Turkey's Political Landscape: Lessons from the 2023 Presidential Elections.

The re-election of Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey's 2023 presidential elections is a devastating exposure of all the pseudo-left political organizations that supported Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as a supposedly “left” or “democratic” candidate against Erdoğan. Erdoğan resorted to media censorship, police-state repression, and the illegal use of state resources to win the election. Erdoğan won the election due to the political bankruptcy of the bourgeois opposition led by Kılıçdaroğlu and, above all, the Kurdish nationalist HDP and the pseudo-left parties that lined up behind him. The main lesson of the 2023 elections in Turkey is that the working class needs its own revolutionary leadership in order to struggle against capitalism, police-state rule, austerity, and war.