The commentators are committed, energetic, informed, and critical. Newspapers from across the political spectrum can be bought daily from the newsstand or read online.[7] Every political topic is debated with equal intensity 24/7 on social media, on Twitter, on Facebook and so on.

I imagine that some readers might be surprised by what I explained in the previous paragraph, but the reason is that the Western press both refuses – and in some cases lacks the ability – to tell them what Turkish politics actually consists of. As Edward Said explained four decades ago, the Western press works with an awareness of what their own companies, readers, and states expect.

Yes, part of this situation is simply sheer ignorance. For example, have we ever seen an international journalist try to explain to their readers why Türkiye’s Republican People’s Party (RPP) always receives around 25% of the vote in an election? Never more than 30%, never less than 20%, always around 25%. The answer is found in Turkish class, demographic, and political phenomena, i.e. sociology. Western journalists simply do not know enough about Turkish sociology to explain such a simple issue to their own readers.

But if they did try to explain such an issue, they would be veering away from the consensus narrative about Türkiye that their editors want, that their readers have come to expect, and that their political classes demand. Explaining RPP voters’ sociology would mean dipping into that party’s actual proclaimed stances, and into information that will violate Western readers’ preconceived notions.

For instance, the RPP and its head, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, have campaigned on an anti-refugee stance since 2015. Almost no one in Europe or North America is aware of this, however, because the Western press never explains to their readers what the RPP’s policy preferences are, or what the reasons for those preferences are. In fact, the RPP’s anti-refugee attitude is no different from that of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland or Hungary’s Victor Orban. But today, straying from the expected narrative means “cancellation” in the current jargon, and can mean jobs lost, social media tempests, or disgrace. So the Western media narrative continues with the same derogatory, uninformed, and misleading content that it has utilized in regard to Türkiye for many decades.

- The Western media must begin with respect for the Turkish voters

Because I have learned from experience that the Western press has no interest in a rational, informed dialogue with the Turkish people or their elected leaders, I will instead conclude by emphasizing the essential situation. The Western press, vis-a-vis the Turkish voters, tries to claim a status of Besserwisserei,[8] a condescending paternalism in its plainest form. To give their contempt a veneer of authority, they also find commentators from Türkiye’s socio-cultural elites willing to slander Türkiye’s political leaders and/or its voters.[9] The Turkish voters, subject to such supercilious behavior for the past 150 years and aware of these detestable attitudes’ true motivations, long ago stopped giving them credence. The Turkish voters cast ballots according to their own interests, their own opinions, and their own perspectives, paying no mind to the hysterical, inept nonsense written by Western journalists.

Thus, the Western journalists and their parent organizations who do not do the work necessary to understand why Turkish voters cast their ballots as they do, will continue to be stunned and perplexed by the results. By taking up an attitude openly hostile to the vast majority of Turkish voters, and possessing the arrogance to publish it as some sort of authoritative wisdom, those Western journalists and publications have no one and nothing to blame other than themselves and their own deficiencies. The only road open to the Western press is to begin by respecting the Turkish voters’ choices, and then working to comprehend those choices holistically.

[1] Edward Said. Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. pp. 46, 47, 48.

[2] A terrorist organization according to Turkish law; Gülen resides in rural Pennsylvania and the last three U.S. administrations have refused to initiate extradition proceedings against him.

[3] The May 14 elections set another record, 88%, and the second round’s turnout was only slightly less.

[4] A special note for Fareed Zakaria, who clearly knows almost nothing about Türkiye, but feels no compunction in publishing columns about Turkiye’s elections composed almost exclusively of disinformation, misinformation, and falsehoods.

[5] A short list: A Haber, CNN Türk, FOX, Haber Global, HaberTürk, Halk TV, NTV, Sözcü TV, TRT 1, TV100, 24TV.

[6] Actually, the televised political debates are a feature of Turkish TV that never abates. Heated political discussions can be found on Turkish channels mostly every evening no matter the season or the proximity (or not) of elections.

[7] Literally, dozens are readily available, far too many to list here.

[8] This German term can be translated as “those who claim to know better.”

[9] The mental and cultural bubble that most of Türkiye’s socio-cultural elites live in – now exacerbated by social media echo chambers – renders them unable to interact with or comprehend the mass of Turkish society. Eric Hobsbawm memorably described such elite social elements in non-Western societies as “those who had cut themselves off from their past and their people” (see: The Age of Empire, Chapter 1: The Centenarian Revolution).

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu.