Turkish General Election

[Donempire]

Hello friends, first of all, it's been a long hiatus but i am back because i need to get some things off my mind.. How's everyone doing? I hope alright, been a while since i talked to most old friends here so i'd be happy if i heard from you.

I would like to start by explaining why i opened this topic. This might be the most important election in the history of my country, with not only the most right leaning alliances imaginable but also possibly the end of civil liberties and constitutional protections as well. These aren't speculations, they are policies proposed by the current head of state who is running for re-election (unconstituonally, i might add).
As for the speculation part, the elections haven't been free or fair since 2014, and should this one end with a similar election victory for erdogan then we might as well change to an election system similar to Russia or Azerbaijan. There are two pro sharia parties in the republican alliance as well, so imagining their trajectory shouldn't be too hard either. Turkey has been a bastion of relative freedom in the hellscape that is the middle east, with secular rule saving it from certain sectarian warring like syria and iran-saudi arabia, but that might change should the worst come to pass...
So this will be kind of my recap and theories on where i think my country is going to both inform anyone curious and so that if there's any turkish scummers on site they can add onto what i express here.

For reference;
RA is republican alliance, the abomination of extremely far right parties led by the current prime minister erdogan. Main two parties are the leading religious conservative AKP, and the far-right nationalist-religious MHP, though the latter has effectively become an AKP puppet, as well as BBP which is small mhp.
Two new parties joined the coalition just recently; one of those being Welfare Party, which is a far-right religious fundamentalist group that wants to start teaching a "religion based lifestyle" starting from elementary school, they are extremely misogynistic as islamic parties are, even censoring the face of a woman congresswoman candidate because they believe just looking at women causes "intense horniness" and is a sin.
And if you think that is bad, the next party is Hüdapar, literally hezbollah in turkish. They don't recognize hezbollah as a terrorist group, have members with ties to hezbollah and are trying to get hezbollah terrorists convicted from terrorism pardoned, and are a pro-sharia, pro-secessionist party that wants to rewrite the parts of the constitution that protect the fundamentals of the republic. Their congressmen have not even taken the oath because they refuse to plead allegiance to the republic. I wasn't exaggarrating when i said this was a coalition that would make imperial japan seem reasonable.

PA is people's alliance, a coalition of anti-erdogan parties led by Kılıçdaroğlu. It has CHP, a center left party, and İYİ which is a secular nationalist center right party, and 4 other smaller parties. Outside of these 6 parties nearly every other party in Turkey supports this coalition including a far right victory party and their polar opposite hdp, a kurdish umbrella party, as well as communists, socialists, nationalists, some islamists etc.. basically anyone who hates erdogan.

Turkey just went through an inflation crisis surpassing Argentina, where the lira lost more than four times its value relative to most currencies, even with the central bank burning through all foreign currency and gold deposits. It saw the continuation of anti-democratic displacements of governors of southeastern cities where erdogan is despised, as well as crackdowns on free speech across all of Turkey. It saw 2 devastating earthquakes, more specifically the clear unpreparedness of the central government, as well as the revelation that most houses were not built to earthquake standarts even though that region was known to be on a fault line. On top of that, the government dogs harrassed people whose literally only aim was to help the wounded and homeless, taking donations from people and stamping their partys logo on top of them, and one egregious instance where the turkish red crescent SOLD tents that were donated to them to be used for earthquake relief and tried to hide it from the public. The catastrophe had 50000+ people dead according to official numbers, but its estimated over 200000 had died considering the scale and damage of it... to put into perspective, a similar earthquake in 1999 had 17000 dead. The numbers could have been similar if proper precautions were taken, and even less so considering these animals were collecting so called earthquake taxes since the 99' earthquake to be used for precautionary measures. There are many other problems too, too much to list all of them...

All of this is to say, that this government is at an all time low popularity. erdogan is barely breathing and still put his candidacy, even though its illegal according to the constitution as this is his 3rd term in a 2 term limit position, since his party controls all state apparatuses all objections from opposition parties were unlawfully rejected. Even then, most polling companies predicted a first round victory for the opposition. Morale was high in the opposition side, and low in the government supporter side as they were voting for a regime that was practically starving them.

Election day came and went, and the results were..... something. Not only did the opposition not win, but erdogan, despite all that had happened, received %49.5 of the votes. Meaning half the country approved of the way he was running the country (into the ground). This sunday the runoffs start, and to be honest, we're fearing for the worst now.

Here's the synopsis of events so far. Tomorrow i'll type what happened these last two weeks, why i believe the election results came like this surprising everyone and discrediting the polls, who i believe will win now and what happens to Turkey and the rest of the world after. Sorry i had to be brief, i'm typing with just one hand as my other arms' on a sling from an accident i had a few weeks back.

[Donempire]

Morning, and sup Menal, Norwegian, Ythan!

Could you explain a bit if Erdogan's decision to hold back from approving Sweden's NATO application has broader political and public support in Turkey?

Short answer, not by itself.

For the long answer, i have to talk about why the membership application is being denied in the first place (or more precisely on what grounds the government legitimizes its denial on), and why finland's application was approved eventually.

The PKK is a kurdish nationalist terrorist organization founded in 1978 with the goals of establishing an independent kurdistan in southeastern Turkey. Don't want to get into its entire history as it is really long, but suffice to say that the locals and turkish nationals really hate this group, and anyone and anything associated with it. They are responsible for multiple massacres of defenseless towns in the southeast as well as combat with the Turkish army. They were eventually pacificied by 2001, as their leader öcalan was captured and brought back to turkey to be tried, and still sits in a maximum security prison to this day. Their attacks whittled down as they lost popular support, funding and leadership and with the newly armed "village guards" they were essentially exiled to syria and northern iraq. This happened under the coalition government of liberals-democrats-nationalists.
After this, essentially all terror activities ceased in Turkey and its borders, even as the Iraq war was raging on and ISIS was starting to form, as the great policies of the coalition government essentially gave no room for these terrorists to breathe. The succeeding AKP government however, took a different policy approach.

As i mentioned before, there is a kurdish umbrella party with a supposed left leaning ideology in congress called HDP/HADEP/YSP. It's the most controversial political party in Turkey as it has politicians with ties to the PKK, as well as statements that seem to support the release of convicted terrorists and the seperation of southeastern Turkey. As it is an umbrella party it would be wrong to call the party terrorists and its voters terror symphatizers. Regardless, it is incredibly popular in the southeast, gaining majority in all southeastern cities in all elections since its creation in 2012. Whatever your opinion of this party is, there's no doubt that their politicians are elected to the congress legitimately and they are the true representatives of their region. (pic below, purple regions are where hdp got majority with most of them being above %60)


Now why do i say this? Because through 2013 to Summer 2015, the AKP government started a period known as "peace process" or the "solution process", where the years long divide between the kurdish majority southeast and the turkish majority everywhere else would be mended, ending the legitimacy of the PKK and similar factions, and opening up talks on kurdish language in congress which was disallowed in the constitution, IN THEORY.
In practice though, this process was a period of time where elected congresspeople were sent off with minimal security to literally negotiate with terrorists under their conditions, sleeping in caves for days on end, making deals on behalf of the government that were and still are not disclosed to the public. They allowed open praisal of the terrorist leader öcalan which was previously banned, as well as starting negotiations on how to go forward with the process with him as he still held sway over the more fanatical parts of the southeast. They let öcalan's brother, which was another terrorist THAT WAS ONE OF THE MOST WANTED TERRORISTS IN TURKEY read a message on TRT which is the national television here (pictured below). I just want to emphasize this point, they got someone who was being wanted by MIT (intelligence service of Turkey) on terrorism charges, brought him on to spread terrorist propaganda on national tv, then just let him go after it was over, just like that. And on and on and on... you get the point.

And throughout all of this, not once did any negotiations happen in congress with elected HDP congresspeople. AKP went out of its way to do its dealings with terrorist elements instead of the people elected to represent the people they were claiming to solve the problems of. Later it would be obvious the reason why was AKP didn't want to share the PR that would have come from successfull negotiations and an end to PKK with another party. It was also to avoid giving them legitimacy as the spokespeople for the southeastern cities as AKP wanted to hold sway over those cities itself, even though HDP was supportive of everything they were doing up till then.
Of course, this whole process ended with it blowing up in AKP's face, as the southeast nearly seceded, PKK gained followers and rebuilt its legitimacy, got funding from central and local governments through the whole ordeal and started anew. A terrorist organization that was effectively in hibernation was raised from the dead thanks to this clusterfuck of a process. If you think this lost them any votes though.. well, i'll get to that.
After this, some HDP congresspeople were made scapegoats, imprisoned on dogshit charges and erdogan claimed he was "fooled by bad actors", which is a recurring theme in his administration, and everyone collectively forgot about it because our people are fishbrained.

After this process, all Turkey was left with were more nationalist zealots on both kurdish and turkish sides. Turks saw our soldiers massacred as PKK was given free reign over southeastern Turkey, placing mines on city borders and trying to take over towns, known terrorists were greeted with open arms in Habur border gate, Turkish names and signs in southeastern Turkey were removed even though the towns had Turks living there as well and on and on.. and on the Kurdish side, their representatives were ignored as the more extreme PKK propaganda was blasted by erdogan and his cronies, standing in the way of peaceful resolution. Of course, instead of focusing on the common enemy, these two sides antagonized each other further, while erdogan passed off blame to civilians and HDP congresspeople.
After all was said and done, they allied with the far right MHP, and went on an anti-pkk propaganda rampage as if they never collaborated, and this is where we stand now.

So what does this have to do with Sweden?

As i said after 2001 PKK went into essentially hibernation, but during this time they also tried a facelift to be seen as an oppressed, misunderstood left-wing group and recruit international support and receive international funding. To that end, using legitimate grievances that gave them the legitimacy in Turkey in the first place, they started a guerilla propaganda campaign in europe that is still ongoing. As i said however, no matter how they market themselves, they are in the end a ridicilously conservative, nationalist militia. Now this was known before 2013, just the government tried to keep it under the rugs as during those times they were sucking up to EU and US demands (Iraq war times), and they even interacted before. Remember i said the "peace process" started in 2013, well, before that it was revealed that MIT (Turkish intelligence) had conducted meetings with leading PKK members in oslo for a year in 2009. This was only revealed to the public shortly before the processes.

As PKK is recognized as a terrorist group in the EU, they use subterfuge to seem like they are independently supporting the kurdish freedom cause, but secretly they funnel those funds back to PKK taskmasters. Some funders are aware, some are not, regardless, it is a real problem and the government so far has used this problem to draw an image of "terrorist supporting europe" to make their populace believe they are dependent on an erdogan leadership. And thats what it comes down to.

These propaganda operations take place mostly in Ireland, France, and Scandinavian countries. And given the hatred of pkk from everyone in Turkey, he decided that now was the time to press these countries into doing something about it in a very public display to his voter base. Internationally it backfired, and thats why he eventually approved Finland as he wanted to get some steam off his back. Domestically this was circlejerked as even some opposition voters say "he sucks internally but diplomatically he's good", even though this was clearly just flexing on our allies for no reason before getting punched, as Finland did fuck all to deal with the problem and we recalled the veto anyway. As for how this affected the people's view, most erdogan voters dont even know what Sweden is. This may have helped him consolidate his voter base as the "anti-terror coalition" but it didn't really gain or lose him any voters. This kind of fear mongering is really common place in erdogan's rhetoric.

Now you might have noticed, France and Ireland are in NATO, and we just accepted Finland despite them not doing anything to alleviate the situation, so what reason do we have to deny Sweden based on the claims that they are harboring terrorists? If they are, aren't the other mentioned countries?

Well, i have talked with reason up until this point. But to understand the average AKP voter, you have to throw reason aside and work your brain ass backwards. I already told you that all of these happenings were used to draw an image of "terrorist europe" in state media, and with the vetoing of two membership erdogan was able to convince his base that he was "showing europe who's boss". In international media the guy's a joke, but domestically his supporters see him as a tough guy who lead the country into becoming a diplomatic powerhouse. Why? Well, because he screams. He says "eyyyyyyyy avrupa" (who are you europe), he threatens to flood them with refugees (another topic)... a master diplomat in all senses.

This is what i meant when i said you have to think ass backward. These voters are conservative, religious, ridiculously right wing aggressive zombies that just want a president who they think is macho, who "slams his fist on the table when need be", even if that means your country becomes a diplomatic nightmare to deal with and all ties with legitimate states are severed and diplomatic trajectory starts to shift towards autocracies like Saudi Arabia and Russia.

So the vetoing of Sweden is not because they are harboring terrorists, as we've established erdogan can't get enough of terrorists, it is just to be a flex to his uneducated, angry voter base, but on its own it is just one of a myriad of fear mongering attempts, and not one that is particularly relevant or effective.

Now i've talked on lengths about the history of AKP-PKK relations, this wasn't just to explain the Sweden veto, like i said it is a relatively minor thing in the grand scheme of things. However, PKK is seen as the key to this election, and to understand what i'm going to talk about next concerning how the 14th of May elections went to the runoffs and how erdogan got so many votes while leading the country so shittily, you have to know at least a summarized history of events up to now. I'm also going to post these on different posts for the ease of anyone curious reading what i write here.

So if my first post was a synopsis of current events, this is a background on the "key to the election" PKK, and AKP's hypocrisy when it comes to this topic that i will touch on now.

[Donempire]

It is a matter of controversy whether the PKK is a terrorist organization.

This is the first i've heard of a controversy. I didn't want to get into its actions in the past as it is irrelevant, just how the sitting government dealt with them in the past(and how it deals with them now), but it is recognized as a terrorist organization by Turkey and all her allies (EU and NATO specifically). Anyone curious can go and read about it themselves, for me and every Turk (besides radicals) it is a pretty clear cut case.

Election day of May 14th came and went, and to say the results were unexpected would be an understatement.
Everyone including government officials were expecting an opposition led congress, as well as either lead the presidential election (there were 4 candidates) or just win outright. It got to such a point where erdogan was campaigning with a seccade (prayer device), his ministers were calling the people's alliance "gay" and a famous defense contractor had a meltdown during a tech fair ranting about how we couldn't let opposition win or terrorists would win. The MHP Chairman also had a weird speech about how "Hans, Sam, Tony, Johnny, Frank and Herkel couldn't fuck erdogan if they all tried"(my favorite). The only one who seemed even a little relaxed was erdogan, and even he seemed way less confident than he usually is. Polling companies near unanimously had Kılıçdaroğlu ahead, with only AKP backed companies showing erdogan leading. Add to that the general unhappiness of AKP voters thanks to the inflation, going into election day opposition spirits were unbelievably high.


Now for a while, the opposition strung us along claiming that they were ahead, and most of us believed it.
See, the way ballots are counted in Turkey is after a ballot box is finished counting, it is sent to the district election board, where vote bags are held until the entire district finishes voting, after which the votes are entered to a central system all at once. This means that since rural districts have less population both counting and entering the votes happens at a way faster rate. And what do you know, rural towns vote overwhelmingly for erdogan.
Add to that that despite being state owned media Anadolu Ajansı (second photo, gets data from Supreme Election Board directly) is known to be under the thumb of erdogan and can essentially manipulate which districts they want to show at the start, people weren't really phased by erdogan starting at %70 (lol). The counting started at 17:00, and the first results were entered around 19:00 with about %30 of boxes opened, and that was when the now infamous Kılıçdaroğlu tweet arrived, "We're ahead.":

Now it's also important to note, that Turkey has a very bad history of election fraud and vote manipulation. I'm not saying this because i'm an opposition voter, even AKP voters know this but they don't care since its their side doing it. I'll post some videos at the end of this post some examples, (some of them include the infamous 2019 Ankara elections where as Mansur Yavaş the opposition candidate was leading, electricity was cut during the counting process because "a cat got inside the transformer", and what do you know, when it came back the degenerate ex mayor melih was leading instead of Mansur.).
But the important thing to know is there are observers on each ballot box, these are (mostly) independent people who are there just to have a fair election and have to be there for at least 12 hours without leaving, and they needed

motivation

to keep staying there, especially considering the counting for some boxes went into the next day. This tweet, and the mayors of Ankara and Istanbul (capital and largest city) claiming their data from ballots showed the opposition was ahead gave the observers their much needed motivation. But, well, it might backfire in the runoffs..

So, great. Even in the rural population erdogan couldnt break %70, cities have much more population and have an opposition bias, what could go wrong?
Well, if the results didnt change all that much even as most cities were opened that might cause problems.
You see, during the counting process ballot officers can object to the counting if they see an inconsistency, starting the counting from the beginning. What the opposition leaders claimed was, the AKP-MHP ballot officers were intentionally objecting on faulty clamis to delay the opening of boxes in places that they knew had a heavy opposition bias. This would result in first results seeming as if erdogan was leading by a huge margin, even if he wasn't. Of course they couldn't prove it, all we could do was take their word for it. And giving the laughable actions of Anadolu Ajansı, such as keeping erdogan's vote at %50,01 for 4 hours just to give the impression of a victory, we all bought it.
The results didn't change for a few hours, staying at %50,01 erdogan until 12 pm, so me and my mates just went to bed, hoping for good news.

But in the end, these were the final results on election day: (right side is congressional votes)

Considering that apart from government sponsored troll polls all polls had Kılıçdaroğlu leading, you can guess that this was a shock to everyone.
This, and apparently the opposition side leaving their observers with no info during the night led to a decimated morale come morning. After all, how could erdogan get this many votes with everything that happened, and with the threat of his extreme right coalition?
I have my own theories, added on top of some possible reasons thrown around in online spaces for your conveniences, listed in order of least to most significant.

1- Sheer Size of AKP

The reason AKP gets so many votes consistently is not because of its popularity. It is still the leading party yes, but they have run the country into the ground these last few years. erdogan is popular, sure, so his supporters just blame his shortcomings on his party instead of him. The reason for this consistency, is that it is just so. damn. big. Like, look at this:

%13 of the country is listed as a member of AKP. For comparison, the CCP has %7 of the country as a member, and the second largest Turkish party CHP has %1.6 of the country. Now add to that the families of the high ranking members that live to benefit off of their corruption, and it's weird that they don't get MORE votes.
AKP is already known to be the most corrupt party in Turkey, where after Istanbul was reclaimed after 20+ years of AKP rule numerous scandals were unearthed that the party is still reeling from. So there's a chance that some higher ups had a field day in their areas just convincing people to vote for them through deception and bribes. Anatolians are really cheap, i personally know people that woulld change their vote for 5 bucks so this isn't a far fetched theory, but it doesnt explain a %10 vote differential.

2- Fear Mongering With Terror

This is why i took the time to detail AKP's dealings with PKK in post 6. Like i said, Turks have a soft spot when it comes to patriotism. As the republic was very fragile when it was formed, it needed an uniting ideal so it wouldn't break away like the ottomans before it. So kemalist nationalism, a sort of patriotism mixed with nationalism, has been state policy ever since the formation of the republic. This, mixed with a militarist history and mythos, led to a very significant portion of the population putting the country above even themselves (or seeming like that to the outside anyway). And to this day, pretty much every party, even left leaning ones have been nationalist or neutral on nationalism (only HDP takes a stance against it). So you might imagine a barrage of propaganda portraying erdogan as the only thing keeping Turkey from breaking apart might have been their hail mary, and the only way to gain votes. They first started with revealing new warships and parading them around large towns, as well as marketing the aforementioned defense contractor and his drones. (republican alliance with TCG Anatolia, the new warship:)

This brings to mind the nazi propaganda, as while germans were starving the nazis were boasting about their army. Cute little parallel
Of course this wouldn't be enough to bring people over to their side. People aren't going to eat warships (or will they?), so AKP needed to fear monger a lot more if they wanted this to work. As i said before, essentially all media is controlled directly or influenced by AKP. There are a few opposition channels, but the door eater base of erdogan voters dont watch them anyway, so they could pretty much get away with peddling anything they want on their channels and the opposition wouldn't have a chance to respond. They used to use the channels to smear the opposition 7/24 anyway, so it was time to shift gears and accuse them of the highest treason in the eyes of Turkish people, terrorism.

Remember HDP, the party that i said had members with alleged and sometimes proven ties to the PKK? Well, they also went to the election under their party banner, but for president they didn't nominate anyone, instead endorsing Kılıçdaroğlu with nothing in return. This would normally be a really admirable move in any other country, but we're in crazyland so of course dumbasses from both sides started attacking Kılıçdaroğlu for receiving their support.
See, the reason they supported him with no strings attached was because of their hate of erdog. During the so called "peace process" they negotiated directly with terrorists instead of elected representatives, and after it blew up they tried to shift the entire blame onto HDP and its voterbase, imprisoning its leading figures with their leader imprisoned to this day, as well as replacing ALL southeastern mayors with their own guys by trying them with baseless terrorism charges. Now i don't think HDP is entirely blameless here, as they were part of the government near the end of the "peace process" and showed support for the process even as every other party was calling it a travesty, but it is clear that the entire blame falls squarely on the government of the time.

So you can tell that HDP and its voters

despise

erdog more than anything, and would vote for literally anyone else to get rid of him. But Turkey has an average IQ of 87, so good luck telling this to people. What erdog tried to do with his unbridled media power was then, was to try to convince the unsure voter that CHP was somehow making deals with PKK, using it's political arm which was the HDP to support him, because HDP was in an alliance with CHP and the other 5 parties i mentioned, even calling the people's alliance "table of 7" to insinuate a 7th member in the coalition which was HDP, and they were planning on building an independent Kurdistan. He even used, i don't want to say deepfake giving the bottom tier quality editing, edited videos allegedly showing PKK leaders endorsing Kılıçdaroğlu, which you have to watch to believe. (no turkish required, erdog just says he supports terrorists and kılıçdaroğlu says "lets go Turkey")

Of course, pretty much everything here is bullshit. But if your channels don't broadcast the answers of the opposition candidates, if your average voter has trigger words that make them press erdogan "just one more time" like pkk, terror, kurdistan etc. and if there is no shortage of bad actors and internet trolls to feed into this propaganda, what chance do you have as CHP? Even as HDP avoided giving them outright support as they too foresaw such a thing happening, it didn't do much to avoid this kind of unabashed and outright lying press.

And this was why i brought up the AKP-PKK dealings. AKP doesn't give a shit about dealing with terrorists. They resuscitated PKK when they were almost disbanded, and now he has HÜDA-PAR by his side which is hezbollah's political arm, and its ties are not at all disputed unlike HDP. In fact, when they were first formed they were a party that rook a hardline stance against nationalism. The conservatives of Anatolia might present themselves as nationalists, but in truth they don't give a shit about anything other than lining their pockets a little bit more and bending their ideology to fit the masses. Frankly, erdog represents them perfectly. And so, the biggest PKK advocate turned to the biggest nationalist just like that...

3- Cheating

Not much to say here. AKP cheats. A lot. Here are some from this election:
-A video of a ballot in urfa where ballot officers are voting for erdog and not letting anyone in.
-Another multiple voter. Good to remind you that these are only ones dumb enough to record themselves. There are probably many more that weren't recorded.
-Fake voters, non-existent people created specifically to vote and then be deleted off the records. Too much conflicting information on this, here's a news segment about one.
-Most importantly, changing the votes from some opposition parties to republican alliance candidates, fixing them later only thanks to the reports filed by observers, with many still not yet changed.
And so on... Sorry about the language barrier, there are still no english sources i can find on this as these just happened. Not much else to say, moving on.

4- Syrians

Well, here we are. I saved this topic for last as not only is this the most significant topic but also the one that requires the most nuance. As with the PKK, i won't go into all the details, just the parts that concern the election and internal politics. I will also not talk about how the migration and eventual settlement of these people who refuse to integrate are changing the demoghraphics of Turkey in a really scary way, as i will do so in more detail in my next post detailing what i think will happen next.

As you all know, the still ongoing Syrian Civil War and the ensuing migrant crisis started in 2013. During this period, a massive migrant flow set in going from Syria heading towards the neighbouring countries and Europe. Most of these going to middle eastern countries did so with little trouble, but going to Europe was a bigger problem. They were shot at while illegally trying to land in the Aegean islands by Greek coast guards, taken in by Hungarian authorities only to be left to stay in tents for months on end just to be turned away from the country, many other similar migrant boats were shot down similarly by Italian coast guards, and many more. What i am saying is, the EU had a real "problem" with these refugees. As it so happens, there was a country right by their doorstep run by a dictator who would not only keep the migrants from fleeing to Europe, but also keep them in its borders until they were "ready to go back". And so, the 2016 EU-Turkey Migrant Agreement was signed, offering Turkey 6 billion euros yearly in exchange for turning the country into a migrant asylum. These 6 billion euros would be used to "care for the asylum seekers".
Now, i am talking pretty unfavorably here, but at first, not many people seemed to mind. We Turks are a personable bunch, and seeing the crisis next door we were ready to help with all we could. After all, we were told that this situation was only temporary until the situation in Syria stabilized. Even the nationalists didn't bark that much, though that might be because they are less secular and more religious and all the immigrants were sunni. It was seen as a temporary situation so no one really cared about it in the beginning. It wasn't.

Now, the

official numbers

put the number of just syrian refugees at 3.7 million. And considering these are government numbers, actual estimates put it at a minimum of 9 million. Even calculating from official numbers, this means Turkey receives about 1600 euros per refugee yearly to care for refugees. 1600 euros. IF they pay at all. But you'd be surprised to know that much more is spent on refugees care. They have all the benefits of citizens except some like voting,

and then some,

like free healthcare including dental, which is not offered to citizens of Turkey. Very charitable.

Of course, erdogan wasn't treating them at a loss because he's a saint, the expenses were paid from the treasury while the EU paid the money to erdogan directly, meaning the taxpayer was paying for refugees to have more rights than they do. But also, he wanted to extend his cult of personality to the refugees. You might ask, why does this matter if they can't vote? Well, that was just a problem to be fixed for erdog. It was time to fix that little issue as well.

First we have to talk about demoghraphics. The syrians who fled the civil war are overwhelmingly sunni, conservative, uneducated adults, with only %6 of them being university graduates. Remember what i said about rural voters voting overwhelmingly for erdog? It's not that he prioritizes farming and herding policies, in fact he nearly single-handedly ended Turkey's self sustainability with dogshit loans to farmers as well as inflation making cattle ranching unprofitable. He gets more votes from rural areas because the more uneducated people vote for him. You can see where i'm going with this. Add to this the way Turkish government treated them, and the refugees absolutely LOVE erdogan. There are no polls polling syrians specifically, but pretty much anyone who says he's a syrian says he votes for erdogan. I would estimate over %90 do. So we have a situation, where supposedly temporary residents, who came into the country not even 10 years ago, can vote to keep getting benefits, at the cost of the living standarts and freedom of all Turkish citizens.

There's still a problem though, non citizens can't vote. So this should not be a problem right? We believed so anyway, and CHP officials also told us that the number of refugees illegally given citizenship were not big enough to be concerned about. Well, even one illegally given citizenship would be a concern in a legitimate country, but we are not one. So we took them at their word, even as tons of images were being circulated showing apartments full of voters with arabic names, far more commonly than would be earned legitimately. And then, of course, the day of election came and went with a huge vote difference. But the bigger issue was, all the polling companies had been wronged, even the ones with a reputation for consistently knowing election results correctly. And one thing they all had in common was that they didn't poll syrians.

Getting to the point, you can become a naturalized citizen if you live in the country for more than 5 years and pass some requirements for citizenship. What is suspected however, is that the ministry of the interior is selling citizenship at essentially no cost to people through illegal means, not checking to see if they passed the 5 year living and other standarts. Of course, since our opposition is chickenshit and lazy, these only remain as rumors, but strong rumors nonetheless. As for syrians who became naturalized legitimately, our minister of the interior says only 196000 syrians have become naturalized.... which makes no sense when you consider that around 9 million (3.7 million by official numbers) syrians live in Turkey, and the numbers been about 3 million since 2013, so these people have been living in Turkey for over 10 years and they didn't apply for citizenship?

Sadly, since AKP holds all the ministries, when it comes to this they can reveal whatever number they feel like revealing and we can't do anything about it. I can only say my suspicions, leave my sources and let you come to a conclusion on your own.

This took longer to type out than i anticipated, especially as my arms still in a sling and it's hard to type and research all this out with just one hand, but hopefully i could give a, even if really really biased in favor of opposition, a pretty concise idea of where we're at as Turkey right now.

I also tried being as factual as possible as there are some heavy accusations that i make here. I am aware that some sources are pretty shoddy, i will be working on updating them to be from more legitimate sources in the following days, and i would be more than happy to answer your questions on topics you feel i have not adequately explained or provided proper sources on.

Election's tomorrow, i'll post more about what i think the future holds tomorrow before the results come in, and after. İyi geceler

[Donempire]

Just voted. Now it's time to wait and see what our people decide. I ask that you keep Turkey in your prayers

[Donempire]

And first cheating videos already surfaced. Thanks urfa.

[Donempire]

Good luck with your candidates.
I don’t know much more about Turkey than what you’ve already written. But i definitely think the world doesn’t need any more "strong" ultra-conservative men leaders.

Thank you.

Kılıçdaroğlu, the opposition to erdog is not perfect by any means. Ask pretty much anyone and he'll tell you something he fucked up during the process, but he did manage to unite pretty much every view barring extreme-far right views under him. The reason why is he promises to go back to a parliament focused government instead of overloading the president with incalculable powers. In the 2017 referendum the people voted to change to a system that gave the president the power to declare a state of emergency, bypass congress to make laws, place him on top of everyone else in the chain of command, and many, many more. That was in 2017, and the results of this change are clear.

After the earthquakes, where more than 50000 people died (200.000 is the minimum realistic estimate) thanks to the governors not checking buildings to see if they conformed to building regulations, emergency response units not responding adequately enough, roads and infrastructure crumbling thanks to a similar corner-cutting ideology while building them, mobile service providers cutting off connections when they were most necessary, and on and on and on, do you know how many people resigned?

0.

They couldn't even resign without erdogan approving it first.

Kılıçdaroğlu promises to change that, and that is enough.

[Donempire]

we lost

it's over