Signal: Turkey’s Moment, American Bitterness, Saudi Revolutions, and a Better Brexit

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-Ian

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A LOOMING CRISIS IN TURKEY?

Turkey faces a moment of truth.

On Sunday, presidential and parliamentary elections will pit President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) against multiple challengers. If no presidential candidate wins a majority, the top two finishers advance to a second-round vote on July 8.

This a deeply divided country that’s been governed under a state of emergency for nearly two years. Here’s your election cheat sheet:

Erdogan’s accomplishments: A generation ago, elites in the country’s largest cities — Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir — dominated Turkey’s politics and economy, and the military acted as guardian of a strict secularism in public life. Erdogan, who first became prime minister in 2003, challenged the dominance of secularism and put religion at the center of public life. Critically, he also enacted policies designed to empower citizens and small businesses across Turkey’s conservative heartland.

GDP per capita nearly tripled during the first decade of Erdogan’s political rule.

The power grab: Erdogan, suspicious of military interference with his agenda, has fought for Putin-level power for years. Prevented by the rules of his party from continuing as prime minister, he won election as president in 2014 and pitched a referendum that would give the office of president much more power.

In July 2016, he responded to a failed military coup by imposing a state of emergency, still in effect today, that gave him extraordinary powers to tighten control of courts, police, and the army.

The crackdown: According to a March 2018 report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in 2017 the state of emergency allowed the government to…

• arrest nearly 160,000 people
• close 166 media outlets, including newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, TV and radio stations
• block 100,000 websites
• shut down 1,719 civil society organizations

Not surprisingly, 65 percent of Turks say they fear that “expressing political views online could cause trouble with authorities.”

Erdogan has said sinister deep-state forces, followers of former ally Fethullah Gulen, European leaders, the United States, and foreign credit agencies all want to undermine him and his country.

Election timing: Turkey’s decade of economic success turned sharply south after 2013. Double-digit inflation and a currency in turmoil are now top of mind for Turkey’s president and its people. This election wasn’t due until next year, but Erdogan, aware that a bad economy will probably get worse, decided to force this vote sooner rather than later.

The opposition: Erdogan may want Putin-like powers, but Turkey is not Russia. Opinions of Erdogan are split evenly across the country, and the political opposition is more united than at any time in many years. Muharrem Ince, candidate of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has the best shot to beat Erdogan.

Given Erdogan’s thin-skinned reputation, it matters that Ince is smart, likable, outspoken, and has a sense of humor. He promises if elected to abolish a law making it a crime to insult the president and to convert the Erdogan-ordered $600 million presidential palace into a science center.

Crucially, the CHP has formed an alliance with the nationalist ?Y? (Good) Party, which cuts into Erdogan’s popularity from the right, and an Islamist splinter party called Saadet.

The stakes: Erdogan narrowly won his April 2017 referendum, probably by cheating, but the new powers it grants to the office of the presidency — to issue decrees with the force of law and pack the courts with loyalists, for example — don’t take effect until after this election. There is growing concern that Erdogan will cheat again to win this weekend. He leads in the polls, but his margin is shrinking.

If opposition parties win control of parliament on Sunday and Erdogan must face a second round (on July 8), the next two weeks could become violent as the president turns up the rhetorical heat and rival protesters hit the streets.

The bottom line: This election will decide whether the man who has dominated politics in this important country for the past 15 years can extend his power indefinitely. There is a serious risk of confrontation and crisis in coming days.

BITTER US POLITICS IN A POLARIZED AGE

The separation of children of illegal immigrants from their families at the US border has dominated news in the US this week. It appeared on Wednesdaythat an intense public backlash had forced President Trump to change direction. But the executive order he signed this week leaves US border policy in a state of confusion and does nothing to reunite the 2,300+ children already in US custody with their families.

As Alex Kliment and Kevin Allison noted on Wednesday, polling reveals a sharp divide between Republicans and all other Americans on the emotive subject of illegal immigrants and their children.

A survey published this week by Quinnipiac University found that “American voters oppose 66–27 percent the policy of separating children and parents when families illegally cross the border into America.” That includes 91 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of independents. But Republican voters support the separation policy by a margin of 55–35 percent.

Context: A generation ago, as elections approached, US politicians competed with opponents from the other political party for the support of “centrist” voters, those less motivated by ideology of the left or right. That practice was dying before President Trump ran for office. It now appears all but dead.

Research suggests that Americans are increasingly unwilling to marry, make friends with, or even live near those who don’t share their political views. In a bitterly divided country, one where voters get much of their news and views from cable TV channels and websites that align with their biases, and where more than 40 percent of eligible voters didn’t show up to cast a ballot in 2016, politicians worry much more about motivating their supporters to actually vote than about winning support from the political center.

Bottom line: On race relations, climate change, tariffs imposed on allies, a trade war with China, and immigration policy, this political logic can persuade President Trump to actively support a policy that’s broadly unpopular. He’s betting that his voters care more about a particular issue than other voters do.

Whether he’s right or wrong, expect more of the same as November’s elections approach.

GZERO WORLD WITH IAN BREMMER: NICK THOMPSON

Ian sits down with WIRED editor-in-chief Nick Thompson to talk about Mark Zuckerberg’s next moves, how governments should be developing AI, and why your kids should stay far away from the iPads.

THE SAUDI SECRET REVOLUTIONS

This Sunday, for the first time in decades, no Saudi can be arrested on charges of “driving while female.” Get set for an avalanche of photos and video of smiling women in traditional dress driving cars of every description. 

But there are other reasons why this is an important moment in Saudi history. An end of the driving ban will not persuade every father, husband, and brother to hand keys to his daughter, wife, or sister. It’s easier to change laws than attitudes. 

In public, June 24 will be remembered as the day (some) women took the wheel. In private, it will be the day that launched a million small revolutions as new family battle-lines are drawn behind closed doors. 

It will also be a fascinating test of both public and elite attitudes toward the modernization drive of Crown Prince (and would-be king) Mohammed bin Salman, the author of this political and cultural change.

MAKING BREXIT FUN AGAIN

Tomorrow, June 23, marks the two-year anniversary of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. Talk of Hard Brexit, Soft Brexit, a customs union, “maximum facilitation,” and a “standstill transition” leaves the world wondering what on earth is going on and where this is headed. The principal problem is that UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s government has been unable to define exactly what outcome it wants.

Frankly, your Friday author would rather hit himself in the head with a hammer than write about Brexit. We all know its importance for the future of Britain and of Europe, but at this stage, it’s an awfully dry subject. That’s why the Signal team is now batting around ideas to make the Brexit story more interesting.

In that spirit, we suggest:

• The Great Brexit Bakeoff — Let’s have Prime Minister May and wannabe prime minister Boris Johnson compete to see who bakes the best shepherd’s pie. (Your Tuesday author suggested hash brownies.) Winner sets British terms of exit. Loser spends two weeks in a one-bedroom flat with Donald Trump, 11 Glaswegian anti-Trump protesters (with megaphones), no hot water, no internet connection, six Rottweilers, and no dog food.
• The BrexitVision Song Contest — Best pop song performer becomes chief EU Brexit negotiator for six months.
• Televised underwater Brexit Talks — To dramatize climate change, officials in the Maldives once held an underwater cabinet meeting. To dramatize the need to make Brexit talks more fun — and to give them useful urgency — let’s put UK and EU officials in diving gear and drop them in the North Sea for a few hours. Tell them they’re not allowed to resurface without demonstrable Brexit progress and until they pledge to stop using so much bureaucratic jargon.

Send us your ideas on how best to make Brexit more interesting, and we’ll pass the best of them to the relevant parties…

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

Ethiopia — Looking for a good news story? (Aren’t we all?) There is real movement toward a peace deal between Eritrea and Ethiopia, one of Africa’s most promising countries.

Japanese football fans — Here’s another one: Check out the Japanese football fans who celebrated a 2–1 World Cup win over Colombia by helping to clean garbage left in the stands at the 44,000-seat stadium where the match took place. Later in the day, Senegalese fans did the same. #SignalSalute

WHAT WE’RE IGNORING

South Africa’s Squatter Camps — The world noticed this week that googling the phrases “South Africa” and “squatter camps” turns up lots of photos of impoverished South African white people. This result, many have noted, is representative of neither white South Africa nor the country’s squatter camps. It appears to be an algorithmic anomaly that reflects user investigations into conspiracy theories rather than an actual conspiracy to mischaracterize South African poverty.

The babushka workout — Russia’s greatest natural resource has never been oil, gas, metals, or minerals. It’s all those grandmas who continually fix what’s broken. Your Friday author, like virtually all of us, needs more exercise. But he knows he has no shot of keeping up with this bad-to-the-bone 72-year-old babushka.

HARD NUMBERS

99.6: Some 99.6% of people in Iceland who were watching TV on June 16 were tuned into Iceland’s first-ever World Cup match. Their team rewarded their attention with a stunning 1–1 draw vs. world football power Argentina. #HandOfCod

68: President Erdogan has expanded the number of religious schools across Turkey from 450 in 2003 to 4,500 today. His government increased the budget for religious education this year by 68 percent.

57: Need a more cost-effective approach to pension reform? Russia’s prime minister Dmitri Medvedev has proposed an increase in the retirement age for men to 65. Current World Bank data suggests that just 57 percent of Russian men will live to age 65, a percentage that hasn’t increased in 50 years.

16: El Salvador, a source of large numbers of would-be asylum seekers in the US, is the world’s most violent country that is not an active war zone. It’s typical for criminal gangs to demand bribes of local businesses. Salvadorans spend $756 million per year on extortion fees. The country’s central bank estimates that violence costs the country around 16 percent in GDP.

1: For the first time since 2012, the US was the world’s #1 recipient of new asylum applications, with 331,700 lodged in 2017, according to a new UN report. That’s a 27 percent increase from 2016 (262,000) and nearly double the number in 2015 (172,700).

WORDS OF WISDOM

“Iranian women aren’t allowed in stadium, but here in Russia, we can go to the stadium.”

— A female Iranian football fan outside Kazan stadium in Russia before a World Cup match.

This edition of Signal was prepared by Willis Sparks with editorial support from Kevin Allison (@KevinAllison), Gabe Lipton (@gflipton), and Leon Levy (@leonmlevy). Spiritual counsel from Willis Sparks. Give a friend the Signal here.