Autocrat v bureaucrat: Turkey’s crucial vote

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Ora Ogumbi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

If you are a film or television writer in America, welcome. Now you've got some time. Check out our back catalog. See, writers are on strike demanding a fair shake in an industry that isn't as glamorous or as up with the times as you might think.

And mixing cocktails involves equal parts of showmanship, knowledge and art. Do you want to work on your skills? Our in house expert mixologist has his list of the best books to learn from. He's someone you might be familiar with.

First up though, On Sunday, Turkey will go to the polls in what's probably the most important election in the world this year. The country is at a geographic crossroads between Asia, Europe and the Middle east and at a kind of ideological one. A NATO member that's cozy with China and Russia. At its head for more than two decades is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose initially sensible rule has in recent years turned increasingly autocratic. Mr. Erdogan has been leaning on the central bank for years, enforcing some upside down economics. These days, Turks have a currency that's slipping as fast as costs of living are soaring. Now, for the first time in a very long time. Mr. Erdogan and his justice and Development, or AK Party have a plausible challenger, a mild, mannered, bureaucratic opposition leader who just might put Turkey's democracy and its economy back on track.

Today, the election is on knife edge.

Pyotr Zelewski is our Turkey correspondent.

Pollsters give Mr. Erdogan and his rival, Kemal Kirichtarol roughly a 5050 chance of winning the presidency. The parliament also seems to be up for grabs, where Mr. Erdogan to lose it would be a stunning political reversal with global consequences. But he is not going easy.

And so what has Mr. Erdogan been doing to win support in the run up to this vote?

This had been a relatively somber campaign, largely because of the impact of the earthquakes that killed 50,000 people in Southern Turkey in February. This has changed over the past two weeks in the final stretch of the campaign, where especially Mr. Erdogan, but also his coalition partners have deployed increasingly inflammatory rhetoric. Erdogan has accused the opposition of taking orders from terrorists and courting what he called deviant organizations like the LGBT community. His main coalition partner, Devlet Bacheli, recently upped the ante and said that every vote to the opposition headed by Mr. Klizztaroglu's Republican People's Party, or CHP, is a bullet for our soldiers. And perhaps not surprisingly, all that rhetoric has gone in hand with some political violence. In Erzurum, a city in Turkey's east, over a dozen people, including children, were wounded after a mob of presumably government supporters pelted the campaign bus carrying ekrem Imamolu, the CHP's Istanbul mayor, with stones. Earlier that day, Erdogan's AK Party had tried to stop Imamu's rally by cramming over two dozen city buses into the square where it was supposed to be held. The opposition called the attack a government provocation. Mr. Erdogan tried to blame all this on the opposition, Saying that Mr. Imabolu had helped incite the violence and said that the opposition were trying to defame Turkish cities.

And we spoke a couple of months ago about the Turkish opposition and its leader, Mr. Kilic Dearolu, when he was confirmed. How has he handled his campaign since then?

Well, Mr. Kilisharolu had a pretty rocky start before he was officially nominated. One of the leaders of the opposition alliance that he has helped forge over the past couple of years basically walked out. Meral Aksoner, the head of the E, or Good Party, was unhappy with with Mr. Kilicitaroglu as the opposition's candidate and had suggested other names, including that of Ekrem Imamolu, the CHP mayor. Eventually, she was brought back to the table. Mr. Kilistaroglu was in fact confirmed as the opposition's president. And at the end of April, I sat down with Mr. Kilistaroglu to get a sense of how he feels about his chances in the election and what kind of future he sees for a Turkey without Mr. Erdogan in charge.

And so what was he like to meet in person?

Well, it's not the first time I've met Mr. Kilisarolu. This time around, I think he looked a tad more frazzled than usual. He's 74 years old, but rather sprightly 74 years old. He did look somewhat tired, possibly as a result of the punishing election campaign schedule, but was certainly upbeat about his chances in the elections. In fact, he seemed quite confident that he would win, win in round one.

And so what did he promise in the event that he did in fact win?

Kirstar always says that he will heal the divisions that Mr. Erdogan has sowed over the past decade or two. He told me that the country needed reconciliation, But also said that his central priorities were the economy and the rule of law. He has pledged to restore the Central Bank's independence, which has been heavily compromised, to say the least, under Mr. Erdogan, and to bring inflation down to single digits. He also promised to pull Turkey back from the brink of dictatorship. He also told me that power needs to be separated, that it cannot reside with one man. In that vein, he said he wanted to dismantle the executive presidency Mr. Erdogan has imposed on the country and to hand power back to the country's Parliament. Whether he can deliver on this goal is another question.

What do you mean?

Well, in order to come up with constitutional amendments needed to overhaul the executive presidency, the opposition would need to have at least 360 votes in parliament in order to put a revised constitution to a popular referendum. Some polls give the opposition alliance, backed by the hdp, the country's biggest Kurdish party, a narrow majority in Parliament. But I've not seen any poll that shows the opposition anywhere close to 360 votes. So the only chance the opposition would have to make good on its pledge would be to win over disaffected parliamentarians from the AKP or the MHP, the AKP's nationalist coalition partner. Mr. Kilistarolu, says that he would work to do so, but for the time being, the prospect looks highly unlikely. Cohabitation would not look pretty either. Because if the opposition and the HDP were to come up short of a majority in Parliament, a President Kilistarol would probably have no choice but to bypass Parliament and rule by decree. Even so, he says that he will take key decisions with the five other leaders of his alliance and delegate authority to individual ministries.

But all of this is sort of rife with ifs all dependent on what happens on Sunday. I mean, how do you expect things will play out? What are you looking for?

To win in the first round, either candidate Mr. Kilizzarold or Mr. Erdogan would have to receive an outright majority, 50% or more of the vote. That is still quite unlikely, largely because there are two other candidates on the ballot in the first round. Those two candidates can probably expect to receive up to around 5% of the vote. But that 5% might be enough to force the contest into a runoff, which would take place on May 28. Mr. Kilistarolo obviously hopes to win in round one and says that it's also necessary for the country's well being. He said the country Turkey cannot afford to lose more time, That confidence in the economy needs to be restored at home and abroad as soon as possible, that the Turkish lira needs to be allowed to recover, and that the government needs to get to work on luring back foreign investors. The stakes in this election could not be much higher. We're talking about the future course of Turkish foreign policy. We're talking about the future shape of the Turkish economy. But I think what distinguishes this election from previous ones in Turkey is that the opposition actually has a chance, the first chance in a Generation to unseat Mr. Erdogan Pioltro.

Thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Back. In 2007, every television and film writer in America went on strike. At the time, Heroes was a big talked about appointment viewing show.

Do you ever get the feeling like you were meant to do something extraordinary? Yes.

We are all special.

The strike lasted a hundred days and some people say it killed Heroes off. In part, the sticking point was how writers would be paid when their works made it onto DVDs. Remember, those other demands dealt with what was lumped under new media. Now, 15 years later, those new media aren't so new anymore. And Hollywood writers have once again put down their pens.

Every three years, the alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is the trade group for the studios, negotiates a new contract with the Writers Guild of America, which is the writers union.

Aaron Braun is our U.S. west coast correspondent.

This is a normal thing. They talk about everything from parental leave to pensions to pay. But this year, talks began and ended acrimoniously because of how streaming in particular has upended business models and working conditions.

Corporate greed has got to go.

Hey, hey, hold up.

So the Writers Guild voted to strike if negotiations failed. And on May 2, hours after their contract expired, that's exactly what they did.

And I know you were on the ground. What was the feeling among the striking writers?

I went out to the picket lines on Tuesday, and the very first shift of writers that decided to pick it, the mood was high. People were pretty excited, I think, to be out there and believed in their cause.

We asked them.

I talked to a bunch of writers outside of CBS's Television City in Central Los Angeles.

I've been writing professionally since about 2001, but I really started making a career of it in the mid 2010s.

Bill walkoff is a writer and a producer for the show Star Trek. Strange New Worlds. How long have you lived in LA and been a television writer?

Sorry.

No, it's okay. It's emotional.

I've lived in Los Angeles since 1995. The reason I'm emotional is because this is so important and we have to make this work stoppage because we can't have careers anymore. And this work stoppage affects not just us, it affects everybody in this town. That's why I'm emotional and I'm mad as hell that the studios and companies never meaningfully engaged with our reasonable proposals and just stonewalled us for months.

And Bill makes a good point. This strike will affect the whole industry beyond the 11,500 unionized members of the Writers Guild.

What do you mean by that? What are we likely to see, or maybe not see because of all this?

So what happens when the writers go on strike is it's much more than them kind of putting down their pens in solidarity. Current productions might go on pause, and that affects all kinds of folks who work on set, like camera people and lighting operators and costume designers. New projects can't start production, and non union writers are affected too. Tucker Morgan, a screenwriter who sold his first film to Warner brothers back in 2019, is part of that group.

Even though I'm not a member, if I were to try to sell a script during this strike, you know, I'm crossing the picket line and it can royally mess up my career down the road. So I could accept general meetings maybe, but I shouldn't necessarily be shopping material during this time period, let alone selling it, because if I go to apply to become a union member, which I want to down the road. It can mess things up.

So the effects are going to be really wide ranging. The Milken Institute, which is a think tank in Santa Monica, thinks that the previous straight in 2007 and 2008, which lasted about 100 days, cost California's economy $2.1 billion. And it's not just California that's affected. It's New York. It's film hubs like Atlanta and New Mexico. It's going to have national effects.

But what's curious here is that, well, this isn't new stuff. Streaming is already old. Why has it taken so long for these grievances to bubble over?

Yeah, when I asked industry watchers about this, I kind of got a lesson in the history of Hollywood, and that was that negotiations between the studios and the writers kind of always are behind the times. Tech is constantly disrupting the industry. And we saw that going back 100 years to the introduction of sound, how VHS and DVDs changed what are called residuals, which is how much a writer gets paid when their work is rebroadcast and now streaming. And writers are also worried about the effect of AI on their jobs. So there's kind of this old adage that there's always a crisis in Hollywood.

Okay, and so what will put an end to this? What are the demands of the Writers guild?

So the WGA's demands boil down to two big issues. First is the amount of work on offer. And There are nearly 600 original scripted TV shows in 2022, which is more than ever before. But in the age of streaming, more content does not equal more work necessarily. So writers rooms, which is where writers kind of try to wrangle their ideas into scripts and bounce ideas off each other, last for fewer weeks, and employ fewer writers. In the past, and one thing that writers continually talked to me about was this trend of using mini rooms, which is where a few writers will map out several episodes before a show even gets the green light. And so those mini rooms might only last for weeks at a time. And the writers view this as kind of an obvious cost cutting measure. The second big problem that writers are concerned with is residuals. In the age of streaming, you can rebroadcast something anytime you want. And so writers argue that the industry hasn't found a way or doesn't want to find a way to equitably adjust their payment system to account for this really big change.

And what I remember from the last Hollywood strike is a lot of People, a lot of viewers, customers, if you, like, squawked that, you know, all these Hollywood writers have a plush life as it is. And what are they squawking about?

Yeah, this is something that I talk to a lot of writers about, whether they were kind of awake to the perception of their jobs. And they told me that it's not all it's cracked up to be. They're just trying to eke out a middle class living, basically. And Bill Walkoff, who we heard from earlier, felt really strongly about dispelling this myth.

I want people to know that writers are fighting for a normal middle class life. This is not about super rich people fighting for mansions. Far, far from it.

It's also true that LA is a very expensive city to live in. So what it costs to be middle class in Los Angeles is very different than what it costs to be middle class somewhere else. It's the fourth most expensive city in the world according to an annual cost of living survey. And one writer who I talked to told me that he knows people who finish projects and immediately start driving for Uber. It really kind of seems like with writers rooms getting shorter and fewer writers working in them, that the gig economy has come to Hollywood.

And what about the studio's perspective on all of this? How do they see all of the economics of this stacking up?

So the strike is coming at a really interesting time for the studios. We've seen big tech firms in recent months announcing layoffs and kind of worrying about profit margins. And the film industry, which includes a bunch of tech giants these days, is really worried about making a profit. Before COVID 19 theatrical releases accounted for a huge chunk of a studio's revenues for a big budget film. And Americans are going to the movies again, but not in the numbers that we saw before the pandemic. Netflix recently said it would restructure to focus on fewer and better films. And some analysts I talked to suspected that we might see a big drop in investments in the industry in general.

So in a way, everybody has their reasons to stand firm here. How do you see this playing out?

Yeah, I think that there is a big gap between where the studios are and where the writers are. And so people are predicting a pretty long strike, unfortunately. And even if and when the strike is resolved, I think the nature of the industry means that conflicts like this are destined to keep popping up every few years.

Thanks very much for your time, Erin.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

We're always trying to improve our podcasts and we'd like your help whether you're a loyal fan or a new listener. We want to hear from you. Do us a big favor and tell us what you think by filling out our listener questionnaire. Come on, it'll only take a couple of minutes. Just head to economist.com intelligencesurvey.

Is this where I say that you've.

Got the best job in the world, Jason? I mean, if this is on the clock, I'll take it. Sorry. I got into cocktails actually in part because of a piece of furniture.

You already know who Jason Palmer is. He doesn't need an introduction, but you might not know that he's actually a bit of an expert when it comes to cocktail making.

We had lived in a number of flat shares with a whole bunch of people where the only booze offering was some dusty bottles on top of the fridge. And I said I wanted a real sideboard. But then I didn't really know what to put in it, didn't really know how to make drinks. So I started looking into it. It's surprisingly easy. There's a bit of an art to it, there's a bit of science to it, but really is very accessible. And I found my way in part by collecting some books and reading up on it. So there are a few books that can take any amateur as I was to, I don't know, call it a budding expert.

The joy of mixology by gary regan.

The Joy of Mixology is a book a little bit about everything, the whole craft, including the professional bartending and how you deal with rowdy customers and the whole works. But for the home bartender, the core principle is really a quote in it. Read this book and you'll be able to feel your way through mixing a drink. It's not about just recipes and strong rules. It's a feel knowing connected drinks, understanding the boozes that are used. There is a certain sort of sixth sense here that I think Gary Regan really brings out. Regan uses the example of the Rob Roy very simple drink with three ingredients, Scotch, vermouth and bitters, but says that which ones you use really matter a lot and if you have that feel, you'll know which ones to use. So today I'm using Pendarin, which is a fairly light bodied, actually a Welsh on a Scotch whisky. For the vermouth I've got Carbono Classico pretty straight down the line. And for the bitters, because of some advice I got long ago from a different book, Patience. Now the thing that's really handy about this book is a chapter called Birds of a Feather. Really a Series of tables that shows you how all these classic drinks you've heard of are actually connected. It makes it really easy to figure out how to make a drink that's very like one you already know, but that you've never made before. You're half of a Rob Roy, sir. Why, thank you. Is that an honorable thing to do to a single malt?

I'll allow it.

The Bar Book by Jeffrey Morgenthaler.

The Bar Book is really one of the only books that's just about techniques, how to do stuff. It's much less about recipes, though it has some time for a lemon garnish. It's laid out in the order that Jeffrey Morgenthaler thinks about making drinks, which is sourcing the ingredients right up to at the end, actually garnishing the drink. You learn really quite a lot along the way about how to do things. So I've chosen the White lady, which, if you look at the original Hary Craddock recipe from 1930, there's no egg white in it. But that's just how you tend to get it in bars. Tastes change. This is the thing. There is no right way and there's no set in stone way with these things. The interesting thing about eggs, and Jeffrey Morgenthaler goes into this in some detail, is how to get the best out of them, how to get the very best foam at the end.

Liquid Intelligence by Dave Arnold.

When I made the White Lady, I did something called a reverse dry shake, pouring off the drink and getting rid of the ice. One more shake to give better foam that's noisy that way. Most of what I've learned about egg science I learned from Dave Arnold's book. It is so filled with science. He's done the experiments to prove why you should shake a drink for 10 seconds and not necessarily more. And also doesn't matter how you shake it, he gives you a real scientific basis for why things are done or why they should be done differently.

Imbibe by David Wondrich.

David Wondrich is unquestionably the best cocktail historian in the business. And this, like his other books, well annotated, well researched. He's gone through every newspaper clipping and advert and bar napkin in history to come up with a story which is ostensibly about Jerry Thomas, the first really flashy American bartender. And you can see in the story he tells how the history of cocktails is really messy. A lot of it is folk history, half remembered things, but he pieces it together as best you can. And from his book, I'm going to choose the Saratoga, which is an equal parts drink of rye whiskey, cognac and sweet vermouth. Now what I like about the Saratoga is it is the predecessor to one of my favorite drinks in the world, the Vieux Carrel, mispronounced as all New Orleans drinks are in bad French, which if you just add a little bit of Peychaud's bitters and a bar spoon of Benedictine, you've got a whole new drink. Last one, new animal.

Wow.

That's good.

That's really good. It is a princely drink.

The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, edited by David Wondrich and Noah Rothborm.

This is a monster of a book. It is the encyclopedia for this stuff. The Oxford Companion exists also for beer and for wine. The cocktail one just came out and is a delight to read. It's a little bit of everything. It's famous bars, it's famous bartenders, it's famous drinks, it's famous ingredients. It's a lot of history and cocktail culture in a doorstop of a book. So taken together, these books will tell you kind of how to get into things, will show you how actually straightforward a lot of it is, will give you a coupet sized dose of the history and culture behind it all. The advice I would give is to try lots of things, take notes, mark down what you like and what you don't, look past the marketing and try to stop before your notes get too sloppy.

I'll drink to that.

Why not? Shall we have another drink?

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com and if.

You'Re not a subscriber to the Economist, you really are missing out. Dive in with the deal we've got going on now though. A free 30 day digital subscription. Just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer or click the link in the show Notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Sam.