And not just because Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was close to victory in the first round, with just half a percent of the votes short of winning outright, and the second round was expected to be a very tough race as well. What is important is this election was truly momentous for Türkiye and the entire Turkic world. And the verdict of Turkish voters—the victory of incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—really opens a new page of Turkish, and not only Turkish, history.
Obviously, the cries of “dictatorship” and “authoritarianism” are better saved for a less discerning and less knowledgeable audience. In a real dictatorship, they do not call a second round of elections when the incumbent head of state lacks only half a percent of the votes to win the election in the first one. And the phrase “this election is a victory of Turkish democracy” is more than pretty words.
It is even more obvious that Erdoğan’s victory is a victory of the Azerbaijan-Türkiye unity, of “one nation, two states, one fist”.
It is understandable why the Azerbaijani public favored the current head of the Turkish state. People in Azerbaijan associate Erdoğan’s name with the signing of the Shusha Declaration, the deliveries of the legendary Bayraktar UAVs and other weapons. Moreover, we remember Türkiye’s principled and tough stance during the 44-day war.
All the more understandable is the verdict of Turkish voters. Türkiye has changed indeed over the years of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s leadership. If 20 years ago the country was completely dependent on arms imports, today NATO allies, and not only NATO allies, are queuing up for Bayraktars, Kizilelma and Akinci are taking to the air, the world’s first drone carrier ship has been launched. Work on its fifth-generation fighter and the Altai tank is progressing successfully. The Turkish and Azerbaijani armies are already equipped with SOM missiles, multiple rocket launchers, armored vehicles…
But most importantly, Türkiye has ceased to be an obedient satellite of the West and started to make its own decisions and conduct its own foreign policy. It was probably to be expected that there would be those who would want to “put it in its place” and stop this dangerous trend of strengthening Turkish statehood, Turanism and pan-Turkic unity. That is why Erdoğan’s election rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu enjoyed such undivided support from foreign media that are far from friendly to Türkiye. One can only guess what “service fees” those Western circles would have demanded from him if he had won. That is why the “anti-Erdoğan” coalition even included representatives of the legal wing of the PKK. And that is why Kılıçdaroğlu’s victory threatened to turn Türkiye into a second Syria or a second Iraq. He was stirring up too much internal tension by trying to unite under his banner radical leftists, radical Islamists and Kurdish separatists. He gathered too mixed a variety of forces in his camp. That coalition could not have been viable by definition. And what would have happened to the country … unfortunately, we all had the chance to see that in the early nineties. Not to mention that Kılıçdaroğlu generously gave promises that he could not and did not intend to keep in the first place.
However, it is worth addressing one of his promises in particular: the plan to build a railroad through the territory of Iran bypassing Azerbaijan. Experts and social media users are already making lists of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s missteps. He had not bothered to visit Azerbaijan when getting ready for the elections. And his proposed railroad map left no more doubts.
However, “bye-bye Bay Kemal” did not seem to expect that this road would carry him away from the victory in the elections at the speed of an express train. That, despite all the stock of protest voters and aggressive agitation, Turkish voters would cast their votes for an alliance with Azerbaijan, for the idea of Turan, for Türkiye’s real independence, against imperialism, against turning their country into a tool of someone else’s politics and against internal confrontation. This is a different Türkiye. And Kılıçdaroğlu’s failure to understand it does not change the reality.
