Did patriotism and nationalism win in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won his third term with more than 2.3 million votes ahead of his opponent? I asked for an expert comment in novini.bg prof. Vladimir Chukov, a famous Arabist, university professor and scholar in the field of Middle East politics and Islam.

Erdogan won despite preliminary polls there that showed almost equal election results between him and his main opponent, Kemal Kalicdaroglu.
President Erdogan has 20 years of experience in politics and already has many supporters. To defeat him, the opposition must have at least 7-8 points ahead so that there may be a different result from the previous one. But as we can see, this did not happen in this vote.

Behind Erdogan stands a very interesting bloc - the conservative-religious,

which has about 35-40% supporters and Turkish nationalism, which gained momentum after 2016, when the Turkish nationalist party became an ally of Erdogan. This is the mother party in Turkey, which has already split into many feathers and trends. We have about 55% behind Erdogan and he manages to skillfully control them through the state media, through the state administration and the supreme electoral council. For nearly 20 years, these institutions have benefited Erdogan and the results of each subsequent vote there.

Erdogan is now strong, but weaker than he was in 2014-2018.

Kalicdaroglu, in my opinion, is a very good apparatchik and managed to push back the third participant in the election race Sinan Ogan. But the strongest in Turkey is Erdogan's conservative bloc, which is seen cornering all its opponents. The battle was between nationalism and religious ideology, but not economics, inflation, the reduced incomes of the people there. There are many reasons that led to Erdogan's victory.
It is important to focus on the powerful external influence on the elections in Turkey. I mean the influence of the East. Western countries and the United States find no room for expression in Atatürk's highly transformed secular state. While the countries of the East, find a good reception here. Sample

One of the first heads of state to congratulate Erdogan was Russian President Vladimir Putin Vladimir Putin, a Russian politician. Born on October 7, 1952 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. He addressed his Turkish counterpart with "dear friend" in his congratulatory addresses. "Your re-election by Turkish voters shows that they support your foreign policy."

The Gulf states are potential sponsors that have made huge investments in Turkey in previous years.
Azerbaijan and President Ilham Heydaroglu Aliyev personally joined Erdogan's election campaign, and today we learn that he influenced Sinan Ogan, who is Azer, to stand behind him. He is a former professor at Baku State University. Egypt, Algeria, the whole eastern world stood behind Erdogan. Iran, too.
Erdogan's victory was in line with the return of Bashar al-Assad Bashar Hafez al-Assad, born in Damascus on September 11, 1965, is the leader of the Baath Party and the League of Arab States.
But the newly elected old president of Turkey has many problems to solve. First of all, this is the Kurdish problem, which has been dragging on unresolved for years, and relations with Syria, where I am still waiting for interesting developments. There will be cracks, I predict, and throughout the Eastern Bloc.

Vladimir Putin

Bashar al-Assad

Turkey

election

Prof. Vladimir Chukov