Opposition struggles for air time ahead of presidential poll

Sunday will be a landmark occasion with the Turkish electorate going to the polls for the very first time to directly elect their president. But what should be a historical moment has the feel of a very damp squib. It is not that the result is unimportant; the poll is a contest not just between competing ideas but three different approaches to how the power of the executive should be used. The trouble is that what should be a bold experiment in popular democracy doesn’t feel democratic at all.
 
Part of the problem is that the front running candidate makes unashamed use of his power and resources as the sitting prime minister. The building-sized portraits of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan plastered everywhere give a city like Istanbul the feel of Baghdad under Saddam Hussein.  More serious still is that much of the Turkish media remains embarrassingly compliant under the government’s thumb.  While this may be unconscionable for privately-owned media, so great an imbalance in publicly-owned state media is an open abuse of power.
 
The Turkish on-line edition of the Wall Street Journal has totted up the figures. For the month of July, the public broadcaster televised 1,158 stories about the prime minister, totalling 312, 478 seconds. Erdoğan’s principal challenger Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu  was the subject of a mere 554 stories, totalling 138,026 seconds. Even more appalling is that TRT, funded through the tax payers’ lira, came at the bottom of the league.  When the leader of the National Action Party (MHP) who supports  İhsanoğlu’s candidacy remonstrated of this imbalance on air, TRT actually suspended the live broadcast.
 
TRT actually devoted less time to the views of Erdoğan’s chief contender than the television news channel, A Haber – head shark in one is commonly referred to as the “pool media” of government cheerleaders (although the assumption must be that this coverage was not entirely objective). TRT which has the luxury of a secure source of funding should be the pacemaker in embarrassing the private stations to abandon their bias. Instead of acting as a public service institution it goes out of its way to encourage one sided-reporting.
 
Consider the coverage of the third candidate, Selahattin Demirtaş. It is not a difficult job because there wasn’t any at all on TRT during the entire month of July. The director general of TRT, İbrahim Şahin angrily dismissed Demirtaş’s complaints as sour grapes, a pretext for the fact that he was going to lose anyway.
 
The naked bias in media coverage is just one of the means that the government is using the power of the incumbency to pump up its candidate.  The OSCE has already made public its concerns that the Erdoğan campaign has made improper use of public resources – for example the Ramadan break-fast meals funded by municipalities as electioneering opportunities.  Not all of these efforts have worked. In the race to get the Ankara top spot, Erdogan inaugurated a new high speed train from Istanbul to the capital, hoping to make do some whistle-stop campaigns on the way. Somehow, the pro-government press failed to mention that the train broke down on this maiden run .
 
Were Sunday’s contest to be fought in a truly democratic spirit then we might have expected the media to be clamouring for a series of live debates between candidates so that the public would have had a more informed basis  of comparison. To their credit, private broadcasters like CNN Türk have offered to host just such an encounter and both of the prime minister’s  opponents said they welcomed the chance. Practically speaking Erdoğan has nothing to gain from accepting to debate and possibly much to lose. Yet the public have a right to hear the candidates confront one another in a moderated discussion. Had TRT joined the chorus it would have been hard for the prime minister to resist.
 
However, instead of helping the public to make up their minds,  TRT appears bent on making voters’ minds up for them.