The Erdoğan Government's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Performance and Actuality in an Authoritarian Context

Abstract

This article analyses the Erdoğan government's policy response to the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the abundant use of moral antagonisms in his discourse, Erdoğan did not attempt to politicize the pandemic, instead framing it as a global health crisis and presenting the government's public health policies as expert-driven and competent. However, this expert-driven approach was largely a performance. Without a system of democratic oversight or a free media to scrutinize government policies, the Erdoğan government could systematically undercount COVID-19 cases and disregard its own public health restrictions, all the while spreading its narrative of competence and success. Competitive policymaking by opposition-controlled municipalities and criticism from a strong doctors' association had relatively limited ability to discredit the government. The public opinion data we present reveal broad-based support for the government's COVID policies. Our article highlights how authoritarian institutions allow governments to sustain a gap between performance and actuality, granting their leaders greater possibilities to claim policy success.

The Populist Radical Right and the Pandemic

“…And even Trump seemed to pass responsibility to individual states rather than centralize control as the pandemic developed (Roberts 2022). By contrast, Orbán used the pandemic to seize emergency powers (Batory 2022), and a similar approach can be observed in the case of Erdoğan in Turkey (Laebens and Öztürk 2022). In addition, we can see a contrast between those PRR actors that employed a security frame and those that focused on an anti-authoritarian frame.…”

“…Another case in point is Orbán in Hungary, who approached the pandemic in a relatively effective way at the beginning, so that his popularity started to suffer only when the situation became more complicated for the country (Batory 2022), but this notwithstanding he was able to secure his power in the parliamentary elections that took place in April 2022. Similarly, Erdoğan in Turkey was able to maintain relatively high levels of public support, particularly during the first year of the pandemic, and interestingly, there are important partisan differences in the perceived salience of the pandemic (Laebens and Öztürk 2022). Finally, the Brazilian case study shows that despite significant changes in Bolsonaro's approval ratings, he has a very stable core constituency that endorses denialist ideas and fosters 'echo chambers' that galvanize the president (von Bülow and Naera Abers 2022).…”

“…Both Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil were consistently inconsistent in their response to the pandemicsometimes downplaying the issue and, at other times, passing the responsibility to state governors (Roberts 2022;von Bülow and Abers 2022, in this special issue). By contrast, Erdoğan in Turkey followed a fairly constant response, characterized by the delegation of key decisions to health experts and respecting their advice (Laebens and Öztürk 2022).…”

“…By contrast, Marine Le Pen in France endorsed the wearing of masks from an early stage, especially when the government was not enforcing a mask policy, but sometimes criticized government lockdown measures as too harsh and at other times for not being harsh enough (Froio 2022). For the PRR actors in government there was variation between Orbán taking a strong hands-on approach in Hungary (Batory 2022), but with Erdoğan taking a more hands-off approach deferring to other actors in Turkey (Laebens and Öztürk 2022), and Trump eventually effectively walking away from a public policy response and leaving it to individual states (Roberts 2022). In Brazil the government policy reflected strong denialism and was half-hearted, without clear policy on mass testing and contact tracing, while Bolsonaro not only actively excluded much activity from shut-downs but also eschewed a full federal response (von Bülow and Abers 2022).…”

“…This means that populist tropes have been employed by almost all PRR forces analysed in this special issue, particularly to blame international actors and institutions as well as to portray them as part of 'the corrupt establishment' headed by progressives who are at odds with 'the pure people'. However, one can see a PRR actor taking a non-populist frame: for example Erdoğan adopted a technocratic approach and stressed the importance of expertise, but without necessarily showing strong support for multilateral organizations and solutions (Laebens and Öztürk 2022).…”