Having won the first round of the Turkish presidential election on 14th May, Recep Tayyip Erdogan now has a good chance of remaining in power. With 49.5% of the vote, against 44.9% for Kemal Kilicdaroglu, his rival from a heterogeneous coalition of six parties and supported by the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), he is in a favourable ballot for the second round.

While some pollsters promised his downfall, even the legislative elections turned in his favor since the People's Alliance, the Islamic-nationalist coalition that brings together his party, the AKP, and far-right and religious parties, won the parliamentary majority.

Threatened by the wear and tear of twenty years in power, the target of a certain popular discontent, fuelled by the shipwreck of the Turkish economy and galloping inflation, criticized for the management of the double earthquake of February, Tayyip Recep Erdogan has used a strategy that has already proven its worth to rally his voters behind his candidacy.

"The outgoing president did not really innovate during his presidential campaign, he remained faithful to the electoral strategy that brought him to power," explains Samim Akgönül, historian and political scientist, director of the Turkish studies department at the University of Strasbourg. For several decades, it has consisted of exploiting the divisions in Turkish society and accentuating divisions, thanks to an identity discourse and nationalist rhetoric, around ethnic, sociological and confessional issues."

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Turkish identity and the role of Islam, the greatness of the country, Ankara's omnipresence on the international scene... The Reis struck a chord with its supporters but also with Turks nostalgic for the Ottoman Empire.

"His populist strategy, his conservative positioning, and his political career are built around divisive speeches that are – and his electoral victories prove him right – much more profitable in Turkey than unifying speeches," said Samim Akgönül. Turkish society is crossed by fault lines that are easier to bleed than to sew up or appease, and Erdogan has always been able to put his fingers in these fault lines in order to spread them a little more."

According to Samim Akgönül, the "Reis" will apply "these same recipes" during the second round campaign because the results of the first round of the presidential election show that "the Turkish population still votes on identity issues and not on rational issues such as the economic crisis or the management of earthquakes."

"Those":jouing the majority against minorities

Thanks to his political flair, Tayyip Recep Erdogan has also always played at placing himself on the side of the majority, continues the historian. "That is to say, on the side of the Turks against the Kurds – by nationalizing his discourse and joining forces with the nationalist extreme right – on the side of the Sunnis against the Alevis – by allying, as today, with fundamental Islam – and finally on the side of the Islamist conservatives against the secularists and secularists accused of corrupting society," he said.

"The most successful slogan of his campaign is the demonstrative pronoun 'those', which he has used throughout his career," says Samim Akgönül. These are terrorists, these are not like us, these are separatists, these are LGBT, these want to marry animals, these want to destroy the country' and so on, and this fear that he instills in people's minds by pointing to the so-called 'enemies' of Turkey works very well, since he is again on the threshold of winning a new election."

During the last campaign, feeling threatened by a united opposition, the outgoing president even stepped up his attacks and launched violent invective against Kemal Kilicdaroglu, from the Alevi minority, whom he qualified as "alcoholic and drunkard" or "terrorist".

" READ ALSO "I was born Alevi, I did not choose it": in Turkey, the dream of equality of a minority

"Violence is part of Erdogan's strategy, which has mastered verbal violence against his opponents and those who are not with him, but also symbolic violence, as Pierre Bourdieu said, always arousing fear of physical violence by using the repressive apparatus of the state," said Samim Akgönül. He even went so far as to brandish, especially after the Gezi revolt in 2013, the threat of paramilitary violence, to give weapons to his supporters and to set the streets ablaze."

And to conclude: "Finally, there is in his speech a bit of 'in my opinion the flood', and this impression in the Turkish electorate that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been in power for more than 20 years, is so associated with the existence of the state that its debunking would be the equivalent of a deconstruction of the state." An element that can, according to the political scientist, explain the good scores achieved by the outgoing president in the areas affected by the earthquakes.

See also After the earthquake, reconstruction at the heart of the Turkish elections

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