Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been in power for two decades. Photo / AP
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been in power for two decades. Photo / AP
For months he had stubbornly resisted calls to step aside and make way for Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the man seeking to become Turkey’s next president at too-close-to-call elections on Sunday, May 14. But then, on Thursday, so late in the day that ballot papers with his name on them had already been printed, Muharrem Ince suddenly backed down.
“I am withdrawing from the candidacy. I am doing this for my country,” he said. But not, it transpired, of his own free will. Instead, the 59-year-old insisted, he was the victim of a smear campaign. A sex tape, he said, had been swiped from “an Israeli porn site” and doctored to make it appear as if he was involved. “This is not my private life, it’s slander. It’s not real.”
But the effects of his withdrawal could be very real. Though Ince was polling only around 2 per cent ahead of the election, most of his backers are now expected to shift their support to Kilicdaroglu, who is seeking to unseat Turkey’s increasingly autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan after two decades in power. And with polls putting Kilicdaroglu on 49.3 per cent to Erdogan’s 43.7 per cent, a handful of extra votes is all the challenger needs to cross the 50 per cent threshold and avoid a run-off against an incumbent famed as a political survivor. Yet should it prove decisive, the alleged sex tape would only prove the most dramatic fakery in a campaign that has been marked by misinformation and accusations of foreign meddling – accusations that saw Kilicdaroglu, 74, denounce “montages, plots, [and] deepfake tapes” – referring to realistic AI-generated videos of people saying or doing things they haven’t done.
The target of his ire was Russia, long seen as an ally of his electoral opponent Erdogan. And analysts suggest such dirty tricks from Moscow would make sense. “Russia is definitely favouring Erdogan [in the election],” says Galip Dalay at Chatham House. “They have energy and grain deals. Putin can even meet Erdogan, head of a Nato country, and so say he is not isolated and that the Nato front is not united.”
Yet Erdogan subsequently suggested that his rival’s accusations of Russian interference were no more than a ruse to deflect attention from the real culprit. “One of the candidates withdrew,” he said after Ince stood down. “Of course, it is impossible to understand why. What did [Kilicdaroglu] come up with? A tape. How did he do that? All they know is tricks.”
Muharrem Ince Has stepped down from the Turkey presidential race after the release of a deepfake porn video featuring his likeness. Photo / Getty Images
And just as Russia has reason to back Erdogan, Israel – provenance of the doctored sex tape, according to its victim – may have reason to see Turkey’s president unseated. “There has been difficulty, real bad blood between Israel and Turkey over the past decade,” says Dalay. “One can assume Israel would back the opposition.”
Whatever the truth about foreign meddling, though, there is little doubt that the world is watching Turkey’s election, freighted as it is with stunning geopolitical significance. Turkey has long played what an intelligence source calls “the man in the middle” – trying to leverage its position as both a Nato member and a country with close ties to Moscow. It also has a critical role in controlling the flow of refugees into Europe and, despite Erdogan’s increasingly dictatorial instincts, remains a large Muslim democracy in a region hardly overflowing with them.
With the war in Ukraine, however, the stakes have got even higher, as West and East both try to bring the world’s 11th biggest economy further into their camp. “And Turkey,” says the source, “is trying to juggle both sides.” On one hand, Ankara is blocking Sweden’s accession to Nato and buying Russian gas, but on the other, “it isn’t turning a blind eye to weapons smuggled through Turkish territorial waters. And nor has Erdogan started arguing Putin’s case in the Western camp.”
Yet if the elections are vital for the world beyond Turkey’s borders, they are also critical for Turkey. The opposition claims they are a chance to restore the country’s battered economy, whose plummeting currency and soaring 40 per cent-plus inflation has created a cost of living crisis that has made many Turks dramatically poorer. Erdogan insists, however, that only he can prevent the restoration of a secular, metropolitan elite dragging the country from its cultural roots. Turkey, he says, can be powerful and prosperous without sliding inexorably Westwards.
It is a clash of civilisations viewpoint that perhaps explains why his campaign has allegedly stooped to its own video deception, playing film at a rally that appears to stitch together footage from a genuine campaign video by his rival with images of Murat Karayilan, one of the founders of the Kurdish PKK separatists, as if to suggest Kilicdaroglu was endorsed by a group regarded as terrorists by the EU and the US State Department. A German media investigation found that the clips came from two entirely separate videos and the Turkish opposition was not being endorsed by the PKK.
Now accusations fly back and forth of truth-bending and image manipulation so voters cannot know if they can trust their eyes. Kilicdaroglu says Erdogan “can make negative propaganda by changing sound and images”, going so far as to suggest his rival is in league with foreign agents, presumably Russian. “We’ve learned that they’ve made agreements with some hackers from abroad and made payments in Bitcoin,” he said. This week he insisted, after directly accusing Russia, via tweet, of meddling: “I wouldn’t tweet if we didn’t have concrete evidence. We find it unacceptable for another country to intervene in Turkey’s election process in favour of a political party. I wanted the whole world to know this.”
If there is a deal with Moscow, says the intelligence source, it would represent “classic Russian tactics”. The exchange goes as follows: “If we can help you win the election, if we do you a favour when you’re in power, you’re going to have to do us a favour.” Sophisticated deepfake videos and other visible elements of a disinformation campaign are useful, the source continues, because they help the outside nation behind them, such as Russia, “demonstrate proof that they helped the candidates get elected, firstly to give them leverage when they want to call in favours, and secondly, to use as blackmail if the favours aren’t returned.”
If Turkey’s election is a live demonstration of the destructive havoc that AI and other advanced technologies can wreak on democracies, then democracies themselves can find it hard to respond in kind to such underhand meddling. To intervene in a foreign election, a British deepfake operation would require authorisation at cabinet or prime ministerial level, if it was done at all. “We have the capacity, we just don’t have the policy permissions,” says the source. In an emergency, getting those permissions would take “time and effort. These [Russian] guys can just go and do it in a couple of hours with little or no oversight.”
Instead, efforts are directed at “counter disinformation”. “What we can do very quickly is expose the truth.”
But in the end, even that may not prove enough. “Deepfakes are very worrying,” says the source. “We’re probably already at the stage where a video could emerge of Rishi Sunak declaring war on China and you wouldn’t be able to tell if it was real.” Today, with Europe’s worst fighting in 70 years raging across the Black Sea opposite Turkish shores, such provocative fakes may change the course of elections. Soon they may start the wars themselves.
