ANKARA: As Turks go to the polls on Sunday to elect their new parliament and president, the country is at a critical crossroads, with fresh allegations about foreign meddling in the elections.
In a startling tweet on Thursday night, Turkiye’s opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu accused Russia of interfering with the Turkish elections, saying that Russians are behind the “deep fake” and defamatory material that has been circulating for the past few days on social media.
“Dear Russian friends, you are behind the montages, conspiracies, deep fake content and recordings that were exposed in this country yesterday. If you want our friendship to continue after May 15, get your hands off the Turkish state. We still side by cooperation and friendship,” he said in Turkish, and tweeted it also in Russian.
However, Moscow rejected Kilicdaroglu’s accusations, with the Kremlin saying in a statement: “If someone gave him such information, they are liars.”
Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara office director of the German Marshall Fund of the US, told Arab News: “Russia has the capability and track record of using disinformation to influence, to impact politics in other countries. Russian malign influence in the US and Germany during elections is well documented.
“It is also not a secret that Russia takes sides in Turkish domestic politics. Therefore, it would come as no surprise if Russia conducted malign influence operations in Turkiye as well,” he claimed.
Russia has been accused of interfering with the US presidential election in 2016 and in the French presidential campaign and German elections in 2017.
“Turkiye today is highly polarized, mainstream media has been eliminated, and Turkish citizens live in echo chambers and deeply distrust each other. As a result, Turkiye is highly exposed to malign foreign influence,” Unluhisarcikli said.
Kilicdaroglu’s claim came after Muharrem Ince, one of the four presidential candidates, announced on Thursday his decision to withdraw his candidacy after being targeted by a series of smear campaigns that included fabricated pornographic images taken from an Israeli site. In other documents, he was also accused of taking bribes from officials to divide the opposition’s votes.
Although his withdrawal may help Kilicdaroglu’s election chances in the first round, it is still unclear whether this will be enough to secure him more than 50 percent of the votes required to win the presidential race on May 14.
“There are fears of various undemocratic interventions in Turkiye’s elections. These are substantiated by the government’s past behavior and other examples in the world, and include various manipulative actions and outright rigging by partisan government officials as well as Russian meddling,” Murat Somer, a political science professor at Koc University in Istanbul, told Arab News.
“But none of this is an easy task in this country of over 190,000 ballot boxes, a long legacy of institutionalized democracy and elections, highly mobilized opposition/civil society, and a bureaucracy obsessed with documenting everything.”
To do it, he added, one has to ensure the compliance of literally hundreds of thousands of people in one way or another.
For Somer, the way to preempt and prevent such interventions is to sway the votes and public opinion to such an extent that the dominant expectation is an imminent opposition victory, and people hesitate to do things they can be held accountable for under a new government.
The activation of some cyberattacks in Turkiye has been predictable.
Last week, Kilicdaroglu also claimed that the opposition bloc might be targeted with fake videos or voice recordings on social media, based on the intelligence reports his party received.
During a campaign rally last weekend, Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also played an alleged deep fake video where militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK declared their support for his rival Kilicdaroglu. But the video that aimed to associate the opposition with terror groups was then proved to be fabricated.
Publicly, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s administration is not picking sides in the Turkish elections. But it is no secret that Turkish-Russian relations have thrived under Erdogan’s rule with a close personal relationship between the two leaders. Erdogan and Putin recently inaugurated Turkiye’s first nuclear plant in a virtual ceremony.
Another economic bonus from the Kremlin to the incumbent Turkish government is that Russian energy giant Gazprom recently agreed to defer a portion of Turkiye’s gas payments.
Although he is expected to take a more pro-Western position, a Kilicdaroglu win is not expected to completely ruin Russia-Turkiye relations, as Russian ties are especially important for Turkiye’s energy imports and trade. Russia is among Turkiye’s biggest trade partners.
In their memorandum, the six-party opposition coalition defined their relations with Russia as follows: “We will maintain relations with the Russian Federation with an understanding that both parties are equal and strengthened by balanced and constructive dialogue at the institutional level.”
Somer said: “Similarly, Putin may figure that he may have to interact with a new government he does not want to alienate. Hence, Kilicdaroglu reiterated his interest in good relations conditional upon Russian non-interference.”
Somer expects that the Turkish-Russian mutually beneficial relations would continue in a Kilicdaroglu win scenario, but that Turkiye would be more firmly anchored in Western democratic values, institutions and alliances.
In an interview with Russia’s RT Network, Kilicdaroglu’s top foreign policy chief and former ambassador Unal Cevikoz said there would not be any serious change in Turkiye’s foreign policy with regard to Russia if Kilicdaroglu won.
“I believe Kilicdaroglu as the new president will have good relations with Putin,” he said.