For civil society and rights defenders, five more years of the Turkish president and his radical backers are a daunting prospect<\/p>
On Sunday, Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan was declared the winner<\/a> of Turkey\u2019s presidential runoff elections. According to numbers reported by the state-owned Anadolu news agency, more than 27 million voters<\/a> cast their ballots in favour of Erdo\u011fan, who has been at the country\u2019s helm for more than two decades. He entered the second round in the lead in the polls, and was expected by most to emerge victorious. Although Erdo\u011fan captured slightly more than half of the vote, more than 25 million people also mobilised to vote against him.<\/p> The elections were being held under deeply unfair conditions, with an opposition set up to fail. Istanbul\u2019s mayor, Ekrem \u0130mamo\u011flu, was recently sentenced<\/a> to more than two years in prison and banned from holding public office for insulting members of the supreme election council. This left the opposition unable to nominate its maybe most promising candidate. This was all amid biased media coverage, relentless smear campaigns against the eventual opposition candidate, Kemal K\u0131l\u0131\u00e7daro\u011flu, threats, manipulation and a crackdown on civil society, such as the arrest<\/a> of 126 Kurdish lawyers, activists and politicians at the end of April in Diyarbak\u0131r.<\/p> Constanze Letsch is a former Turkey correspondent for the Guardian and has recently finished a PhD on urban renewal in Istanbul<\/p> Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p> Continue reading...<\/a>\n