The elections are tomorrow and it's prohibited by law to broadcast political rallies on the last day.
The pro-government TV channels are broadcasting Erdogan's rallies while other TV channels respect the law(and they are afraid of disproportional penalties if they do the same).
Erdogan claims that there is a "global conspiracy to stop the rise of Turkey" and people who believe him don't care much about the unlawful things he is doing because you know, Turkey is under attack and extraordinary measures should be taken to protect the country.
Polls show that %77 of the population believe the corruption case against the government is real.
However the situation is really complicated. Without going into details, I have to say that probably there is a real conspiracy orchestrated by the Gulen(islamic cleric allegedly with big influence on the judiciary & law enforcement) movement because some of the leaked tapes seems to be collected illegally.
The Gulen movement was close ally with the government till recently. They probably collected evidence about the corruption in the government since years and waited until the right moment comes to start the criminal case. The PM responded by demonizing the whole movement and suspending the rule of law.
The allegations against the Gulen movement are not proven at all but few years ago the same prosecutors started a case against the military and lot's of unlawful things took place during the whole trail process. That time the PM Erdogan strongly supported the case but today he claims that this was a conspiracy against the Turkish army.
Many lawyers agree that lots of the evidence against the military was fabricated and many people were imprisoned for political reasons.
Back then a sex tape of the main opposition party leader was leaked and PM Erdogan used it as a political tool. Today the same PM claims that these leaks about corruption are invasion of his privacy. Another leak shows that the PM was involved in the filming and distribution of the sex tape of the opposition party.
There are lots of voters believe in Erdogan because he said he's clean. It's all about uneducated public being manipulated through religion and patriotism. He talks about Islam and national flag. He's reading national anthem's lyrics in ads on TV.
Actually, whereas I don't think Turkey is that far "gone" on the antidemocratic spectrum, but it has one thing in common with more severe cases of "border-line" democracy, like Russia: It's not the money that rigs the government, it's the government that rigs the money.
In some sense, the US with their absurdly high campaign spending, avoid this kind of corruption either way just by competition.
Even if a single interest group/company would try to outright "buy" a presidential campaign (which hardly works anyway), all the other interest groups combined have an incentive to "buy" it back. Which is why politicians can't be controlled through donations as often as TV Shows might want you to believe.
Erdogan however just rigs the regulation in a way that benefits his reelection and accumulation of wealth. No competition, no problem...
The US elections are equally rigged - you vote for which faction of the mil-ind complex you like, and whether planned parenthood is funded - but not anything like wars, which simple continue as scheduled.
Rigged? I don't think so. But if you accept that you can't vote for every single decision because of practical reasons (and because multiple single-issue-votes tend to contradict each other), you can only vote for the general direction, and in the US this means you have a choice of about two directions. In other democracies you might have three or four directions but those countries tend to have more issues with incompetency and corruption.
However the "axis" of these two directions is aligned by the general public. If people care about wars, the parties would align towards "war" and "no war" for an election. But they don't, because beginning and ending a war isn't something that works well with elections or any arbitrarily timed decision process for that matter.
Governments have to be able to start a war or not end it at the wrong time, otherwise you might as well let non-democratic countries take you to the cleaners...
> In other democracies you might have three or four directions but those countries tend to have more issues with incompetency and corruption.
That's a joke, right? Germany is more corrupt and less competent than the US? Sweden is? The UK is? On almost every metric of government efficiency, the US is behind most european countries.
> If people care about wars, the parties would align towards "war" and "no war" for an election. But they don't,
This is a stupid assertion. Why would they align towards "war" and "no war" when they don't have to? They have enough divisive things like Row vs. Wade, Planned Parenthood, Food Stamps, ACA, etc to make sure that every single-issue voter is accounted for in one camp or the other.
Do you remember that Obama campaigned on the "Close Gitmo" promise?
> But they don't, because beginning and ending a war isn't something that works well with elections or any arbitrarily timed decision process for that matter. Governments have to be able to start a war or not end it at the wrong time, otherwise you might as well let non-democratic countries take you to the cleaners...
I will assume you are naive, because otherwise I would have to assign malice to your argument. The US has been, for years, opening a new front every couple of years. Regardless of timing, "more military action around the world" and "less military action around the world" are things you can base policy on. In fact, Ron Paul campaigned for the latter. But in a two party system, anything except the big two parties is meaningless, and the big parties like it that way - it means they don't have to align with anything the public at large might actually want.
Somehow it is comforting how abysmally bad he is at doing that though...