The sociology of charisma

After the election, as expected, all the factors, accurate decisions, candidates and discourses that led the successful side to this success come to the agenda, while for the unsuccessful side come all its faults, flaws, shortcomings and mistakes... Every victory, every conquest, every success has such a consequence. Consequences and effects that are partly psychological and partly sociological (Surah al-Fath).

The mistakes, flaws, shortcomings and errors of the one who comes out of the game successful are not seen. Because he has succeeded. Success covers over mistakes and makes dwelling on them unnecessary. But that is in the eyes of the people who will appreciate him. Those on the inside, of course, know the shortcomings, the mistakes and the errors too. Getting carried away by the intoxication of victory and regarding oneself as flawless because of the victory would end in incorrigible arrogance. Perhaps the most important trait that has distinguished President Erdoğan from others until now is that he has not fallen into this error. Success and victory have not kept him from seeing his own mistakes; through the election results he studies meticulously after every election, he has begun preparing for the next election the very next day. Yet it is a fact that failing to digest political success and victory brings such a danger with it.

By contrast, failure brings all faults to light.

Anyone looking at the political landscape in Turkey from a year or two before the elections could see the picture of a government nearly bankrupt, one that had smeared everything over its own face, sunk the country, and been drowned in corruption. Against all the faults brought to the agenda, the government side had of course its own defenses, indeed its own claims. But this was the picture reflected both on social media and, from there, to the whole international public. The election results coming out in the government's favor showed that this picture was nothing but an illusion.

It was also seen that the end of one whose guide is social media is disappointment. Even the passage from the virtual reality created on that social media to the world of realities can cause hysterical fits.

It also seems that for one whose guide is the opposition in Turkey, experiencing a traumatic disappointment was foreordained.

Having begun before the elections to see success almost in hand, the charisma of the personalities produced by this success claimed in advance was buried in Erdoğan's political ballot box as a result of the inevitable failure, and thus erased. Charisma is by no means a negligible element in politics. Some individuals have a trace of this charisma, and it serves them, for better or worse, on the political stage. But charisma is not tied only to stature, age and God-given likability. The effect of that kind of charisma is, especially in elections, one-time. For it to continue it must be fed by success, and moreover by indisputably concrete successes.

Even those who voted for him did not believe in the charisma that Kılıçdaroğlu tried each time to build by embellishing and gilding. Because he has no success. His only success is having managed to get hold of the CHP's leadership through wheeling and dealing. Perhaps only for the CHP voter might some charisma come out of this success. But for a broader segment of the people, no success story comes out of it. Above all, the fact that he has not won a single election he has entered each time makes people pay attention not to his claimed good qualities but to the deficiencies that make him lose.

İmamoğlu, Yavaş, Davutoğlu, Babacan and so on. These too have had no successes so far that could provide them charisma. Indeed, the only successes of the last two names were in the work they did under Erdoğan's leadership. And İmamoğlu's and Yavaş's only successes were that they won elections against municipalities that had been on the AK Parti line for 25 years. This may have a somewhat charisma-producing effect. But not only do they have no successes in the municipalities they won that could feed this charisma, but with the defeat they are now collectively undergoing, all their mistakes, faults, shortcomings, blunders and botches are spilling out and exhausting their charisma.

Charisma is fed by success, victory, conquest, and of course it must exist in order to be fed, but even existing charisma is bound to fade when it is not fed by success.

That Erdoğan has a charisma is beyond dispute. But this charisma has continued to be constantly fed with successes that will not easily fall to anyone else in his political life. These successes can be electoral successes, and they are also fed by successes in getting out of a crisis, solving a crisis and overcoming a crisis. Because there is a very close bond between "crisis" and "charisma," both etymologically and in reality.

When he went to prison because of a sentence he received while he was mayor, in answer to some intellectual circles that questioned his charisma, I wrote an article titled "Charisma, Popular Culture and Fascism" in Tezkire magazine. Against warnings about what charismatic authorities have led to in history, I had stressed that Erdoğan's charisma, like every charisma, was sui generis. Shortly after this article the AK Parti was founded, and in 2002, entering the elections despite being banned, as a candidate to bring Turkey out of the great political, social and economic crisis it was in, he made, by burying in the ballot box all the political actors of the day, all the actors the people were nearly sick of and wanted to be rid of, yet another charisma.

This event was in itself an event of "exit from the crisis." He had stood out as a leader who delivered us from those very political actors who were the cause of the problems and the crisis. At that time I also wrote an article in Birikim magazine under the title "The Hyperreality of Charisma." It was not a simple eulogy of Erdoğan; it was entirely an application of the sociology of charisma to Erdoğan's story, using the data of political science and sociology. In the end, everything unfolded within the narrative unity of a story whose beginning and end was a struggle between the good and the bad, ending in the victory of the good.

Since that day Erdoğan has lived through, and made others live through, a similar story at every juncture. In all these stories there were villains who struggled against him and wove all sorts of intrigues against him, and each was a story that ended in his victory as the representative of the good.

Victories which, as they repeat, confirm that none of his successes so far can be explained by chance. In the latest event too he won a clear victory against an alliance that united against him and that clearly included bad people among them.

This result, which is a victory for him, is a rout for his rivals, and a rout is also a situation in which the spilling out of all mistakes, errors, faults and dirty laundry is foreordained.