Turkish elections free… but fair?

There is an election pending in Turkey. It is impossible to go anywhere in the city of Istanbul without confronting billboard after billboard bearing the smiling face of the prime minister, boasting of his party’s achievements. “They talk, the AK Party does” is the caption beneath assertions that Turkey is building a home-grown fighter jet, third airports, and will rank as one of the world’s 10 largest economies.
 
Far be it for P24 to cough politely and question not just the merits of some of these accomplishments but even the veracity of what is being claimed. When last we looked Turkey, measured in terms of GDP, was the 17th largest in the world, and not climbing the ladder quickly. 
 
A more determined threat to unfettered debate comes from the prosecutor’s office’s request to the Turkish Satellite Communications Company (TÜRKSAT) Directorate General not to rebroadcast television stations of which it disapproves. These include Bugün TV and Samanyolu TV — associated with the followers of the preacher Fethullah Gülen. These stations supported the government at the previous elections but are now bitterly opposed.
 
“If the prohibition goes ahead, it would deal a devastating blow to media freedom and diversity in Turkey. Many commentators are criticizing the paranoia that the government is displaying towards the country’s leading media groups and accuse it of trying to silence the free press,” according to the media rights group, Reporters Without Borders.  
 
The organisation accuses the Turkish government of specifically trying to gag independent media ahead of the election.
 
So far the request has not been granted; and there are indications that the Turkish foreign ministry at least is aware that arbitrary legal fiat to ban critical media just before an election is not an example of putting Turkey’s best foot forward. “This is against the rule of law and against the freedom of expression,” Mevlut Cavuşoğlu, the Turkish foreign minister said– to his credit.
 
Indeed, it staggers the imagination that a government that has so successfully instigated a regime of self-censorship should need to engage in pro-active censorship.  P24 has reliably heard that OSCE monitors of the Turkish election process will protest the one-sided coverage on Turkish television.  
 
Indeed, perhaps the real problem with the Turkish elections is who is allowed to talk and who is not. State broadcaster TRT even stopped an exclusive interview with the economy minister Nihat Zeybekci within the first minute, to give more airtime to the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The president is constitutionally meant to be above politics but has managed to turn the election into being all about him.
 
A nation cringed at the excessive sycophancy of the interviewer Mehmet Barlas on a late night interview on a television station owned by the consortium building the third Istanbul airport of which the campaign posters are so proud.  Among the softball questions Barlas asked where ones which allowed the president to attack yet another newspaper – Hürriyet.
 
Mr Erdoğan’s vendetta with that paper has reached a point where prosecutors have now filed a criminal complaint against the editors because of a headline saying that ex-president Morsi faces the death penalty despite being elected with 52 per cent of the vote (the same percentage received by the Turkish president). “Not only is the accusation distorted and absurd; it is a slap at the idea that Turkey is still a democracy,” according to a recent New York Times editorial.
 
The popular consensus is that the key issue at this election is whether the Kurdish nationalist HDP can cross the ten per cent threshold that would allow it into parliament at the possible expense of a government majority. By mid-April from the start of the campaign, the HDP had received just 15 minutes worth of election coverage compared to the 80 minutes for the ruling Justice and Development Party leader Ahmed Davutoğlu.
 
The state broadcaster is guilty of flagrant bias and creating a “toxic climate” according to the RWB statement. And this does not even take into account the wide-scale coverage of the crypto-campaign being waged for the AK Party by a president who is constitutionally above-party but who now tours the country at taxpayers’ expense. The irony of the “take-down” request to TÜRKSAT is that it comes from the Bureau for Crimes against the Constitutional Order.
 
Under more normal circumstances we might have been writing to lament the lacklustre nature of the campaign and in particular the absence of any direct debate between the leaders of the top four political parties. A ruling party, which has become expert in spin and controlling the flow of information has no incentive to engage in a real, unpredictable discussions.
 
So instead we write to lament the paucity of any debate at all. Turkey will vote on 7 June for elections that may just be free, but which almost certainly will not be fair.

Tags: erdoğan, mehmet barlas, p24, turkey, turksat