Elections That Mark 2023 as a Key Year

An official of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) validates a voter at a polling station during the gubernatorial election at Ede in Osun State, southwest Nigeria, on July 16, 2022. Voters went to the polls to elect a new governor for Nigeria's southwest Osun state, in what has become a battleground to test support for the leading presidential hopefuls ahead of presidential elections in 2023. (Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Elections, even in small nation-states, can have global consequences, and three national elections, at least in 2023, will have significant strategic ramifications beyond their borders: those in Nigeria, Turkey, and New Zealand.

Nigeria’s Feb. 25 presidential and parliamentary elections are the most important of Africa’s 10 scheduled 2023 elections because Nigeria is both Africa’s largest economy and its largest population. And as Nigeria goes, so does much of the fortune of sub-Saharan Africa. Until this election, Nigeria has been in a protracted downward spiral—economically and socially—and the 2023 election offers a unique opportunity for a breakthrough.

Without that breakthrough, Nigeria risks “business as usual”: a continued downward spiral.

Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections, should they occur on May 14 (moved up from the scheduled June 18 date), are critical because they would determine whether Turkey, as the pivotal geographic region between the eastern and western blocs, moves further under authoritarian expansionist governance or back to economic stability.

But the incumbent president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has demonstrated that he will imprison his challengers, utilize the great earthquake that hit Turkey on Feb. 6, or initiate war with neighboring Greece to either postpone or distort the scheduled elections. The change of the election date, and the declaration of a “state of emergency” due to the earthquake are all signs of desperation on the part of a president who has so comprehensively destroyed the Turkish economy that a normal election would see him guaranteed to lose power.

And Erdogan is not prepared to accept that.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a statement after the cabinet meeting with the agenda of Russia and Ukraine in Ankara, Turkey, on Feb. 28, 2022. (Presidential Press Office via dia images via Getty Images)

Erdogan, in fact, is just one example of how political parties and leaders have come to take for granted the post-modern view that countries belong to them rather than that they belong to their countries.

Turkey aside, this has been the result of largely republican-style practices of short-term transactions that have seamlessly “bought off” electorates so that populations have reverted to becoming subjects of their government rather than government being subject to the electorate.

Thus, “democratic” societies have voted for their own subordination.

New Zealand’s parliamentary election on Oct. 14 determines whether there is a chance for the survival of one of the most important treaties in post-World War II years: the UKUSA Accords (“Five Eyes”) linking the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Absent a “return” of New Zealand, and then Canada (where elections are not required until October 2025), to historical patterns for those countries, the great alliance structure of “the West” would likely move to a new phase and center around a new bloc, AUKUS, the Australia-UK-U.S. accords nations.

Elections have consequences, and frequently not just for the societies that hold them.

Voters in most societies consider only the immediate and local—and often transactional—aspects of their elections rather than the longer-term strategic ramifications. And while the fundamental issue of sovereignty, particularly as it has evolved from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, gives sole control of elections to the sovereign states conducting them, the reality is that external societies may be profoundly affected by them and seek to play a role in them.

There is no mechanism in a “Westphalian world” for these external powers to play a legal influencing role in such elections. So attempts are made in the white (open), grey (indirect and blurred origin), and black (covert and deniable) psycho-political warfare spectra, particularly by major powers, to shape foreign elections to their strategic desires.

The “outcry” in the United States in recent years of “Russian interference” in U.S. elections disguises the reality that it is a practice employed by all major powers, including the United States itself, and is designed to achieve strategic outcomes that would be more desirable than being forced to face a future military situation from a foreign government not of their choosing.

In recent years, the most extensive operations to influence elections around the world, and utilizing advanced cyber operations, have been those of China. This gets to the two largely unspoken and incompatible questions. How do we preserve our sovereignty against foreign interference? How do we ensure that the elections of a foreign country do not damage our nation-state?

Of the three “key”—or globally significant—elections of 2023, it is possible that Turkey will either postpone or cancel its poll, or attempt to shape it in such a way that Erdogan retains office, regardless of popular opinion. There is very little that he could do, short of accepting electoral defeat, which would not cause a reassessment by Turkey’s allies—East or West—as to its position. Even now, there is growing momentum within NATO about whether Turkey should remain a member.

Leaders of member states of NATO line up for a group photograph in Madrid, Spain, on June 29, 2022. (Denis Doyle/Getty Images)

But NATO without Turkey opens the doors to Russian domination of the Black Sea/Mediterranean link, and gives Russia great leverage in the Eastern Mediterranean. And Turkish membership in NATO saves Ankara from subordination to Russia.

The only answer is that, for Turkey to survive and recover, Erdogan must go. But clearly Erdogan is prepared for Turkey to die with him, just as Adolf Hitler insisted that Germany should die with him in 1945. Erdogan, like Chinese leader Xi Jinping, has made himself a lightning rod by eliminating all potential rivals and insisting on being seen as the sole source of power.

That has meant—as with Xi—that he must take the blame for all that goes wrong as well as the praise for all that goes right. And lately, capped with the earthquake that has devastated much of Turkey, little has gone right in Erdogan’s homeland.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.