One simple alteration to the electoral system in America would have resulted in a landslide victory for incumbent Barack Obama in the US presidential election, to the effect of a stomping four-to-one margin of victory over challenger Mitt Romney.
In what would admittedly be a tough sell in Congress, if an amendment to the constitution turned over the task of selecting the US president to the population of Turkey, a dramatic election night would become a formality rather than a race to the finish. Pollsters reinforce the notion that can be easily gleaned from reading the columnists in Turkish papers: In the eyes of Turks, Obama is the man.
Commentators have pointed to Obama’s foreign policy and personal narrative as reasons for his popularity in Turkey. Obama was riding the anyone-but-Bush effect in the favorability he received in foreign countries even before he was elected as president four years ago. Turkey, as a country acutely affected by the implosion of Iraq’s central authority as a result of the Bush-led invasion, was more than happy to reward the anti-Iraq war rhetoric of Obama’s 2008 campaign by bumping their confidence in the US presidency up by 32 percent overnight following Obama’s ascent into the White House, according to polling by Pew Global Attitudes Project.
But while Turks’ support for Obama as the American president is non-news, what if the inhabitants of Anatolia were asked to vote for Obama as their own president? Better yet, let’s scribble a thick mustache on the leader of the free world and pit him against current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the first direct presidential election in the history of the Turkish republic, to take place in 2014. In doing so, we explore the unmeasured limits to Turkish support for one American president. But, more significantly, the hypothetical offers a comparative lens to pry open the lid on the real substance behind the Turkish vote.
As Turks consider their future president during the 2014 election season, Obama is unlikely to make any ground in defeating his main opponent Erdoğan, who is expected to run for the office, in terms of foreign policy. The feeling of many Turks that their country is being dragged into a conflict with their southern neighbor, Syria, is unlikely to abate in the next year. The exact reason that many Turks love Obama – the steady withdrawal of US military from the Middle East and his conciliatory “zero problems with Muslims” position outlined in his Cairo speech in 2009 – would win him few hearts as a leader that would be charged with taking sides between Muslims at war.
While the AKP and Turkey as a whole have been reluctant to see their young men in the military get involved in the Syrian quagmire, in a time of insecurity Turks may be less thrilled with Obama’s dovish, wait-and-see approach to Middle Eastern crises. Erdoğan, though he has held troops on the Turkish side of the border, has at the same time offered the most comprehensive and direct support to the Syrian opposition. The Turkish prime minister has also backed up truculent rhetoric against Bashar al-Assad with live fire, responding to artillery that dropped on Turkish soil from across the border in October with his own tit-for-tat strikes on Syrian government positions. On his 2014 Turkish campaign trail, Obama would have to prove to the Turkish people that, after all, he is capable of war in the Middle East, something that Erdoğan has made clear through a recent congressional mandate.
But what about the narrative of Obama as a racial minority and possibly Muslim underdog who has fought his way through the white US bureaucracy to lead the American underprivileged from the country’s highest seat of power – a mostly fictional caricature that makes the US president endearing to many Turks? The diversity that Barack Obama represents and that has a role in his political philosophy, however, may play out differently in Turkey than in an America in which religious diversity has become cliché.
Upon questioning by a reporter in 2014 while campaigning in front of the Alaeddin Mosque in Konya, candidate for the Turkish presidency Barack Obama would have to respond to the question of his “real” religion by alluding vaguely to “faith in Jesus” before explaining that faith “can express itself in people in many ways.” Again, despite the diversity of religious belief in Turkey, despite the government’s early attention to issues of religious minorities, despite the tolerance that Turks like to express toward other (Abrahamic) religions, and despite the fact that Turks themselves appear to be growing less conservative as a whole, Turkey remains a country where a majority of voters are motivated by a leader with an unequivocally Muslim, and to this point Sunni, identity.
Even if we humor those in America who claim that Obama is in fact a Muslim, giving him a certain boost in our Turkish election scenario, the US president has not shown a tendency of using religion to relate himself to the American public. Such reluctance would fare well with secularists in Turkey who see Erdoğan’s heavy use of religious identity as a threat to the nation’s foundations. But the fact that Erdoğan’s AKP have secured three consecutive majority governments in Turkey is partly a sign that the Turkish public responds to a candidate who serves their politics with a healthy reference to the tenants of Islam. That Obama is secretly a Muslim “over there” in America is reason enough for him to receive high marks in Pew polls, but if Obama were “God only knows what” here in Turkey, many more Turks would vote with their gut and vote Erdoğan.
Obama’s racially mixed background brings another issue to the forefront in his campaign in Turkey: Turkey’s Kurds. At around one-fifth of the population, the Kurds in Turkey represent an even larger minority than blacks do in America. The debate around certain language and cultural rights for Kurds – and more divisively the status of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – is incredibly sensitive in Turkey, and politicians who have been seen as too close to groups like the PKK have been straightly locked up.
Again, although Kurds are largely assimilated into Turkish culture and enjoy most of the same rights as ethnic Turks, although the AKP initiated bold reforms several years ago relating to Kurdish issues, and although Obama has done less to reduce inequality for minorities in America than many had hoped, there are certain policies related to race and minorities supported by Obama that would cause pause among Turkish voters. Imagine Obama, walking the ancient walls surrounding the predominantly Kurdish Diyarbakır, encouraging Turkish universities to up their diversity by considering a student’s minority status as a possible boost to their application. Such a position is not unthinkable in democratic Turkey, but many Turks would feel better if the comment were made about someone else’s minorities, somewhere else.
Another issue that could doom Obama’s 2014 campaign against Erdoğan is one that gets represented less in the caricature of the US president in Turkey. Imagine an Obama campaign van inching past apartment buildings on an Anatolian street, proclaiming through loudspeakers Obama’s support for same-sex marriage and the rights for gays to serve openly in the military — in between blasts of Jay-Z and Rolling Stones. Obama was certainly a relief for Anatolia from the foreign policy of the Bush administration, but the majority of observant Turks may find themselves spinning their heads hearing the US president’s stand on social issues during his 2014 Turkish campaign. Prime Minister Erdoğan, on the other hand, has given all indications he will leverage conservative social issues to gain critical votes in his efforts to secure reelection.
Those reading closely have by now, first, realized the practical limits of pasting a US political figure and his ideology plainly into the Turkish context, and second, that a couple of themes have nonetheless risen to the surface to help us better see our apples from our oranges.
The first is that, in attempting to gauge the support Obama could garner as a Turkish politician, we find ourselves explaining the political philosophy of those Turks that vote for Erdoğan as something that looks quite Republican, in the American sense. The “AKP-US Republicans” analogy has been suggested already by observers and problematized by others. But when considering that overtures to a strong national defense, traditional family values, and a robust national, as well as religious, identity are characteristics of the US Republican platform, not in a simple sense Obama’s, it is more likely that a Turkish Mitt Romney would have a greater chance of grabbing AKP votes than Obama’s analogy.
Second, Obama’s leadership style may make him a fish out of water in a Turkish election. The Turkish political spectrum is replete with leaders of the strongman variety. Erdoğan, as well as the leaders of the Turkey’s main opposition parties, projects his power in traditional means: volume, hand-gestures, and fierce scowls. But being a strongman in Turkey also means using these oratorical tools to solidify yourself as the representative of the oppressed, to ward off opponents with unapologetic polemics, and to make people in a very dangerous region feel safe. Many Turks that found a quieter Obama in America appealing may never hear him over the Turkish strongmen he will have to oppose in 2014. So for the future of US candidates who consider a second career as a Turkish politician, perhaps the best advice is, simply, to talk louder.
Brett MARLER
Brett Marler is an editor and writer in Istanbul and a former Fulbright recipient to Turkey. Follow his tweets at @BrettThinking.
