There is such a thing as governing for too long. After about ten years in post, politicians’ once natural feel for the nation’s pulse instead starts to rub the electorate the wrong way. Thatcher, Blair and de Gaulle all saw their time run out.
What about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? He has led Turkey since 2003 as prime minister and since 2014 as president. This Sunday, he will try to defy political gravity.
Opinion polls don’t suggest a clear outcome in the Turkish election. They suggest that no presidential candidate will get 50 per cent of the vote in the first round on Sunday, and that Erdoğan’s principal and not overly charismatic opponent, the former servant Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has a decent chance of pulling ahead in the second. This would be a case of Erdoğan being hoisted by his own petard. Under the super-presidential system he himself created, he needs to get an absolute majority of the vote.
A post-Erdoğan era will not necessarily be calmer.
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