If populism is the trend of our times, Turkey may have shown how to fight it

The strongman tactics of many a populist leader caused outsiders to fret about creeping authoritarianism in many countries both inside Europe and on its fringes over the past decade.

And yet green shoots emerged last weekend in Turkey that suggested the seemingly unstoppable march of populist attitudes could be reversed.

The country’s local elections — which should have been about matters like bin collections and traffic congestion — produced results that were a genuine surprise, even to long-time observers like me.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party lost control not only of the capital Ankara, but the country’s largest city Istanbul too.

It was not a runaway victory for the opposition: in Istanbul, the official margin between the top two candidates was 23,945 votes — enough for even the small Jewish population to make a difference — in a city where there are 10.5 million voters. In Ankara, the gap was just 3 percentage points.

A partial recount of votes in some areas underway on Wednesday could yet alter the outcome, but cannot change the fact the opposition’s tactics were impressive.

Any robust democracy needs elections that are free and fair. In Turkey, which is a flawed democracy, elections tend to be free but unfair: voters largely get what they asked for at the ballot box, but after a campaign where media coverage, advertising and funding opportunities are dominated by the governing party.

And yet the Turkish opposition navigated this huge imbalance by demonstrating three qualities I have not seen in 17 years: solidarity, resilience and strategic planning.

The solidarity came from a belated realisation, after so many years dominated by Mr Erdoğan’s party, that they stood to gain far more by not tearing into each other. So it was that two opposition parties formed an alliance and did not stand candidates against one another, and even came to an accommodation with the party representing the Kurdish minority.

The resilience was in how those alliances withstood powerful attacks from the government. Mr Erdoğan, who campaigned energetically across the country for an election in which he was not on the ballot paper anywhere, accused opposition parties of colluding with terrorists and sabotaging Turkey’s very existence. The alliance did not crumple.

And on election night itself, as official figures showed a strong early lead in Istanbul for the governing party, the opposition candidate held ten separate press conferences to repeatedly insist his figures showed he would win.

It was a clear strategy to combat the narrative in the government-friendly media that the race was done and dusted.

They did not transform Turkey overnight, but they showed change, however difficult, is attainable.