Turkey’s High Electoral Council has ordered a rerun of Istanbul’s mayoral election, which the candidate from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party narrowly lost last month. Since the vote, the Turkish strongman had kept complaining that the victory of an opposition candidate had been a result of irregularities or outright “theft at the ballot box.” This blatantly anti-democratic move — let’s have votes until the government gets the result it wants — is, in part, a matter of realpolitik: Mr. Erdogan’s party, and even his immediate family, depend on the resources available only to those who hold power in Istanbul, Turkey’s business center. But it also has a logic that is specific to authoritarian populists.
Politicians like Mr. Erdogan are distinguished by their claim that only they truly represent the people. They suggest they can lose at the polls only when elections have been rigged by liberal elites. There are many leaders like Mr. Erdogan around the world right now, including Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and the president of the United States. In an interview last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a reporter for this newspaper that she worries that if President Trump is defeated in 2020 by a narrow-enough margin, he will, like Mr. Erdogan, refuse to accept the legitimacy of the election. Ms. Pelosi has good reason to worry.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, populists are not distinctive just because they criticize elites. There’s nothing wrong with critiquing the powerful; in fact, it’s often healthy in a democracy. What is specific to populists is the claim that they are the only ones who represent those they often call “the real people.” The implication is not only that all other contenders for power are corrupt or lack legitimacy, but also that citizens who fail to support populists do not truly belong to the people at all. As Mr. Erdogan revealingly put it in 2014, when referring to himself and his followers at a party convention, “We are the people.” Then he turned to other candidates and ominously posed the question, “Who are you?”
If, by this logic, only the populists represent the silent majority, then by definition, they will always win elections, as long as the majority is allowed to speak. When populists do not succeed at the polls, it is imperative for them to offer an explanation that cannot just come down to what other politicians would normally say: namely that they are right, their opponents are wrong, and they will try harder next time to convince citizens. Instead, populists often suggest in a more or less veiled manner that they are dealing with not a silent but a silenced majority. Someone, they insinuate, must have been manipulating matters behind the scenes to prevent the people from electing their only genuine representatives — hence the connection between populism and allegations of voter fraud (which are themselves fraudulent) as well as broader conspiracy theories.
Mr. Trump infamously responded to the question whether he would accept a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016 with the line, “I will tell you at the time.” Of course, his audience understood the declaration’s real meaning perfectly well. Seventy percent of Trump supporters believed that had the Democratic candidate been declared victorious, the vote must have been rigged. That kind of number is bad news for any democracy. Not because citizens must blindly accept all results — voter suppression, namely of racial minorities, is a reality in parts of the United States — but because populists systematically sow distrust of existing institutions. Germany’s far-right populist party, Alternative for Germany, has for years been demanding election observers, insinuating that there are serious problems at polling stations — though without ever specifying them. And Mr. Trump, lest we forget, never actually accepted defeat in the popular vote in 2016, claiming that millions of illegal votes had to be subtracted from the official tally.
There is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, someone who criticizes an election system on account of gerrymandering, the influence of “dark money” or any other empirically verifiable factor, and on the other, a populist loser whose only real complaint is “It must be rotten because I didn’t win.”
Even when authoritarian populists themselves have governed for years (and in all likelihood, rigged the system in their favor), they have no trouble finding reasons an election failed to give the real majority a chance to express itself. Contrary to the naïve view that once in power, populists have to cease criticizing “the establishment” (for they themselves are now the establishment), they always fall back on accusing “shadowy international elites” or other powerful outsiders of manipulating the outcome. This is somewhat easier to do in countries like Hungary and Turkey than in the United States. But even in the world’s most powerful nation, Mr. Trump, during the last presidential election, already experimented with an ad that portrayed “global special interests” (who all happened to be Jewish) as evil forces behind Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.
So can nothing be done? One obvious way forward is to defeat populists with such overwhelming majorities that charges of fraud will just seem too far-fetched. Another is to involve international election monitors even more closely, though that constitutes no guarantee that populists will accept the outcome. A more cynical — but alas, perhaps sometimes necessary — solution is to offer populist losers a way out such that they do not lose everything if they lose a vote. Obviously, for kleptocrats, an election defeat can pose an existential danger when they feel that there is no option between the president’s palace and prison. Letting them (and at least some of their money and their extended political families) go is an extremely unappealing prospect, even if it does not come with an official exoneration. But on occasion it might be a price worth paying to restore or protect democracy.
Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and the author of “What is Populism?,” among other books.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Populists Don’t Lose Elections
Opinion | Populists Don’t Lose Elections
Turkey’s High Electoral Council has ordered a rerun of Istanbul’s mayoral election, which the candidate from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party narrowly lost last month. Since the vote, the Turkish strongman had kept complaining that the victory of an opposition candidate had been a result of irregularities or outright “theft at the ballot box.” This blatantly anti-democratic move — let’s have votes until the government gets the result it wants — is, in part, a matter of realpolitik: Mr. Erdogan’s party, and even his immediate family, depend on the resources available only to those who hold power in Istanbul, Turkey’s business center. But it also has a logic that is specific to authoritarian populists.
Politicians like Mr. Erdogan are distinguished by their claim that only they truly represent the people. They suggest they can lose at the polls only when elections have been rigged by liberal elites. There are many leaders like Mr. Erdogan around the world right now, including Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and the president of the United States. In an interview last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a reporter for this newspaper that she worries that if President Trump is defeated in 2020 by a narrow-enough margin, he will, like Mr. Erdogan, refuse to accept the legitimacy of the election. Ms. Pelosi has good reason to worry.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, populists are not distinctive just because they criticize elites. There’s nothing wrong with critiquing the powerful; in fact, it’s often healthy in a democracy. What is specific to populists is the claim that they are the only ones who represent those they often call “the real people.” The implication is not only that all other contenders for power are corrupt or lack legitimacy, but also that citizens who fail to support populists do not truly belong to the people at all. As Mr. Erdogan revealingly put it in 2014, when referring to himself and his followers at a party convention, “We are the people.” Then he turned to other candidates and ominously posed the question, “Who are you?”
If, by this logic, only the populists represent the silent majority, then by definition, they will always win elections, as long as the majority is allowed to speak. When populists do not succeed at the polls, it is imperative for them to offer an explanation that cannot just come down to what other politicians would normally say: namely that they are right, their opponents are wrong, and they will try harder next time to convince citizens. Instead, populists often suggest in a more or less veiled manner that they are dealing with not a silent but a silenced majority. Someone, they insinuate, must have been manipulating matters behind the scenes to prevent the people from electing their only genuine representatives — hence the connection between populism and allegations of voter fraud (which are themselves fraudulent) as well as broader conspiracy theories.
Mr. Trump infamously responded to the question whether he would accept a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016 with the line, “I will tell you at the time.” Of course, his audience understood the declaration’s real meaning perfectly well. Seventy percent of Trump supporters believed that had the Democratic candidate been declared victorious, the vote must have been rigged. That kind of number is bad news for any democracy. Not because citizens must blindly accept all results — voter suppression, namely of racial minorities, is a reality in parts of the United States — but because populists systematically sow distrust of existing institutions. Germany’s far-right populist party, Alternative for Germany, has for years been demanding election observers, insinuating that there are serious problems at polling stations — though without ever specifying them. And Mr. Trump, lest we forget, never actually accepted defeat in the popular vote in 2016, claiming that millions of illegal votes had to be subtracted from the official tally.
There is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, someone who criticizes an election system on account of gerrymandering, the influence of “dark money” or any other empirically verifiable factor, and on the other, a populist loser whose only real complaint is “It must be rotten because I didn’t win.”
Even when authoritarian populists themselves have governed for years (and in all likelihood, rigged the system in their favor), they have no trouble finding reasons an election failed to give the real majority a chance to express itself. Contrary to the naïve view that once in power, populists have to cease criticizing “the establishment” (for they themselves are now the establishment), they always fall back on accusing “shadowy international elites” or other powerful outsiders of manipulating the outcome. This is somewhat easier to do in countries like Hungary and Turkey than in the United States. But even in the world’s most powerful nation, Mr. Trump, during the last presidential election, already experimented with an ad that portrayed “global special interests” (who all happened to be Jewish) as evil forces behind Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.
So can nothing be done? One obvious way forward is to defeat populists with such overwhelming majorities that charges of fraud will just seem too far-fetched. Another is to involve international election monitors even more closely, though that constitutes no guarantee that populists will accept the outcome. A more cynical — but alas, perhaps sometimes necessary — solution is to offer populist losers a way out such that they do not lose everything if they lose a vote. Obviously, for kleptocrats, an election defeat can pose an existential danger when they feel that there is no option between the president’s palace and prison. Letting them (and at least some of their money and their extended political families) go is an extremely unappealing prospect, even if it does not come with an official exoneration. But on occasion it might be a price worth paying to restore or protect democracy.
Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and the author of “What is Populism?,” among other books.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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