Türkiye elections: Here’s what you need to know about diaspora voting

Ferhat Kopuz, a Turkish expat travelling from Istanbul to Sydney, cast the first vote as Türkiye’s presidential and parliamentary elections got underway on Thursday (April 27).

Kopuz exercised his democratic right at the Istanbul International Airport’s customs section, where a booth has been set up for expats entering or exiting the country.

For the Turkish diaspora, voting will run from April 27 to May 9, according to Türkiye’s Supreme Election Council (YSK). Resident citizens will vote in Türkiye on May 14.

Around 3.4 million Turks living abroad are eligible to cast their votes in the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections. Roughly 1.5 million of them exercised their right to vote in the previous election.

Türkiye’s diplomatic missions have set up voting booths at 156 locations in 73 countries, officials said.

“From how things appear, people are more excited to vote than they were in the previous elections. There were long queues when voters were registering themselves in the electoral rolls,” says Bulent Guven, a Turkish-German political scientist who lives in Hamburg.

A majority of the Turkish diaspora lives in Western Europe, where migrant workers settled in the 1960s as part of the post-World War II reconstruction programme. They make up the single-largest Muslim immigrant group in Western Europe.

With over 1.5 million registered diaspora voters, Germany tops the list of countries where Turkish politics will play out at a fever pitch, followed by France, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Regarding factors that shape voter preference, the diaspora has different priorities than their fellow citizens in their home country.

“People here give weightage to Türkiye’s international image, they are proud of the indigenously developed electric car TOGG, proud of the drones and TCG Anadolu, the recently inaugurated warship,” Guven tells TRT World.

Compared to the 61 million registered voters within Turkiye, the diaspora vote might appear to be minuscule, but their stamp of approval can have a decisive impact, as was seen in 2018.

“I think the number of diaspora voters is not going to go down below what we saw in the last elections,” says Mehmet Kose, the former head of YTB, the Presidency of Turks Abroad and Related Communities.

How do Turks vote abroad?

While the diaspora voting begins on April 27, the YSK has set different start dates and periods for various countries depending on their population.

In Amsterdam, Netherlands, voting will kick off on April 29 and run for nine days up to May 7, says Mahmut Burak Ersoy, the Turkish Consul General in Amsterdam.

“The election calendar is different in some countries because of the number of Turks living there. Also, you have to take into account that the Netherlands is not a big country like Germany and travelling short distances is easier,” he tells TRT World.

There are more than 280,000 Turkish registered voters in the Netherlands. Around 150,000 Turks live in and around Amsterdam, but only 40,000 are registered voters, according to the consul general.

People can vote between 9 am and 9 pm at the voting venue - the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center, the largest in the city.

Voters have to bring their Turkish ID cards or some other document, such as a marriage certificate, to prove their identity. At the voting venue, they first go before a five-member board, which checks if the person is registered in the electoral roll of expat Turks.

The board comprises two Turkish government officials and three representatives from the political parties which had received the highest number of votes in the last election.

A rising trend

Over the years, Türkiye has introduced multiple legal amendments to make it easier for expats to vote in the elections.

For instance, Turkish citizens are automatically added to the electoral lists maintained by the Supreme Election Council, and all they have to do is make sure their details show up in electoral lists before the voting starts, explains Kose.

Voters can easily check their information electronically.

But things were not always so easy.

On paper, Turkish expats were given the right to vote in Türkiye’s domestic elections in the 1950s. But procedural difficulties such as the requirement to travel to Türkiye in person for inclusion of name in the electoral roll discouraged expat voters, says Kose.

In the subsequent decades, rules were relaxed, and from 1987 onwards, non-resident Turkish nationals could vote at border crossings while entering or exiting Türkiye during election time. Yet, that was not enough to increase participation.

“Between 1987 and 2011, the maximum number of people who voted at the customs points (border crossings such as airports) was 270,000. It was very small. Sometimes it went as low as 40,000 or 50,000,” says Kose.

The participation rate of expats in the elections surged from 2014 when voting booths were set up in the cities and towns where the Turkish diaspora lives and the process became accessible.

In 2014, only half-a-million votes were cast by the 2.8 million registered voters in the presidential election. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won with 62.5 percent of the expat votes.

The turnout increased in the parliamentary election held the following year as more polling stations were added, and the duration for casting votes increased. More than one million votes were cast.

Erdogan’s AK Party again emerged at the top.

In the 2017 constitutional referendum aimed at streamlining the working of the presidency, the turnout among expats reached 1.4 million voters.

In the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections, which the AK Party once again won, expat participation jumped to more than three million.

Since the 1980s, the Turkish diaspora has put its weight behind centre-right parties, beginning with the Motherland Party led by former prime minister Turgut Ozal, says Guven, the political scientist from Hamburg.

“This conservative-leaning has continued with the emergence of the AK Party, which has received most votes from Turkish citizens living abroad.”

The lack of representation that politicians with Turkish roots get in Europe is perhaps a reason that has propelled the diaspora to have more say in the Turkish elections.

For instance, in the 1990s, there were more Dutch Surinamese politicians than Dutch-Turks in the Netherlands, even though Turks had a larger population. Suriname, a tiny South American nation, has a total population of over half a million.

Anti-Turkish sentiment was particularly visible during Brexit when right-wing politicians fanned lies about a horde of Turkish migrants trying to reach Britain.

Another reason that gives a boost to the diaspora votes could be, under Erdogan's watch, Türkiye has exerted its diplomatic influence internationally as seen with the Ukraine grain deal.