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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

This improves the chance of Erdogan's main opponent winning the election because opposition votes won't be split across multiple candidates.

So despite the weird sex tape business, this is a positive event if you think Turkey should move forward from the authoritarianism and incompetent economic management of the Erdogan era.

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Other people are saying his voters are more likely to split towards Erdogan. Which is it?

All I know is that the bond market thinks it’s a positive sign, and foreign investors aren’t rooting for Erdogan:

”Investors reacted positively to both the new polls and İnce’s withdrawal from the race, pushing the price of Turkey’s international bonds higher. A US dollar-denominated bond maturing in 2030 was trading on Thursday with a yield of 8.54 per cent, down from about 9.2 per cent at the start of the week.

”Bond yields fall when prices rise. The cost of protecting against a default on Turkish debt also declined, with the spread on five-year credit default swaps falling to 490 basis points from above 550 bps earlier this month, according to Bloomberg data. The spread had risen as high as almost 900 bps last summer.”

(Financial Times)

What should be our takeaway from the fact that foreign capitalists don’t like Erdoğan?

Someone can be a totally awful authoritarian bad leader and be hated by (presumably also totally awful) foreign capitalists. That's a thing.

It’s not like or dislike, they’re betting on the economic future of Türkiye - and their bet, with their money on the line, is that Erdoğan is bad for Türkiye.

I'd say they're betting on their possibility to extract wealth from Turkey, and their bet, with their money on the line, is that Erdogan is bad for their possibility to extract wealth from Turkye.

We are not talking about imperialist sources trying to colonize a nation. Capitalism has its shortcomings, which can surely be discussed, but it isn't an evil plan to reallocate the most resources from a zero-sum game to the "foreign capitalists".

Of course not. We are talking about possibility to have businesses who will mostly employ local workers and mostly use local resources, some will maybe even pay fair local taxes, but whose majority of profits will move out of the country. Thus, wealth extraction.

This is not extraction. If they pay wages, this is profit sharing. At best you can argue that they should share more with locals.

Nope. Profit is what remains after wages and any other expenses, and is shared between owners or shareholders.

When they bet on bonds, they essentially bet on the government not to default. When they bet against bonds, they expect a sovereign default, which would be terrible for everyone involved.

Yeah but you’d be wrong. The “foreign capitalists” are betting on Turkiye but mostly betting against other “foreign capitalists”.

That it's irrelevant? What matters is why they don't like him (obviously you can agree on specific things with people you otherwise heavily dislike), and in this case it's because he's pursuing an economic policy that hurts pretty much everyone, domestic citizens and foreign investors alike. Foreign capitalists and foreign left-wingers both dislike Erdogan and dislike eachother - trying to gain meaningful takeaways from who specifically does and doesn't like someone else is probably not wildly helpful

Only if you assume that the capitalists are being honest about why they don’t dislike him.

I mean, the reason is that they want to make money, that doesn't seem particularly out of character. It just so happens that the inflationary policies that are making it hard for them to make money are also making it hard for everyday folk domestically. If that wasn't the case then there wouldn't be that alignment between normally opposed groups.

The likeliest answer is that it's too hard to tell - it's too small of a populace (1-2% or less likely) that's hard to reach in an unbiased way to sample properly for a poll (without it getting expensive, I guess). People are mostly speculating based on his attitudes and positions.

> this is a positive event if you think Turkey should move forward from the authoritarianism and incompetent economic management

Forward may very well be more of the same or worse. Only time will tell if their system is systemically and irrevocably broken.

What makes you think it may be irrevocably broken? Worth noting that unlike, say, the USA, Turkey does not have a constitution that was written two hundred plus years ago and is virtually impossible to change or update.

There’s been 5 amendments to the US constitution since 1960. In 1971 it took 100 days to pass the 26th amendment lowering voting age to 18.

The largest barrier is it doesn’t have that many rules people want to change. It’s a short document and many things like requiring the president to be 35 just don’t come up very frequently. The few things that apply frequently such as free speech have broad support.

> In 1971 it took 100 days to pass the 26th amendment lowering voting age to 18.

I was taught in history class that this was rushed so quickly because congress thought it would reduce the number of student protests.

> Worth noting that unlike, say, the USA, Turkey does not have a constitution that was written two hundred plus years ago and is virtually impossible to change or update.

That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s what keeps the USA from devolving to the 51% mob rule flavor of the month after each election.

Many countries update their constitutions much more regularly and don't have that sort of thing happen to them. Why do you think the US would be any different?

The US has a large number of fairly undemocratic institutions such as Congress (supremely gerrymandered in many states), the electoral college (frequently favors the person who lost the popular vote) and the Senate (which rewards the same number of reps to 39,000,000 people as it does to 500,000 people).

These institutions offer routes for extremist positions to take power which they could then entrench with a more malleable constitution.

These "undemocratic" institutions only exist precisely because the constitution is hard to change. The electoral college, the gerrymandering, the shape of the Senate, they are all things that the constitution already allows. The takeover of power has already happened, the US is trapped in a 2-party system that basically everybody hates, but it's so entrenched into the culture that it's unthinkable to change it.

The 2 party system’s okay. It’s not the worst when it’s working alright. Right now it’s not great lol.

But this system has survived 227 years or so for a reason.

At the end of the day the Senate was actually a bulwark against extremism in these last elections in many ways.

I’m not sure what you mean by takeover of power as if there’s some sort of cabal out there. There’s a lot of different vying interests out there and some have more power than they should, and this isn’t our shiningest moment in general, but I don’t necessarily agree that there’s been some sort of “takeover”.

> 51% mob rule

How is this distinguishable from democracy?

The US is not a pure democracy.

The question is about the purpose of framing "51% mob rule" as something other than democracy.

It's hard to put my finger on the problem. Speaking generally and in only my opinion, Turks have a general lack of faith in any public system. The court system has barely worked, the parliamentary system was recently crippled.

I could go on, but to keep this short it's not clear that there is a cohesive political will to move toward a rule by system rather than rule by person. There is a large segment of the population willing to vote for a personality and an astonishing tolerance for key personnel to be changed when the new person is voted in.

Consider that their economy is going to break (further) no matter which candidate gets chosen and there will be little room for improvement.

To be fair, having a constitution that’s nearly impossible to change or update may be helpful during years when authoritarians are in power.

To be fair, any authoritarian worth worrying about will either simply not care or secretly staff Congress and the courts with sympathizers who will do a Palpatine and "make it legal."

The Constitution is just a piece of paper. Its only power lies in the willingness of people to believe in the political fiction that is "law." Trump is the closest the US has come to a truly dangerous authoritarian so far, but he wasn't competent enough to get his shit together and really take over. But he could have. He had millions of people convinced the Democrats were involved in an international communist conspiracy to steal the election. People within the government and military leadership openly espousing their support for a coup. Support within law enforcement. Half the country willing to ride or die for him.

And ironically his greatest success in terms of forcing his political agenda was completely legal - stacking the Supreme Court with ideologues. Doesn't really matter how hard the Constitution is to change when nine unelected people with lifetime appointments can just decide what it means.

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