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Opinion
January 25, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 23
Turkey’s democratic deconstruction:
Not so amusing
Akin Nazli in Belgrade
You may have noticed some very odd Turkish pre- election stories making a big splash in the global news media’s short-attention-span 24-hour news cycle before disappearing as fast as they arrived. The tale of the 165-year-old first-time voter
found on the electoral roll perhaps? Or the single apartment apparently home to 1,000 registered voters? All very amusing, but their appearance and rapid disappearance beg two rather important questions.
Firstly, is Turkey’s so-called democracy by
now so compromised that observers shrug off such worth-a-giggle goings-on with a “Well, of course, it’s Turkey we’re talking about here after all”? And secondly, are these ‘funny old world’ tales symptoms of a pervasive, obscured and systematic attempt to engineer an election result and proceed with the destruction of a democracy?
The stories broke just as Turkey’s political adversaries prepared to step up new year campaigning for the March 31 local elections, likely to be held in a recessionary economic environment in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has to acknowledge that its credit-fuelled boom has bust.
“More than 200 voters live in the same apart- ment in Bingol, a city in eastern Anatolia. That's either one big happy family or something does not add up,” Deutsche Welle reported on January 17,
Erdogan inspects a welcoming regiment in Ordu on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. He landed there on January 20 to hold an election rally and announce mayoral candidates.
adding: “Recent days have seen voters registered with addresses at stables, construction sites, and empty or nonexistent buildings. One apartment was reported listed for 1,000 voters. [Main oppo- sition Republican People’s Party] CHP members said they found voters registered on the fifth floor of a four-floor apartment building in Istanbul.”
“Political parties in Turkey are crying foul after thousands of unlikely voters appeared on the electoral roll. Among the oddities are many first- time voters over 100 years old—and one aged 165,” the BBC reported on January 21, adding: “The supposed [165-year-old] voter Ayse Ekici would have been born under the reign of Sultan Abdulmecid of the Ottoman Empire.”
Adiguzel does the math
Onursal Adiguzel—the CHP deputy head who prepared a livestream election results monitoring system that collapsed on the evening of last year’s June 24 snap parliamentary and presidential polls—determined that a total of 6,389 voters
over the age of 100 had been identified. Adiguzel, who never has provided a satisfactory explanation as to what went wrong with his monitoring—he has blamed data failures attributed to the other opposition parties—might do well to reflect that if the imaginary Mrs Ekici was 65 years-old rather than 165, the number of voters older than 100
he detected would have been 6,388. Who can seriously say how many rogue voter registrations there might be out there?