Erdogan on track to win again

Nationalist reactionaries continue to perform better than one would hope:

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won reelection Sunday, the national election board said, surviving a challenge from a candidate backed by a united opposition movement and ensuring that the president’s dominating and divisive tenure at Turkey’s helm would extend into a third decade.

Erdogan garnered 52 percent of the vote, the election board’s chairman said, giving the president a four-point victory over his opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, in a result that affirmed Erdogan’s gift for political survival and his uncontested control over the levers of state. Facing an electorate bludgeoned by a long economic crisis — largely of the president’s making — Erdogan shifted the public conversation to debates over terrorism and national sovereignty, outflanking Kilicdaroglu, who emphasized pocketbook issues and the president’s increasingly authoritarian practices.

Erdogan’s victory highlighted the power of his most loyal supporters, many of them conservative Muslims, as a pivotal and enduring force in the country’s politics. And it left the opposition wondering what might have been had they chosen a candidate more charismatic than the 74-year-old Kilicdaroglu — a bespectacled party bureaucrat who adopted more hard-line rhetoric in the last weeks of his campaign in an unsuccessful bid to attract nationalist voters.

He’ll always have one particular reactionary ready to do his billing:

“I’m a free speech absolutist (unless it will cost me business in an authoritarian country).” pic.twitter.com/keUA0wj4q1— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) May 28, 2023

You might be an authoritarian when you think it’s self evident that your social media company should comply with a political censorship regime than simply not do business in that country.Time for another round of the TWITTER FILES!