President Donald Trump mocked Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his state visit to the White House on Thursday, saying he is well acquainted with “rigged elections.”
Trump opened his remarks during a bilateral press conference with Erdogan in the Oval Office by noting that Erdogan remained his friend when he was in “exile” following the 2020 election, which Trump maintains was “rigged” in favor of former President Joe Biden.
He then mocked Erdogan, who is in his third decade of power between his previous time as Turkey’s prime minister and current tenure as president, stating, “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody.”
As Breitbart News has noted, Erdogan has imprisoned political dissidents, stymied potential opposition, and silenced dozens of media organizations that would not carry water for his regime throughout his more than 20 years in power. International observers criticized the most recent Turkish presidential election, between Erdogan and Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in May 2023, as neither fair nor free.
“This was the most unfair election period in our history,” Kılıçdaroğlu said in the aftermath of the election and implied that Erdogan embraced means of intimidation to hold his office.
“We did not bow down to the climate of fear. In this election, the will of the people to change an authoritarian government became clear despite all the pressures,” he said.
Another prominent opposition leader, former co-leader of Turkey’s Pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party Selahattin Demirtas, has been imprisoned since 2016 and was forced to run for president from prison in 2018. He was sentenced to another 42 years in prison in 2024, eight years after his original arrest, on dubious charges.
The Turkish government saddled Demirtas with dozens of criminal charges, with many tied to alleged riots in response to attacks from the Islamic State on Kobane, a Kurdish city in Northeast Syria, in 2014.
“Turkish Kurds wanted their government to establish a corridor from Turkey’s Kurdistan region to the besieged city so it could receive humanitarian and military assistance. The Turkish government refused, enraging Turkish Kurds who could literally see the fighting in Kobane on the horizon from their homes,” Hayward noted.
The 2024 conviction came after Demirtas was sentenced to an additional three and a half years in prison in 2021 when he was found guilty of “insulting the president,” according to his lawyer, Ramazan Demir, at the time. The sentence reportedly stemmed from Demirtas’s 2015 remark that Erdogan “fluttered from corridor to corridor” in hopes of a photo opportunity with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kılıçdaroğlu’s successor as potential CHP presidential candidate, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, was arrested in March on charges of alleged corruption just days before his nomination.
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