Erdogan announces that presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for November 2019 will be held in 66 days. Bear with me as I will explain why he is rushing. turkey.theglobepost.com/erdogan-bahcel…
Erdogan's biggest strength was to rally nationalist votes few months before each elections. It happened right before 2011 and his party won in landslide. He started Kurdish peace process and hence lost the election in June 2015.
His party refused to form a coalition government, ended the Kurdish peace process and won in snap elections in November that year.
Nationalist votes are kingmaker in Erdogan's electoral calculations. Erdogan has always been successful in stealing nationalist votes because nationalist party has a weak leader -- Devlet Bahceli.
In 2016, Devlet Bahceli (usually acrid Erdogan opponent) was challenged by a charismatic woman named @meral_aksener, who fared much better than the incumbent party leader in every poll and posed a great challenge to Erdogan's political future.
Erdogan had deployed every trick in the book to undermine Merak Aksener's rise, engineering legal battles, refusing venues for meetings and defaming her in the media. It worked. And Bahceli became Erdogan's pawn since then. A co-opted "opposition" leader.
Meral Aksener then founded the @iyiparti, which could have potentially challenge Erdogan in November 2019 elections. Here is how Erdogan prevented that too.
Erdogan's single most important achievement in his 15-year-rule is building a robust economy and weathering global economic crises. This has started to fall apart in the past 2 years.
With elections in his mind, Erdogan pressured the Central Bank to keep interest rates low (to spur economic growth) and employment high (the most effective voting factor).
He started a massively popular military campaign in Afrin, a great way to rally nationalist votes. Everything is ready to go. But how to blunt Meral Aksener's party in elections?
Today, Erdogan decided to hold snap elections on June 24.
Legally, Aksener's party can't run in elections until June 28.
As almost every political Islamist leader, the primary source of legitimacy for Erdogan is elections. He keeps pointing to popular vote when challenged. Barring his challenger from elections may hurt his legitimacy.
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