It was the best opposition performance since the late 1970s

( Globalvoices.org ) – Turkey’s local elections which took place on March 31, will go down in history as one of its most surprising. Turkey’s demoralized opposition, namely the [secular] Republican People’s Party (CHP), dominated in what many pundits described as the ruling [center-right] Justice and Development Party’s worst defeat of its 22-year existence. For the first time since 1977, the CHP took more votes nationwide. In his televised address afterward, the CHP leader Özgür Özel called the elections “historic” as he teared up. Scores of supporters took to the streets to celebrate the results across Turkey.

Istanbul, where CHP secured victory in 2019, was one of the key cities in this year’s race. At the time, losing control over the municipality in Istanbul was described as a major blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development party (AKP), as it was where he started his political career when he was elected mayor in 1994. The results of yesterday’s election nationwide cemented this rejoinder on Erdoğan’s agenda.

In the capital, Ankara, the CHP’s incumbent mayor, Mansur Yavaş, outdid his rival by over 28 percent. In Turkey’s third-largest city, Izmir, opposition candidate Cemil Tugar finished 11 points ahead of the ruling party’s candidate.

Elsewhere across the country, as the results were trickling in, the map was slowly turning red as many of the provinces previously led by the AKP were showing victories for the opposition party candidates.

According to Gönül Tol, Director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkish Program, the change was “notable,” as “opposition CHP [was] not confined to coastal regions but expanding into Anatolia, the conservative/nationalist heartland of the country.”

In total, the opposition won in 35 out of 81 provinces. The rest of the provinces were split between AKP (24 provinces), the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM, 10 provinces), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP, 8 provinces), the New Welfare Party (two provinces), and Iyi Party (Good Party, one province). With some six million eligible voters, the turnout at the time of writing this story was estimated at more than 78 percent across the country’s 81 provinces, with almost all ballots counted. In previous municipal elections, the turnout was 84.5 percent. In Turkey, the voter turnout has always been high ranging between 70 and 90 percent throughout the years.

This victory also reversed political tides ahead of the next general elections scheduled for 2028. There were hints the AKP would be making constitutional changes which could allow incumbent President Erdoğan to stay in power, despite earlier promises these elections would be his last.

While the president cannot legally run in the next presidential race in 2028, according to Turkey’s Constitution, there are two scenarios in which this can change. In the first scenario, Erdoğan and the AKP would need to secure 400 votes in the parliament to change the constitution. Turkey’s parliament, the Grand National Assembly, consists of 600 seats. At the moment, the AKP and its main ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), hold 313 seats. Thus, pushing for a constitutional amendment with a parliamentary vote would largely depend on whether the ruling party and President can secure the support of other political party representatives.

In the second scenario, the parliament can call for an early election. But even in this scenario, 360 parliamentary votes are needed.

With election results in, these plans will likely be put on hold.

While still low, the number of women mayors also increased, rising from four to 11. In Bilecik, a provincial capital of Turkey’s Bilecik Province, in northwestern Anatolia, Melek Mızrak Subaşı who was likened to Daenerys Targaryen, the fictional character in George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire — which was later made into the HBO blockbuster Game of Thrones series, also secured victory.

The elections also saw instances of violence. At least one person was killed and 11 injured in the city of Diyarbakir, and at least sixteen were injured in the province of Sanliurfa, according to media reports.

Critiques against Erdoğan

As results started to trickle in, one of the widely discussed questions was what kind of election results Turkey would see had it been a different opposition candidate running against President Erdoğan.

The local election results also illustrated that the dynamics between the local and general elections were different. Turkey’s ongoing economic crisis, wherein the country’s currency lost 40 percent of its value since last year and over 80 percent in the last five years, did matter, and the voters placed the blame on the ruling government in the local elections. In an interview with Reuters, Hakan Akbaş, a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group, said, “The economy was the decisive factor. Turkish people demanded change and İmamoğlu is now the default nemesis to President Erdoğan.”

Another surprising result came from the Yeniden Refah (the New Welfare Party), a religious-conservative party which pundits speculated could divide the AKP’s votes among conservative and religious voters disillusioned by Erdoğan’s economic choices. It came third in the race after the ruling AKP secured over  six percent of votes.

In his balcony speech delivered past midnight, Erdoğan adopted a less divisive tone than usual, expressing his gratitude to all of his party candidates as well as the people. He also said the party would fix mistakes ahead of the 2028 general elections. Unlike in previous municipal elections in 2019, the ruling party also did not contest election results, with Erdoğan, saying he and his party accept the people’s decision. In 2019, after the CHP’s Ekrem İmamoğlu won against the AKP’s Binali Yıldırım, the latter objected to the results. In the re-run, İmamoğlu won with an even higher margin — some 860,000 votes versus 13,700 votes.

In securing his re-election, İmamoğlu now has a clear shot at becoming the next leader of the opposition CHP as well as a likely candidate in the next presidential race. According to Sinan Ülgen, director of the Istanbul-based Edam think tank, “This outcome has certainly been a watershed for İmamoğlu. He will emerge as the natural candidate of the opposition for the next round of presidential elections.” Whether İmamoğlu will succeed remains to be seen, especially as the popular Istanbul Mayor is still facing a charge over allegedly insulting public officials in a speech he made after he won Istanbul’s municipal election in 2019. The higher appeals court must uphold the verdict, but until then, İmamoğlu remains Istanbul’s mayor.

Also important to note is that these elections were free but not fair. Ahead of the vote, Erdoğan relied heavily on his presidential powers as well as the government institutions and media. In a country where 90 percent of traditional media is controlled by the government, it was not surprising to see that much of the air time was devoted to the ruling party and its candidates. There was plenty of disinformation, as was the case during the general elections last year. In December 2023, the Information Technologies and Communications Authority (BTK), Turkey’s top telecommunications watchdog, imposed an access ban on 16 VPN providers. The country has also witnessed a backsliding on human rights, democracy, judicial independence, and the rule of law.

Featured image: Tons of CHP supporters took to the streets after their surprise victory in Turkey’s election. Collage by Arzu Geybullayeva.

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

Via Globalvoices.org

Election districts that do a terrible job identifying their voters expose their state to problems far beyond a few votes by individuals with impossible ages. Consider that in 2020 New York voters with no personally identifiable information (PII – Social Security or driver’s license numbers) in the voter database cast nearly as many ballots as Joe Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump—more than 1.8 million votes.

Before anyone claims this is the smoking gun that proves massive voter fraud, let me assure you that no one has brought forth legally admissible proof of voter fraud sufficient to change any state election result in 2020. And I should know. I was hired by the Trump campaign to look for voter fraud in the days after that election.

These impossibly old voters and voters who lack PII represent sloppy computer systems and reveal a lack of statewide standards for how New York’s counties operate their elections. With birthdates of 1800, 1850, and 1900, those overly-aged New York voters have placeholder dates of birth, put there because election workers didn’t know the actual date. New York election officials should have flagged these voters as problematic, researched them, and either fixed the data or removed them from the rolls. These issues impact the overall integrity (and perception of integrity) of New York’s election systems and interfere with election officials’ ability to maintain the voter rolls properly.

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This is a bipartisan issue in New York. Forty-nine percent of all registered voters in the state are Democrats, while about 22 percent are Republicans. When it comes to voters who lack PII, 49 percent are Democrats and 29 percent are Republicans.

The lack of PII carries serious consequences. Not being able to sort the dead from the living via PII and valid birth dates is a monumental problem that leads to bloated voter rolls. Bloated voter rolls artificially lower election turnout percentages, waste the time and money of campaigns trying to reach voters who may no longer exist, and open the door to mischief—or worse.

It also leads to 118-year-old voters. There are obvious problems with this extraordinary bit of longevity and civic duty beyond the fact that the oldest human being still alive is 116. And yet, New York has 3,595 registrants older than 118 years (based on their recorded date of birth). Votes were cast by 269 of these registrants in 2022, and 368 of them voted in 2020. As you might have guessed, 3,474 lack PII.

But the problem is deeper than voting by the immortal elderly. Almost 1.2 million registrants have no votes recorded in the data file and have been registered to vote in New York for at least 20 years. Of these, more than 800,000 do not have PII. Many of these registrants are most likely deceased and fell through the cracks. They should have been purged from the rolls long ago. If they had, New York’s 2020 voter turnout would have improved from roughly 70 to 78 percent. Sadly, this has gone on for so long that election officials cannot uniquely identify these voters without expensive data analytics.

It gets worse. More than 3 million registrants are currently on the rolls without PII, according to data from a 2022 Freedom of Information inquiry. Of those, more than 1.8 million voted in 2020, and 1.4 million voted in 2022. Many of these date from 1989, before the federal law requiring voters to present PII when being registered. Despite the passage of the law requiring PII, New York continues to enroll voters it can’t uniquely identify. The state should backfill the missing PII for as many voters as possible.

Part of the reason for this mess is the lack of having one central state elections hub. Instead, New York’s counties are responsible for administering elections, which leads to chaos when the counties do things differently. In the 2020 election, New York counties identified votes in ten different ways. Inconsistency is the enemy of integrity.

Why is there no statewide standard for recording votes the same way by every county? This is a seemingly simple thing to implement and enforce. One might wonder about other ways New York’s counties administer their elections differently.

To show I bear no ill will towards New York, New Jersey has nearly 25,000 impossibly old voters, almost 8,000 of whom cast votes in 2020.

Our election infrastructure is a mission-critical component of our governance. The data that underpins that infrastructure should be sound. An election system that cannot uniquely identify its registrants as severely as New York’s should be unacceptable to everyone.

( RFE/ RL ) – Iran’s parliamentary elections on March 1 witnessed a historically low turnout, in a blow to the legitimacy of the clerical establishment.

The official turnout of 41 percent was the lowest for legislative elections since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Critics claim the real turnout was likely even lower.

Hard-liners dominated the elections for the parliament and the Assembly of Experts, a body that picks the country’s supreme leader, consolidating their grip on power. Many reformists and moderates were barred from contesting the polls.

Experts said the declining turnout signifies the growing chasm between the ruling clerics and Iran’s young population, many of whom are demanding greater social and political freedoms in the Middle Eastern nation of some 88 million.

“These elections proved that the overriding imperative for the Islamic republic is strengthening ideological conformity at the top, even at the cost of losing even more of its legitimacy from below,” said Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group.

‘Widening Divide’

Observers said disillusionment with the state has been building up for years and is reflected in the declining voter turnout in recent elections.

Turnout in presidential and parliamentary elections were consistently above 50 percent for decades. But the numbers have declined since 2020, when around 42 percent of voters cast ballots in the parliamentary elections that year. In the 2021 presidential vote, turnout was below 49 percent.

Ali Ansari, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews, puts that down to growing “despondency” in the country.

This is “the clearest indication of the widening divide between state and society, which has been growing over the years,” said Ansari.

“It is quite clear that the despondency is extending even to those who are generally sympathetic to the regime,” he added, referring to reformist former President Mohammad Khatami choosing not to vote in the March 1 elections.

Voter apathy was particularly evident in the capital, Tehran, which has the most representatives in the 290-seat parliament. In Tehran, only 1.8 million of the 7.7 million eligible voters — or some 24 percent — cast their votes on March 1, according to official figures.

Up to 400,000 invalid ballots — many believed to be blank — were cast in Tehran alone, a sign of voter discontent.

AP Archives Video: “Iran begins voting in first parliament election since 2022 protests amid questions over turnout”

Ahead of the elections, nearly 300 activists in Iran had called on the public to boycott the “engineered” elections.

Beyond Boycott

The March 1 elections were the first since the unprecedented anti-establishment protests that rocked the country in 2022.

The monthslong demonstrations, triggered by the death in custody of a young woman arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law, snowballed into one of the most sustained demonstrations against Iran’s theocracy. At least 500 protesters were killed and thousands were detained in the state’s brutal crackdown on the protests.

Iran has been the scene of several bursts of deadly anti-establishment protests since the disputed presidential election in 2009. Many of the demonstrations have been over state repression and economic mismanagement.

But experts said that the 2022 protests alone did not result in the record-low turnout in the recent elections.

“This is a reflection of a deeper malaise that extends back to 2009 and traverses through 2017, 2019, and 2022,” Ansari said. “It has been building for some time.”

Despite the historically low turnout, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised the “epic” participation of the public. State-run media, meanwhile, spun the elections as a victory over those who called for a boycott.

By claiming victory, the clerical establishment “overlooks the growing absence of support from 60 percent of its population,” said Vaez.

“Such self-approbation [mirrors] the regime’s previous dismissal of the 2022 protests as the result of foreign intrigue rather than reflection of deep discontent,” he said, adding that it represents the Islamic republic’s “continuation of ignoring simmering public discontent.”

Hard-Line Dominance

Around 40 moderates won seats in the new parliament. But the legislature will remain dominated by hard-liners.

The elections were largely seen as a contest between conservatives and ultraconservatives.

“We can say that a more hotheaded and previously marginal wing of the hard-liners scored a victory against more established conservatives,” said Arash Azizi, a senior lecturer in history and political science at Clemson University in South Carolina.

“This is because the former had a more fired-up base and in the absence of popular participation were able to shape the results,” he added.

A more hard-line parliament could have more bark but “certainly” not more bite than its predecessors, according to Vaez.

“The parliament is subservient to the supreme leader and rubber stamps the deep state’s strategic decisions, even if grudgingly,” he added.

Since the ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi, a close ally of Khamenei, was elected as president in 2021, Iran’s hard-liners have dominated all three branches of the government, including the parliament and judiciary.

Other key institutions like the Assembly of Experts and the powerful Guardians Council, which vets all election candidates, are also dominated by hard-liners.

“There is not much left of the system’s republican features,” Vaez said. “The Islamic republic is now a minority-ruled unconstitutional theocracy.”

RFE/ RL

(The Conversation) – The months since Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, have been excruciating ones for Israeli peace activists. As the country rallies behind the war effort, critics have been arrested and condemned by opponents who say the attacks proved how misguided the peace movement is.

But in activists’ eyes, the horrific violence of Oct. 7 and Israel’s sweeping military response only prove its urgency. Vivian Silver, who spent a decade leading Women Wage Peace – a solidarity group of Israelis and Palestinians – was one of several peace activists murdered that day. “If we want a future here, we have to make the conflict a thing of the past,” her son Yonatan Zeigen wrote in an op-ed after her death.

For some activists, in other words, Oct. 7 only underscored the urgency of their cause. Yet the peace movement has always been diverse and often fragmented. In reality, there are multiple movements, each with its own definition of peace. As a scholar of religion, ethics and politics, I have traced how divergent accounts of Israel’s founding connect to different visions of justice.

The ‘peace camp’

The Israeli demographics most associated with the “peace camp” are predominately Ashkenazi Jews, meaning they are descended from communities in Central and Eastern Europe. They also tend to be secular, meaning they do not closely observe traditional Jewish religious law.

Even within this larger camp, however, there are divergent perceptions of justice, shaped by how people understand the root causes of the conflict. Did it truly start in 1917, when a British lord promised a home for Jews? In 1948, with Israel’s War of Independence – which Palestinians experienced as the Nakba, their “catastrophe”? Or is the most important date 1967, when Israel occupied the Golan Heights, east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?

For the most part, this “peace camp” believes “Israel proper” consists of land within the “Green Line,” set by the armistice agreements at the end of the 1948 war. The Green Line does not include the territories Israel has occupied since the end of the 1967 war, which most of the peace camp considers a morally wrong occupation.

More broadly, their vision is grounded in preserving Israel as a democracy with a Jewish majority. This necessitates the creation of a sovereign Palestinian nation-state in the occupied territories.

Owen Jones Video: “This Israeli Peace Activist Must Be Heard – w/ Dana Mills”

A prominent example of a secular group accepting the Green Line as a peace premise is the once-robust Peace Now movement, created in 1978 by Israeli veterans. They argue, using human rights and international law, that a permanent occupation will threaten the character of Israel as a Jewish democracy.

… and its dissenters

Ever since the early days of Zionism, however, other Jews have challenged the movement’s basic objective of creating a Jewish-majority state, given the reality that other groups of people, in addition to Jews, already lived in historic Palestine. For example, the group Brit Shalom, established in 1926 by European Jewish intellectuals, envisioned a binational state that would include equality for non-Jewish Palestinian communities.

In Brit Shalom’s view, a commitment to democratic principles contradicted ambitions for creating a majoritarian Jewish state, which they predicted would depend on driving out Palestinians and preventing their return.

Other contemporary secular groups that are mostly made up of Jewish Israelis also oppose the Green Line as a basis for peace building. Zochrot, for example, emphasizes the Nakba of 1948 as a root cause of the conflict. Therefore, they advocate for Palestinian refugees’ right of return, which is central to Palestinians’ own conceptions of justice.

Other critics of the mainstream peace movement have criticized it for ignoring the social justice struggles of non-Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis, such as Arab Jews or “Mizrahim” and Ethiopian Jews, or connecting those issues with Palestinians’ experience.

Palestinian voices

The continuous expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank has eroded the Green Line as the basis for peace. This de facto annexation, as many analysts call it, makes it increasingly unlikely that “peace” could mean most Israelis living within the line and most Palestinians outside it.

Yet with the erosion of the Green Line, various organizations are reemphasizing a binational vision of a single state, or two states joined in a confederation. Compared with the “mainstream” peace camp, some of these groups have more Palestinian representation, coming mostly from Palestinian citizens of Israel.

A Land for All: Two States One Homeland, known as ALFA, was formed in 2012 and is co-led by Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. In events after Oct. 7, members grappled with their grief by resolving to imagine a political future together.

ALFA’s foundational assumption is that “both people belong in the whole land.” While it believes that, realistically, Jewish settlers will remain in the territories occupied in 1967, it envisions them becoming Israeli residents of a future State of Palestine – one half of a larger confederation with the state of Israel.

Similarly, the organization Standing Together sent two representatives – one Jewish Israeli, one Palestinian Israeli – to the United States together to hold events with the message that “both Jewish people and Palestinians are going to stay on this land. No one is going anywhere.”

Notably, the Palestinian members of groups seeking Palestinian-Israeli dialogues tend to be Israeli citizens from within the Green Line, with a few exceptions, such as Combatants for Peace – a group of Palestinians and Jews committed to nonviolence but made up of former fighters.

However, after decades of “peace process,” many Palestinians interpret coexistence initiatives as a form of normalizing the occupation.

The Faithful Left

The tension between Israel’s Jewish and democratic identities has been present since before the state’s founding. Under the current hard-line government, however, critics fear the state has been relinquishing the democratic part in favor of Jewish supremacy.

Religious politicians have been some of the most visible advocates for measures that decrease the likelihood of a contiguous Palestinian sovereign state, such as by constructing new settlements. Yet the current right-wing coalition has provided an impetus for more Israelis who are observant Jews to join peace efforts: the “Faithful Left,” or Smol Emuni in Hebrew.

The movement was born when hundreds showed up to a Jerusalem conference in January 2023, discussing their discomfort with how Jewish tradition was being used politically, and a second conference was held in February 2024. Because many of the Faithful Left are products of religious Zionist schools, their key advantage within the peace movement is the ability to challenge arguments for annexation or domination on religious grounds.

Older groups such as Rabbis for Human Rights, whose members range from humanist to Orthodox, have also drawn on religious ideas for decades.

Some activists within the Faithful Left have also been a part of Bnei Avraham, a group that shows solidarity with Palestinians by building relationships in the West Bank – specifically Hebron, where Palestinians routinely experience violence and harassment.

Secular anti-occupation groups such as Ta’ayush take this idea one step further by trying to provide in-person protection against violence. For example, Ta’ayush activists walk kids to school or accompany Palestinian shepherds as a buffer to prevent harassment.

The erosion of the Green Line has challenged many peace groups’ visions for peace and justice, as diverse as those are. Even more fundamentally, it has reopened the question of what it means for Israel to be Jewish and democratic – a question at the heart of Israeli peace activists’ challenges today.

Atalia Omer, Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

An effective criticism of social and political woes by public intellectuals might get the attention of some segments of the public, especially those who might be labeled “politically aware”—individuals who regularly follow the news and crises of the day. But there is more to being a public intellectual than becoming a gadfly gnawing on the pestiferous hide of the establishment. Eloquently depicting misdirection, mismanagement, and overweening ambitions among the political class can be motivating but often prove insufficient. Worse yet, it could become a self-defeating enterprise when these criticisms lead to public despair and political alienation. It is akin to the proverbial heralding that “the emperor has no clothes,” with the added twist that no tailor can sew one either. When others pile on, we get closer to a political black hole.

Churning out critical essays and commentaries should not be the end but an inducement to search for remedies. What utility do such analyses offer if their message only intimates a rotten and entrenched status quo immune to change and improvements?

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The public intellectual must go beyond criticism of the unsatisfactory status quo and policies by inspiring a sense of optimism in the public’s mind about change and reform and suggesting how they might be achieved. How can this be done responsibly?

Paul Romer, a Nobel laureate in Economics (2018), distinguishes complacent optimism from contingent optimism (he calls it  “conditional optimism”; I prefer contingent optimism to  accentuate the difference with complacent optimism) by giving an example of each: “Complacent optimism is the feeling of a child waiting for presents. “Contingent optimism “ is the feeling of a child who is thinking about building a treehouse. ‘If I get some wood and nails and persuade some other kids to help do the work, we can end up with something really cool.” In the first case (complacent optimism), the child is passive, awaiting a present with earnest expectation. In the second case (contingent optimism), the child lays out a plan to make her wish a reality. The optimism of the first child is wholly dependent on the largesse of others; she makes herself the object of her expectations. The optimism of the second child is born of her agency to identify and secure the resources she needs to build her treehouse.

Contingent optimism begins by taking stock of the challenge. Once the problem is defined, you search for credible solutions to change the situation in the desired direction. In other words, contingent optimism makes the reason for developing an optimistic outlook contingent on working out a strategy of change that makes it likely to achieve the outcomes one seeks. It is the careful mapping out of a plan that justifies feeling optimistic about change. That optimism is contingent on having correctly defined the problem and potential solutions.

We should expect contingent optimism from public intellectuals, not despair. They are uniquely equipped and positioned to critically analyze our societal ills and propose remedies that can change the system to better serve the common good. The same goes for the rest of us. Deluding ourselves with passive hope is the essence of complacent optimism. Planning how to achieve our wishes justifies optimism—contingently, of course!

We can leave aside those presidents tried for crimes against humanity and massacres, such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq (executed in 2006) or Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. Trump rode roughshod over people’s civil rights, including in Portland, Or. and Lafayette Park, but those are not among the charges against him. He stands accused of sedition and conspiracy to overturn an election. There also isn’t a good parallel to South Korea, which has routinely tried and imprisoned former presidents on embezzlement and corruption charges. Although there are questions about whether the Trumps illicitly used the White House to enrich themselves further, DJT is not being tried on those grounds.

The closes parallel is former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who faces as many as 16 trials, one of which began in June. He is charged with spreading misinformation about the election in the months leading up to it. If found guilty he could be barred from politics for 8 years.

In 2019, former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf was convicted of treason because he had suspended the country’s constitution in 2007. Musharraf made a military coup against elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999 and held a phony referendum, whereby he because president. This is not so hard since in a referendum you have no opponent and the only candidate people can vote for is you. Musharraf was not the first military dictator to make himself president of Pakistan, in fact he was the fourth, after Generals Ayyub Khan, Yahya Khan, and Zia ul-Haq.

Musharraf, however, went further than ruling according to provisions in the constitution for a national emergency. In 2007 he dismissed the Supreme Court and replaced it with one to his liking, and in November of that year he actually set aside the constitution, restoring it a month later, in December.

Pakistan was in so much turmoil that Musharraf couldn’t control the situation, so he agreed to the holding of new elections in 2008, won by Asaf Ali Zardari after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated. Musharraf went into exile. The legal establishment, however, still minded his attempt to tinker with it and in 2013 they began proceedings against him for treason in connection with his suspension of the constitution. In 2019 the trial in absentia wrapped up with Musharraf being sentenced to death. The pawerful Pakistani officer corps had lobbied against one of their own being treated like this, but to no avail. Musharraf was sentenced to death in absentia, given that he lived in Dubai then. He died on Feb. 5, 2023.

Since US prosecutors have not considered Trump’s crimes to constitute a form of treason, he does not face the death penalty, though he is 77, so he could easily die in jail if he is convicted and imprisoned. In Georgia, he can’t get less than five years if he is convicted of the racketeering and other charges, because of mandatory sentencing guidelines. He also cannot be paroled or pardoned before spending 5 years in prison.

An Atlanta, Georgia, grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump on Aug. 14, 2023, charging him with racketeering and 12 other felonies related to his alleged attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state.

Eighteen of Trump’s allies and associates, including former Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, were also indicted for racketeering and other felony charges for their alleged involvement in the scheme.

This marks Trump’s fourth indictment in five months – and the second to come from his efforts to undo the election results that awarded the presidency to Joe Biden. Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, started investigating Trump’s involvement in this alleged scheme, as well as that of Trump’s colleagues, in February 2021.

In January 2021, one month before the investigation started, Trump placed a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressed him to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win.

The Conversation U.S. spoke with Anthony Michael Kreis, a scholar of Georgia’s election laws, to understand the significance of the charges laid out in the 98-page indictment. Here are five key points to understand about the precise nature of the charges and why racketeering is at the center of them.

1. Racketeering is different from conspiracy charges

With a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, charge, Willis presents a narrative that there were a large number of people involved in this case, but that they didn’t necessarily sit down at some point and over cocktails and say, “We are going to engage in this criminal act,” which would be a traditional conspiracy case. She is painting this picture of people winking and nodding and working toward this end goal of overthrowing the election, but without some kind of expressed agreement.

The Georgia RICO law allows her to rope in a lot of people who allegedly were involved with this kind of approach.

To be able to bring conspiracy charges, she would have to have an expressed agreement and a concrete act in furtherance of that conspiracy. And here there really wasn’t quite a plan – it is essentially a loose organization of people who are all up to no good.

2. Georgia – and Willis – have used racketeering charges before

Traditionally in Georgia, RICO has been used to prosecute people engaged in very violent kinds of activity – for street gangs and the Mafia, in particular. It has also been used in other contexts.

Turkey’s rapid deterioration into full-blown authoritarianism is rooted in more than recent anti-democratic trends.

( Waging Nonviolence ) – Despite initial skepticism regarding the results of the November 2002 general elections — which saw the decimation of the incumbent coalition and veteran politicians by the newcomer Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — Western pundits soon hailed Turkey as a model for the rest of the Islamic world, an inspiring example of how Islam can be combined with secular democracy and market capitalism.

But the optimism inherent in considering Erdoğan’s Turkey as a model to emulate in a post-Arab Spring context proved to be short-lived, as demonstrated by a series of political crises including corruption scandals, country-wide protest movements, a failed military coup, the escalation of the conflict with Kurdish separatists, societal polarization exacerbated by uncontrolled immigration and, last but certainly not the least, brutal repression of all forms of dissent.

The failure of the Turkish model cannot be explained solely in terms of unrealistic expectations. The rapid deterioration of Turkey into full-blown authoritarianism is also a manifestation of a broader, global trend of what political scientists call “democratic backsliding.” As documented by Freedom House, 2021 marked the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. With a global freedom score of 32 out of 100, Turkey is categorized as “not free.” In the Global Democracy Index report, Turkey is labelled as a “hybrid democracy” characterized by the following features: elections have irregularities that prevent them from being free and fair; corruption is widespread; the rule of law and civil society is weak; and media and the judiciary are not independent.

But how did Turkey get here? What accounts for the meteoric fall from grace of what was once considered a success story? To what extent is the deterioration of democracy in Turkey related to the global rise of authoritarianism? And how do domestic factors, notably nationalism and religion, factor in?

From empire to nation-state

Modern Turkey emerged out of an imperial order in which the main line of demarcation was religious affiliation. The salience of religion was buttressed by the social and political organization of the empire into legally recognized, culturally autonomous religious communities — the millet system. This partially decentralized system granted some internal autonomy to Ottoman communities, but their relative autonomy did not amount to some form of multiculturalism avant la lettre, as some commentators have later argued. On the contrary, the system guaranteed social and cultural segregation, regulating interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims and ensuring that intermixing was restricted.

From the beginning of the 19th century, the Ottoman empire began to decline militarily and economically. The Young Turks, who took over the empire after the 1908 rebellion, joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers and collapsed in the subsequent defeat at the hands of the Allies, which also led to the occupation of İstanbul and İzmir. The humiliation and exigencies of this defeat triggered a profound psychological trauma for the Ottoman elites. This prompted the formation of a strong nationalist movement with a vision of a modern nation-state, the blueprint for republican Turkey. In 1922, after a successful military campaign against the victorious Western military forces that later became the cornerstone of the foundational story of contemporary Turkey, a newly founded parliament officially ended 623 years of Ottoman rule. The following year the Republic of Turkey was formally created, with Ankara as its capital and the charismatic war hero Mustafa Kemal (later bestowed with the surname Atatürk, or the “father of Turks”) as president.

Ruptures and continuities

The founding elite was determined to distance the new state from its predecessor as it deemed a clean break with the Ottoman past necessary for its nation-building project. Post-imperial identity embraced Western modernity across the whole spectrum of daily life, from the mundane (the adoption of a new dress code, the introduction of the international Gregorian calendar, etc.) to the official (the replacement of the God-given sharia law by a civil code, the closure of religious convents, etc.), and it was premised on a number of foundational myths: of an embattled nation threatened by both internal and external enemies; of the need to prioritize the nation at the expense of individual and group rights; and, ultimately, of democracy. Despite its claim to be all-encompassing, hence “civic,” republican nationalism had a strong ethnic color from the outset as it placed particular emphasis on culture, and privileged the dominant Turkish element.

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Their self-avowed commitment to modernism and secularism notwithstanding, the republican leadership was aware of the strength of Islam, and sought to take advantage of it. This paradox of rejecting religion in principle yet embracing its potential in practice was to have a lasting legacy on social and political life. On the one hand, Islam, seen as a link with a past from which republican elites were trying to dissociate themselves, had to be symbolically downgraded. On the other hand, its appeal as a mobilizing force, a factor of social cohesion and a cultural resource for the new national narrative, not to mention its function as a boundary excluding what were deemed to be “non-Turkifiable” minorities, was hard to deny. The solution to this conundrum was to place religion under the purview of the state. Although in theory Islam was defined as a strictly private affair, in practice it was transformed into yet another state apparatus dedicated to the colonization of everyday life and the inculcation of a statist paternalistic logic.

Contrary to the commonplace view that the establishment of the Republic banished Islam to the margins of Turkish social and cultural life, republican nationalism and its definition of Turkishness drew heavily on Sunni Islam, and the systematic process of “Turkification” on which the new elites embarked involved measures that discriminated against non-Muslim minorities and subsequently heterodox Muslim minorities such as the Alevis. It can thus be argued that Islam, despite — or perhaps because of — its subsumption to the state, became a dominant ethnic and national idiom, a privileged and highly important signifier of Turkishness.

Nationalism and Islam

The transition of Turkey into multiparty politics in the 1950s marked the beginning of a new era that saw the transformation of Islam into a language of protest and discontent. Sects and religious orders re-emerged, influencing the agenda of opposition parties which, for example, promised the restoration of the Arabic call to prayer in response to popular demand. Despite the continued claims of the political elites that republican nationalism remained the guiding principle of the Turkish political system, the rehabilitation of religion became a prevalent feature of conservative politics which relied on Islam as a force for political mobilization.

State paternalism, which was reflected in the state’s attitude towards Islam, was inspired by a mistrust of the very people whose sovereignty the Republic was supposed to represent. Thus it envisaged a strenuous process of social engineering, to enlighten the people and “save” them from the clutches of tradition, and the establishment of formally democratic, but in essence authoritarian, political institutions that would safeguard the unity and modernization of Turkey. Thus, in instances where democracy was considered to be testing the boundaries of accepted political behavior, the national interest acquired priority over popular will, and was used to justify frequent interventions in the democratic process.

The reintegration of Islam into definitions of Turkishness during the 1950s and ‘60s informed the so-called Turkish model until the end of the 20th century, albeit kept in check by a formally secular state. During this time, Turkey was described as what several commentators called a “tutelary democracy,” in which individual and collective rights were always supposed to take second place to the national interest. In this visualization of modern Turkey, the nation was equated to an undivided people with a single sense of purpose. This entailed the “othering” of those who were believed to constitute a threat to national unity, be they non-Muslims, Kurds, Alevis or other minorities.

This binary divide between mythical nation and actual people survived the demise of tutelary democracy and became one of the defining features of Erdoğan’s rule. The earlier, more instrumental, synthesis of Islam and Turkishness has not been radically overhauled. True, Islam has emerged out of the margins, become more assertive and visible, yet it has still remained mainly a tool of mobilization and legitimation, controlled and shaped by the state, which considers it part and parcel of its particular “national vision.”

The ‘New Turkey’

In post-Kemalist Turkey, democracy began to be narrowly conceptualized as a process in which competitive elections became the sole source of legitimacy and the expression of the national will: a formula for empowering populism. The war of maneuvers between the AKP and the military/state bureaucracy and other contenders for power thus led the AKP to develop into a counter-institution displaying many characteristics of its opponents, including the creation of a personality cult around its leader, Erdoğan. The party progressively established its own control over key agencies of the state apparatus and resisted calls for internal democratization. Somewhat ironically then, despite the downfall of the Kemalist state, Erdoğan’s “New Turkey” turned out to be a less secular replica of the old regime.

This was by no means a foregone conclusion. There were times, in particular in the first, pragmatic, phase of AKP rule, which lasted roughly until 2010, when hopes for the emergence of a truly democratic order were stronger. The AKP even launched an initiative to resolve the country’s longstanding Kurdish problem, the so-called “democratic opening” process. It is true that the reforms the state undertook were more cosmetic than concrete; the process itself top-down, opaque and subject to the whims of two strongmen, Erdoğan and Abdullah Öcalan, the incarcerated leader of the Kurdish separatist PKK (Kurdish Workers Party). Still, the ceasefire between Turkish armed forces and the PKK lasted more than two years, and many believed that the process was irreversible.

These hopes were dashed in 2013 when a peaceful sit-in held by environmental activists on May 28 to counter government plans to raze Gezi Park in the symbolic Taksim Square escalated into a country-wide protest movement that was brutally suppressed by the state and its security apparatus. The fear that has been the hallmark of the second, ideological, phase of AKP rule has been exacerbated by the bitter feud between the government and the Gülen Movement; the deteriorating situation in Syria and the declaration of autonomy in Northern Syria by the PKK’s sister organization, the Democratic Union Party; and a series of terrorist attacks in various Turkish cities allegedly perpetrated by the Islamic State.

The simmering tensions boiled over when a small clique within the Turkish army attempted to topple the government on July 15, 2016, leaving 241 dead and an even stronger “strongman” behind. A state of emergency that gave extra powers to the government and the president was declared, and it was followed by an immense wave of arrests and detentions that extended far beyond those individuals allegedly linked to the Gülen movement, the “mastermind” behind the putsch according to the official narrative.

Statist communalism

It is commonplace to talk about Erdoğan’s “New Turkey” in terms of “the return of religion” or the failure of top-down secularization in a predominantly Muslim society. But this does not capture the fundamental continuity between Kemalist and post-Kemalist Turkey. Erdoğan’s unabashedly Islamist regime has more affinities with the modern-secular nation-state Mustafa Kemal and his associates were trying to build than its proponents are prepared to admit. It is equally based on a notion of strong leadership and the personality cult that goes with it, xenophobic and – at least at the rhetorical level – anti-Westernist. On the other hand, unlike its Kemalist forebear, the new authoritarian nationalism portrays Turkey as a regional powerhouse, the potential leader of the (Sunni) Muslim world — championing a particular interpretation of Islam that attempts to reconcile it with modernization and the inner workings of a capitalist market society: the “new model” for which the regime was originally acclaimed.

Linking the old and the new political orders is what I call statist communalism.

Statist communalism is predicated upon a strong, paternalist state, one that values communities, above all family, tribe and clan (aşiret), over individuals and civil society. This paternalist state is not egalitarian; it does not tend to increase social welfare, or protect individuals or groups against encroachments on their rights and entitlements. On the contrary, it is perceived as and acts like a “father,” presiding over a hierarchical structure that promotes a form of communalism akin to the millet system of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey has always been (and still is) an archipelago of communities held together by fiat and when necessary by force. Yet this contrived unity has never produced a society of shared values and practices, let alone a nation with a sense of a common past and destiny. The transition to full autocracy was so rapid and easy in Turkey because it has no unified society; because each community is ready to form an alliance with the state to further its own interests, turning a blind eye to the predicament of other communities; because overcoming autocracy requires resistance, and resistance requires unity, but the various communities despise one another as much as, if not more than, they despise autocrats; because for every community, including that of the oppressed, the only route to salvation is to nurture a leader from among its own ranks and to replace the autocrat with its own leader, thereby taking control of the state mechanism.

The future?

It may indeed be that there is more democratic resilience in Turkey than is apparent at this moment. Today’s crisis may turn into tomorrow’s opportunity. And even if the crisis proves to be of a more permanent nature, reflecting on it will shed light on the global tension between, on the one hand, the nation-state as a secular democratic project organized around a community with clearly demarcated boundaries, and, on the other, more universalistic projects that rely on theocratic authoritarianism at home and expansionism abroad.

It is clear that a country as heterogenous and vibrant as Turkey cannot be held together by an autocrat who relies on a slim majority, no matter how fragmented the opposition is. Either the country will be thrown into chaos and disorder (a scenario that cannot be tolerated by the international community, given Turkey’s pivotal role in the region and in various strategic alliances), or the opposition will finally decide to bury the hatchet, even if temporarily, and start acting together.

Needless to say, this does not require taking up arms or engaging in violence, which would be tantamount to mimicking the regime. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan show in their award-winning book “Why Civil Resistance Works,” nonviolent resistance campaigns are almost twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts.The answer to the Leninist question “What is to be done?” then, is not hard to come by. What is harder is to overcome statist communalism and to leave behind the bitter feuds and quarrels that stand in the way of an organized civil resistance. This may require us, as one of the protagonists in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s unique “The Little Prince” puts it, to endure the presence of a few caterpillars until we become acquainted with the butterflies. Not a particularly heavy price, I would hazard, if this is indeed the only way out.

This story was produced by Fellowship Magazine

Waging Nonviolence

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Umut Özkırımlı

Umut Özkırımlı is a senior research fellow at IBEI (Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals), a professor at Blanquerna, Ramon Llull University, and a senior research associate at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). He is the author of the recently published “Cancelled: The Left Way Back From Woke.”  A longer version of this article was previously published at IEMed.org.