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      Turkey’s Erdogan Woos Voters in Re-Election Campaign

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      President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rock star appeal at his election rallies, promising to lead Turkey to claim its rightful place as a global power if he is re-elected in a runoff on Sunday.ISTANBUL — His campaign addresses begin softly, drawing the audience in. A devout Muslim, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan frequently says he seeks to please not just the Turkish people, but also God. Playing to the crowds, he sings folk songs, recites lines from local poets or drapes the sash of the local soccer team over his shoulders.He sometimes wades into the throngs of supporters for photos or greets children, who kiss his hands. Then he takes the podium to speak, dressed in a suit or a plaid sports coat.To the cheers and whistles of hundreds of transportation workers at a campaign rally last week, he laid out why they should keep him in power in a runoff on Sunday. He boasted that he had improved the country’s roads and bridges, raised wages and offered tax breaks to small businesses.He also vowed to keep fighting forces that he deemed enemies of the nation, including gay rights activists, to make Turkey “stronger in the world.” And he bashed the leaders of the opposition who are seeking to unseat him, accusing them of having entered “dark rooms to sit and bargain” with terrorists because they won the support of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party.“We take refuge only in our God and we take our orders from our nation,” the president said. The crowd roared and men leaped to their feet, chanting, “Turkey is proud of you!”Mr. Erdogan, 69, came out ahead in the toughest political fight of his career on May 14 — the first round of the presidential election. Since then, he has kept a busy schedule in the run-up to final vote.In multiple appearances a day and in speeches that sometimes last 40 minutes, he has stuck to themes that have served him well during his two decades as Turkey’s leading politician. He bills himself on the campaign trail as the leader needed to shepherd a rising nation struggling to beat back multiple threats so it can claim its rightful place as a global power.Listening to Mr. Erdogan at the Justice and Development Party headquarters in Ankara, the day after the first round of voting.Necati Savas/EPA, via ShutterstockIn the first round of voting, Mr. Erdogan failed to win the majority he needed for an outright victory. But with 49.5 percent of the vote, he did beat his main challenger, the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who got 44.9 percent.Many analysts predict Mr. Erdogan will win on Sunday given his strong showing in the first round and his subsequent endorsement by the third-place candidate, Sinan Ogan, who received 5.2 percent of the vote and was eliminated from the race.In grand terms, the president casts Turkey as being in a great struggle to rise in spite of forces conspiring to keep it down, and he invites voters to join him in this heroic national cause.He vows to fight “imperialists,” a code word for the West that recalls the fight for independence from European powers that led to Turkey’s founding 100 years ago. He warns of “traps” and “plots” against the nation, like the attempted coup against him in 2016. He speaks out against “economic hit men” and “loan sharks in London,” hinting at foreign hands behind Turkey’s economic struggles. And he blasts terrorist organizations, pointing to decades of bloody battles between the government and militants from Turkey’s Kurdish minority.To tout his government’s accomplishments, he lauds the infrastructure, calling out airports, tunnels and bridges by name and reminding voters how new highways have cut drive times between cities. Other oft-cited points of pride are the drones, warships and satellites produced by Turkey’s growing defense industry.Mr. Erdogan spends little time on the country’s economic woes, including annual inflation that peaked above 80 percent last year and remained stubbornly high at 44 percent last month, greatly reducing the purchasing power of ordinary citizens. Nor has he hinted that in victory he would revise policies that some economists say have left the economy vulnerable to a possible currency crisis or recession.The president particularly relishes belittling his challenger, Mr. Kilicdaroglu, who pitched himself to voters as less imperious and more in touch with the concerns of common people. Mr. Kilicdaroglu promised to strengthen Turkish democracy following years of a slide toward autocracy, and to repair relations with the West.A campaign poster for the Turkish opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, in Istanbul on Monday.Sedat Suna/EPA, via ShutterstockIn nearly every speech, Mr. Erdogan dismisses his rival as incompetent and as a servant of Western powers. But his most potent line of attack has been to link the opposition, in voters’ minds, with terrorism.Turkey has fought for decades with Kurdish militants seeking autonomy from the state. Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider them terrorists. The Turkish government has also often accused the country’s main pro-Kurdish party of collaborating with the militants, and many party members and leaders have been jailed or removed from elected posts in parliament or city councils.In the run-up to the election, the pro-Kurdish party endorsed Mr. Kilicdaroglu, and Mr. Erdogan pounced, leveling terrorism accusations and even showing videos at campaign rallies that falsely showed militant leaders singing along to an opposition campaign song.“Can any benefit come to my nation from those who are going around hand in hand with terrorists?” Mr. Erdogan said at one rally in Hatay Province, one of the areas hardest hit by the February earthquakes that killed more than 50,000 people in southern Turkey.For his staunchest supporters, who tend to be working class, rural, religious or from smaller cities away from the coasts, Mr. Erdogan has rock star appeal.His campaign anthems blare as his supporters crowd into stadiums to await his appearance. The orange and blue flags of his governing Justice and Development Party are often strung up overhead.During appearances in the quake-hit region, campaign organizers flooded audiences with Turkish flags, turning otherwise drab expanses of temporary shelters into seas of red and white.Mr. Erdogan addressing supporters at a hospital opening ceremony in Hatay Province. The photograph was released by the presidential press office.Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Turkish Presidency, via ReutersMr. Erdogan acknowledged some criticisms that his government was initially slow to respond. Calling the quakes the “disaster of the century,” he spoke of a newly built hospital and his government’s plans to build hundreds of thousands of homes in the area in the next year.“With your support and your prayers, we will bring you to your new homes,” he told supporters in Hatay.In recent appearances, Mr. Erdogan has put his connection with voters in almost romantic terms.“Don’t forget, we are together not until Sunday, but until the grave,” he told supporters in the central province of Sivas, where he won more than two-thirds of the vote in the first round.Even opposition supporters acknowledge Mr. Erdogan’s strong bond with his constituents.“He has been in power for a very long time and he is very good at delivering a message,” said Gulfem Saydan Sanver, a Turkish political consultant who has advised members of the opposition. “Over the years, he has built trust with his voters, and they believe whatever he says.” More

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      How Erdogan Reoriented Turkish Culture to Maintain His Power

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      At the final sundown before the first round of voting in the toughest election of his two-decade rule, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey visited Hagia Sophia for evening prayers — and to remind his voters of just what he had delivered.For nearly a millennium the domed cathedral had been the epicenter of Orthodox Christianity. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it became one of the Islamic world’s finest mosques. In the 1930s, the new Turkish republic proclaimed it a museum, and for nearly a century its overlapping Christian and Muslim histories made it Turkey’s most visited cultural site.President Erdogan was not so ecumenical: In 2020 he converted it back into a mosque. When Turks return to the ballot box this Sunday for the presidential runoff, they will be voting in part on the political ideology behind that cultural metamorphosis.Join the crowds at the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque now, leaving your shoes at the new long racks in the inner narthex, and you can just about glimpse the mosaics of Christ and the Virgin, today discreetly sheathed with white curtains. The famous marble floor has been upholstered with thick turquoise carpet. The sound is more muffled. The light’s brighter, thanks to golden chandeliers. Right at the entrance, in a simple frame, is a presidential proclamation: a monumental swipe at the nation’s secular century, and an affirmation of a new Turkey worthy of its Ottoman heyday.“Hagia Sophia is the crowning of that neo-Ottomanist dream,” said Edhem Eldem, professor of history at Bogazici University in Istanbul. “It’s basically a transposition of political and ideological fights, debates, polemical views, into the realm of a very, very primitive understanding of history and the past.”In the 1930s, the new Turkish republic made Hagia Sophia, which, over the centuries, had been a cathedral and a mosque, into a museum. In 2020 President Erdogan made it a mosque again. Bradley Secker for The New York TimesBradley Secker for The New York TimesBradley Secker for The New York TimesIf the mark of 21st-century politics is the ascendancy of culture and identity over economics and class, it could be said to have been born here in Turkey, home to one of the longest-running culture wars of them all. And for the past 20 years, in grand monuments and on schlocky soap operas, at restored archaeological sites and retro new mosques, Mr. Erdogan has reoriented Turkey’s national culture, promoting a nostalgic revival of the Ottoman past — sometimes in grand style, sometimes as pure kitsch.After surviving a tight first round of voting earlier this month, he is now favored to win a runoff election on Sunday against Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the candidate of the joint opposition. His resiliency, when poll after poll predicted his defeat, certainly expresses his party’s systematic control of Turkey’s media and courts. (Freedom House, a democracy watchdog organization, downgraded Turkey from “partly free” to “not free” in 2018.) But authoritarianism is about so much more than ballots and bullets. Television and music, monuments and memorials have all been prime levers of a political project, a campaign of cultural ressentiment and national rebirth, that culminated this May on the blue-green carpets beneath Hagia Sophia’s dome.Some mosaics with Christian imagery are now discreetly covered by white curtains.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesOn the eve of the first round of voting President Erdogan visited Hagia Sophia for Maghrib prayers. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/PPO, via ReutersOutside Turkey, this cultural turn is often described as “Islamist,” and Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., have indeed permitted religious observances that were once banned, such as the wearing of head scarves by women in public institutions. A Museum of Islamic Civilizations, complete with a “digital dome” and light projections à la the immersive Van Gogh Experience, opened in 2022 in Istanbul’s new largest mosque.Yet this election suggests that nationalism, rather than religion, may be the true driver of Mr. Erdogan’s cultural revolution. His celebrations of the Ottoman past — and the resentment of its supposed haters, whether in the West or at home — have gone hand in hand with nationalist efforts unrelated to Islam. The country has mounted aggressive campaigns for the return of Greco-Roman antiquities from Western museums. Foreign archaeological teams have had their permits withdrawn. Turkey stands at the bleak vanguard of a tendency seen all over now, not least in the United States: a cultural politics of perpetual grievance, where even in victory you are indignant.For this country’s writers, artists, scholars and singers, facing censorship or worse, the prospect of a change in government was less a matter of political preference than of practical survival. Since 2013, when an Occupy-style protest movement at Istanbul’s Gezi Park took direct aim at his government, Mr. Erdogan has taken a hard turn to authoritarian rule. Numerous cultural figures remain imprisoned, including the architect Mucella Yapici, the filmmakers Mine Ozerden and Cigdem Mater, and the arts philanthropist Osman Kavala. Writers like Can Dundar and Asli Erdogan (no relation), who were jailed during the purges that followed a failed military coup against Mr. Erdogan in 2016, live in exile in Germany.This election suggests that nationalism, rather than religion, may be the true driver of Mr. Erdogan’s cultural revolution. Bradley Secker for The New York TimesMore than a dozen musical concerts were canceled last year, among them a recital by the violinist Ara Malikian, who is of Armenian descent, and a gig by the pop-folk singer Aynur Dogan, who is Kurdish. The tensions reached a grim crescendo this month, shortly before the first round of voting, when a Kurdish singer was stabbed to death at a ferry terminal after declining to sing a Turkish nationalist song.In the days after the first round of voting, I met with Banu Cennetoglu, one of the country’s most acclaimed artists, whose commemoration of a Kurdish journalist at the 2017 edition of the contemporary art exhibition Documenta won acclaim abroad but brought aggravation at home. “What is scary right now compared to the 90s, which was also a very difficult time, especially for the Kurdish community, is that then we could guess where the evil was coming from,” she told me. “And now it could be anyone. It is much more random.”For the Turkish artist Banu Cennetoglu, Istanbul has become a city of self-censorship. “But even if you don’t speak,” she says, “you can be the next one.”Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesThe strategy has worked. Independent media has shrunk. Self-censorship is rife. “All the institutions within art and culture have been extremely silent for five years,” Ms. Cennetoglu said. “And for me this is unacceptable, as an artist. This is my question: when do we activate the red line? When do we say no, and why?”Nationalism is nothing new in Turkey. “Everybody and his uncle is a nationalist in this country,” Mr. Eldem observed. And the Kemalists — the secular elite who dominated politics here for decades until Mr. Erdogan’s triumph in 2003 — also used nationalist themes to spin culture to their political ends. Turkey’s early cinema glorified the achievements of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Archaeological digs for Hittite antiquities aimed to provide the new republic with a past rooted even more deeply than Greece and Italy.Edhem Eldem at his home in Istanbul. “When it comes to heritage, the uses of the past, he’s not very different from his predecessors,” the historian says. “He’s just more efficient.”Bradley Secker for The New York TimesIn the 2000s, Mr. Erdogan’s blend of Islamism and reformism had Turkey knocking at the door of the European Union. A new Istanbul was being feted in the foreign press. But the new Turkish nationalism has a different cultural cast: proudly Islamic, often antagonistic, and sometimes a little paranoid.One of the signal cultural institutions of the Erdogan years is the Panorama 1453 History Museum, in a working-class district west of Hagia Sophia, where schoolchildren discover the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in a painted cyclorama. At one point, a painting in the round might have been immersion enough. Now it’s been souped up with blaring video projections, a wildly nationalist pageant styled like the video game “Civilization.” Kids can watch Sultan Mehmed II charge toward Hagia Sophia, while his horse rears up in front of a celestial fireball.Visitors to Panorama 1453, a history museum founded in 2009, whose 360-degree mural celebrates the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesAn immersive video animation depicts the Ottoman victory over the Byzantine Empire.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesSultan Mehmed II rears for battle.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesThere’s a similar backward projection in Turkey’s television dramas, which are hugely popular not just here but internationally, with hundreds of millions of viewers throughout the Muslim world, in Germany, in Mexico, all over. On shows such as “Resurrection: Ertugrul,” an international hit about a 13th-century Turkic chieftain, or “Kurulus: Osman,” a “Game of Thrones”-esque Ottoman saga airing every Wednesday here, past and present start to merge.“They are casting the discourse of Tayyip Erdogan in the antique ages,” said Ayse Cavdar, a cultural anthropologist who’s studied these shows. “If Erdogan faces a struggle right now, it is recast in an Ottoman context, a fictional context. In this way, not the knowledge about today’s struggle, but the feeling of it, is spread through society.”A still from “Kurulus: Osman,” starring Burak Ozcivit as Osman I, the first sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish historical dramas are popular not just at home but abroad.ATVIn these half-historical soap operas, the heroes are decisive, brave, glorious, but the polities they lead are fragile, teetering, menaced by outsiders. Ms. Cavdar noted how frequently the TV shows feature leaders of an emerging, endangered state. “As if this guy has not been governing the state for 20 years!” she said.Culture came on the agenda during the runoff, too, as Mr. Erdogan showed up to inaugurate the new home of Istanbul Modern. The president had praise for the new Bosporus-side museum, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano — but he couldn’t help bashing the creations of the previous century, with what he described as a misguided abandonment of the Ottoman tradition.Now, the president promised, an authentic “Turkish century” was about to dawn.Assuming he wins on Sunday, his neo-Ottomanism will have survived its strongest test in two decades. The cultural figures with the most to regret are of course those in prison, but it will also be a bitter outcome for the academics, authors and others who left the country in the wake of Mr. Erdogan’s purges. “A.K.P.’s social engineering can be compared to monoculture in industrial agriculture,” said Asli Cavusoglu, a young artist who recently had a solo show at New York’s New Museum. “There is one type of vegetable they invest in. Other plants — intellectuals, artists — are unable to grow, and that’s why they leave.”Back issues of Agos, the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper edited by Hrant Dink, a journalist assassinated in Istanbul in 2007. His home has been converted into a memorial museum.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesNayat Karakose, coordinator of the museum, in Hrant Dink’s office. “In the past we were able to cooperate more with universities, but now it’s almost impossible,” she said.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesTurkey’s minorities may face the greatest hazards. At the memorial museum for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist assassinated in 2007, I looked through copies of his independent newspaper and watched footage of his television chat shows, each an admonishment of contemporary Turkey’s constricted freedom of expression. “Civil society actors are becoming more prudent,” said Nayat Karakose, who oversees the museum and is of Armenian descent. “They do events in a more cautious way.”For Mr. Eldem, who has spent his career studying Ottoman history, the reconversion of Hagia Sophia and the “Tudors”-style TV dramas are all of a piece, and are less confident than they seem. “Nationalism is not just glorification,” he said. “It’s also victimization. You can’t have proper nationalism if you’ve never suffered. Because suffering gives you also absolution from potential misconduct.”“So what the naïve Turkish nationalist, and especially neo-Ottomanist nationalist, wants,” he added, “is to bring together the idea of a glorious empire that would have been benign. That’s not a thing. An empire is an empire.”But whether or not Mr. Erdogan wins the election on Sunday, there are headwinds that no amount of cultural nationalism can stand against: above all, inflation and a currency crisis that has bankers and financial analysts flashing a red alert. “In that future, there’s no place for heritage,” Mr. Eldem said. “The Ottomans are not going to save you.”Hagia Sophia has been the epicenter of Orthodox Christianity, one of the Islamic world’s finest mosques and, for decades, a museum that was Turkey’s most visited cultural site. Now it is called the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque.Bradley Secker for The New York Times More

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      The Strategic Fashioning of Casey DeSantis

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      With an eye to the Kennedys, and the Trumps. Sometimes, a wardrobe is a strategy.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has finally, officially, entered the presidential race. The long-anticipated Trump-DeSantis matchup is about to hit prime time. Which means that so, too, is what Mr. DeSantis himself called in his recent book, “The Courage to Be Free,” the “Ron and Casey traveling road show,” a Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago by way of Disney series that is now going national. And while Mr. DeSantis may be the nominal star, it is his wife, in her supporting role, who has been making the most notable entrances.At least judging by the previews that have been playing for the past few months at most of Mr. DeSantis’s major public events, including his re-election night celebration in November 2022, his inauguration in January, his State of the State speech in March and his trip to Japan last month. Throughout, Ms. DeSantis, 42, a former television news anchor, mother of three and breast cancer survivor, has demonstrated a facility with the power of the visual statement, and the way it can tap into the national hive mind, that has been as strategic, and big picture, as that of any political spouse in modern memory.“She understands the image game and how to play it,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist who masterminded communications for the confirmation of the Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch. “How to maximize the levers of attention and the media.”Put another way, while Mr. DeSantis may be talking presidential policy, Ms. DeSantis has been making him look the part, primarily by “dressing her part,” said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.” By using all sorts of synaptic cues to connect what we see to what we think, she triggers associations with terms like “Kennedy” and “Trump” and even “royalty” — not as odd a grouping as it may first appear, given that Kennedy was the first TV president, Trump the first reality TV president and Ms. DeSantis clearly a student of both.Ms. DeSantis with her husband at a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister in Tokyo in April, wearing an ice blue Badgley Mischka dress that looks similar to …Pool photo by Eugene Hoshiko… the ice blue dress Jacqueline Kennedy wore to meet Prime Minister Nehru in the gardens of the presidential palace in New Delhi in 1962.Getty ImagesShe has the bouncing, glowing Breck locks of Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” (the 1991 animated version) and Catherine, Princess of Wales mixed up with the full-skirted pastel wardrobe of a well-mannered debutante, some fleece and a cape or two. She’s “dressing to be either princess of the world or first lady,” said Tom Broecker, the costume designer for “Saturday Night Live” and “House of Cards,” who has made something of an art of studying and replicating the style of first ladies. “There’s so much intentionality and purpose behind everything.”To acknowledge that is not to undercut her substance — the work she has done for mental health, cancer research, hurricane relief — but to credit her with understanding a basic truth of modern campaigning. “Presidential campaigns are M.R.I.s for the soul,” said David M. Axelrod, the founder of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and a former senior adviser to Barack Obama. “Folks are not just evaluating your positions, they are evaluating you as a person.” To that end, he said, “spouses play a really important role in filling out that picture.”Picture, in this case, being the operative word.The Camelot ConnectionThough Ms. DeSantis has always been a considered dresser, a lesson from her days as a local anchor with WJXT in Jacksonville, Fla., when she and Mr. DeSantis met, she has ratcheted up her style over the past year. On election night in 2022, she wore a floor-length gold and yellow one-shoulder ruched gown that made her look as if she were on her way to a state dinner, rather than simply taking the stage in the Tampa Convention Center.It was her outfit on inauguration day in January, however, that really foreshadowed the couple’s ambitions in the public eye: a mint-green dress by Alex Perry, an Australian label, with a built-in cape flowing from the shoulders, worn with white gloves. In its color and line, it seemed to draw its lineage straight from the Kennedy era. This was only compounded by the bright pink dress Ms. DeSantis wore to her husband’s State of the State address, with a portrait neckline and more white gloves, another seeming nod to Jacqueline Kennedy, one of the most recognizable, revered and stylish first ladies in American history. Ditto the ice-blue dress she wore to accompany Mr. DeSantis to Japan, another caped style, this time with floral epaulets at the shoulders.It’s a smart move, even if it can also seem like a cliché (clichés are clichés, after all, because they are part of common parlance). As Michael LaRosa, a communications strategist who was Jill Biden’s spokesman during her husband’s 2020 primary campaign for the White House, said: “Americans love glitz, glamour and attractiveness, celebrities and TV. Casey DeSantis understands all of that.”Déjà vu dressing: (clockwise from top left) Casey DeSantis at the governor’s State of the State address in May; Jacqueline Kennedy on a boat ride in Udaipur, India, in 1962; Mrs. Kennedy at her daughter’s wedding in Hyannis Port, Mass., in 1986; Ms. DeSantis at the her husband’s inauguration in January. Clockwise from top left, Phil Sears/Associated Press; Cecil Stoughton/FK Presidential Library/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; PL Gould/Getty Images; Lynne Sladky/Associated PressBy connecting herself and her husband implicitly to the Kennedy tradition, Ms. DeSantis connects to myriad ideas rooted in the American narrative: youth and generational change (not incidental when two of the other candidates are setting records as the oldest in history), glamour and taste. Blink, and a button deep in the cerebral cortex gets pushed.Never more so than when she dons her capes and gloves, accessories from the costume department freighted with meaning, trailing whiffs of kings and queens as well as old-fashioned morality and gender roles. The clothes both act as a “disguise for how political and strategic she is,” Ms. Brower said, and support her husband’s position as a warrior for conservative values.So while Ms. DeSantis may be, as The New York Post called her, the governor’s “not-so-secret political weapon” and, according to Politico, a “superstar of a political spouse” who is “unusually important and uncommonly involved,” with her own portfolio, the broad-stroke portrait is of the classic helpmeet smiling charmingly in the background.“She has been able to use her position to showcase what they could be,” Mr. Bonjean said.According to Mr. Broecker, she is “manifesting the message.”Beyond TrumpAnd the image-making is not limited to herself. Like Catherine, Princess of Wales, Ms. DeSantis is adept at color-coordinating the couple’s young children for their public appearances, the better to present a snapshot of family unity: the two little girls wearing matching dresses and pinafores, their brother echoing their father. She and Mr. DeSantis even wore matching white rubber shrimp boots when viewing the damage after Hurricane Ian.It all makes for an implicit contrast to the current Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, whose own children have been divided during the campaign (Ivanka staying away, Tiffany largely absent) and whose wife, Melania, has been largely absent since his announcement.Ms. DeSantis wearing a Republican red Trina Turk caped dress at a news conference with Governor DeSantis in Miami in May, 2022, which looked very much like …Joe Raedle/Getty Images… the red caped Givenchy gown Melania Trump wore when she and President Trump attended a dinner with Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in London in 2019.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd though Ms. DeSantis shares a certain style ethos with Ms. Trump, her clothes are more aspirational than elitist, sourced largely from the contemporary, as opposed to luxury, market, with an emphasis on brands like Ted Baker (the blue coat she wore for her husband’s first inauguration), Badgley Mischka (the caped dress and white floral pantsuit she wore in Japan) and Shoshanna (that gold and yellow ruched gown).All of which fits with the more accessible narrative the campaign is building around her — especially when combined with the zip-up athletic jackets with the Florida state flag on the breast that she tends to wear with jeans when meeting constituents on the road.Put another way, both Ms. DeSantis and Ms. Trump may have worn Republican-red caped gowns at different times, but while Ms. Trump’s was Givenchy, Ms. DeSantis’s appears to have been Trina Turk. Ms. Brower called the effect “Melania lite” — easier for most people to digest.Yet Ms. DeSantis also chose a label for her official portrait — Chiara Boni La Petite Robe — that is the unofficial uniform of the women of Trumpland, a favorite of Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Kayleigh McEnany and Jeanine Pirro, thanks to its ability to play to both boss lady and the male gaze. All of which underscores her husband’s pitch that he is the palatable alternative to Trump: familiar, but less baggage.Casey DeSantis in an official portrait as Florida’s first lady, in 2019, wearing Chiara Boni La Petite Robe.Colin HackleyThe DeSantis team declined to comment on Ms. DeSantis’s role, but for those who think her image-making is simply happenstance or a fortuitous coincidence, consider the fact that in his book Mr. DeSantis notes that it was Ms. DeSantis who asked him to wear his naval “dress white uniform” for their wedding, complete with all his medals, though he had planned on wearing a tux.She also held an on-air competition, he wrote, so viewers could vote on what wedding dress she should wear. When it came time to walk down the aisle, Mr. DeSantis wrote, she looked “less like a TV anchor and more like a princess.” Together, however, they looked like nothing so much as cosplay from the triumphant finales of both “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “A Few Good Men.”In other words, from the beginning Ms. DeSantis was thinking about the images that would be captured for posterity and their public repercussions, and “I was happy to defer to my bride on that call,” Mr. DeSantis wrote. Odds are that pattern will continue.After all, when you can deploy a spouse in a primary, Mr. LaRosa said, “it’s the equivalent of having the advantage of two candidates.” You get twice the airtime and twice the eyeballs.Indeed, Mr. Bonjean said, “The team will do everything they can to get attention. And she will be a big part of that.” More

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      Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal?

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      There is a lot about the American electorate that we are only now beginning to see. These developments have profound implications for the future of both the Republican and the Democratic coalitions.Two key Democratic constituencies — the young and the religiously unobservant — have substantially increased as a share of the electorate.This shift is striking.In 2012, for example, white evangelicals — a hard-core Republican constituency — made up the same proportion of the electorate as the religiously unaffiliated: agnostics, atheists and the nonreligious. Both groups stood at roughly 19 percent of the population.By 2022, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (better known as P.R.R.I.), the percentage of white evangelicals had fallen to 13.6 percent, while those with little or no interest in religion and more progressive inclinations had surged to 26.8 percent of the population.Defying the adage among practitioners and scholars of politics that voters become more conservative as they age — millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (those born in 1997 and afterward) have in fact become decidedly more Democratic over time, according to data compiled by the Cooperative Election Study.The graphic below, which is derived from the study, shows a significant increase in voting for House Democratic candidates among Millennials and Gen Z. More

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      Turkey’s Next President Will Win an Economy in Peril

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      A surge in government spending before the election this month and pressure on the country’s currency could hit the economy in coming months, experts say.Inflation in Turkey remains stubborn at 44 percent. Consumers have watched their paychecks buy less and less food as the months tick by. And now, government largess and efforts to prop up the currency are threatening economic growth and could push the country into recession.It’s a tough challenge for whoever wins the runoff election for the presidency on Sunday. And it’s an especially complicated one if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan remains in power because his policies, including some aimed at securing his re-election, have exacerbated the problems.“The relatively strong economy of the past several quarters has been the product of unsustainable policies, so there will most likely be a contraction or recession,” said Brad W. Setser, an expert in global trade and finance at the Council on Foreign Relations.“Working Turks will feel poorer when the lira falls in value,” he said of the local currency. “People will find it harder to find a job and harder to get a salary that covers the cost of living.”In the run-up to the election, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rolled out a range of policies aimed at blunting the immediate effects of inflation on voters. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesEconomic turmoil in Turkey, one of the world’s 20 largest economies, could echo internationally because of the country’s broad network of global trade ties. It will also likely dominate the immediate agenda of whichever candidate prevails in the runoff election on May 28.During Mr. Erdogan’s first 10 years in power, he oversaw dramatic economic growth that transformed Turkish cities and lifted millions of people out of poverty. But some of those gains have been eroded in recent years. The national currency has lost 80 percent of its value against the dollar since 2018. And annual inflation, which reached more than 80 percent at its peak last year, has come down but was still 44 percent last month, leaving many feeling poorer.While economic orthodoxy usually calls for raising interest rates to combat inflation, Mr. Erdogan has insisted on doing the opposite, repeatedly reducing them, which economists say has exacerbated the problem.During his election campaign, Mr. Erdogan showed no intention of changing his policies, doubling down on his belief that low interest rates would help the economy grow by providing cheap credit to increase Turkish manufacturing and exports.“We will work relentlessly until we make Turkey one of the 10 largest economies in the world,” he said at an election rally this month. “If today there is a reality in Turkey that does not allow its pensioners, workers and civil servants to be crushed under inflation, we succeeded by standing back to back with you.”In other rallies, he vowed to continue lowering interest rates and to bring down inflation.“You will see as the interest rates go down, so will inflation” he told supporters in Istanbul in April.In the run-up to the election, with the cost-of-living crisis on many voters’ minds, Mr. Erdogan launched a range of expensive policies aimed at blunting the immediate effects of inflation on voters. He repeatedly raised the minimum wage, increased civil servant salaries and changed regulations to allow millions of Turks to receive early government pensions. All of those commitments must be honored by whomever wins the election, meaning greater government spending into the future.Exacerbating the economic stress is the vast damage caused by the powerful earthquakes that destroyed large parts of southern Turkey in February. In March, a government assessment put the damage at $103 billion, or about 9 percent of this year’s gross domestic product.Rubble of buildings destroyed in Kahramanmaras, Turkey, by the earthquakes that struck in March.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesAt the same time, the government has heavily intervened to slow the decline of the Turkish lira, mostly by selling foreign currency reserves. During one week in early May, the reserves declined by $7.6 billion to $60.8 billion, according to central bank data, the largest such decline in more than two decades.To address that, Mr. Erdogan has reached agreements with countries including Qatar, Russia and Saudi Arabia that would help shore up reserves in Turkey’s central bank. Saudi Arabia announced a $5 billion deposit in March, and Russia agreed to delay at least some of Turkey’s payment for natural gas imports until after the election.The terms of most of these agreements have not been made public, but economists said they were part of a short-term strategy by Mr. Erdogan more focused on winning the election than on ensuring the country’s long-term financial health.Should Mr. Erdogan win, as many analysts expect he will, few expect him to dramatically change course.“I don’t think the current government has a plan to fix this because they don’t admit that these problems are due to policy mistakes,” said Selva Demiralp, a professor of economics at Koc University in Istanbul. “I don’t see a way out for the current government.”A vegetable market in Kayseri, Turkey. Inflation has left many Turkish people feeling poorer.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMr. Erdogan came out ahead in the first round of elections on May 14 with 49.2 percent of the vote but fell short of the majority needed to win outright. The main opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, won 45 percent, and a third candidate, Sinan Ogan, won 5.2 percent. Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Kilicdaroglu will compete in the runoff.Most analysts give Mr. Erdogan an edge because of his strong showing in the first round and the likelihood that he will inherit significant votes from Mr. Ogan, who formally endorsed Mr. Erdogan on Monday. Mr. Erdogan’s political party and its allies also maintained their majority in Parliament, allowing Mr. Erdogan to argue that voters should choose him to avoid a divided government.If Mr. Erdogan sticks to the status quo, economists expect the currency to sink further, the government to impose restrictions on foreign-currency withdrawals and the state to run short of foreign currency to pay its bills.In its campaign, the political opposition promised to follow more orthodox economic policies, including raising interest rates to bring down inflation and restoring the independence of the central bank, whose policies are widely believed to be overseen by Mr. Erdogan himself.A market in Istanbul. Whichever candidate wins Turkey’s runoff election will face a significant economic crisis.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesBut if he becomes president, Mr. Kilicdaroglu will inherit a financial situation that will require immediate attention, economic advisers to opposition parties have said.In addition to honoring the additional spending added by Mr. Erdogan in recent months, a new administration would need to respect his financial arrangements with other countries, the terms of many of which are not clear.“What are the political terms? What are the financial terms?” said Kerim Rota, who is in charge of economic policy for Gelecek Party, a member of the opposition coalition. “Unfortunately, none of those numbers are reflected in the Turkish statistics.”If it came to power, the opposition would need both short- and medium-term plans to bolster the government’s finances and restore the confidence of investors, he said. But restricting its ability to maneuver would be the majority in parliament led by Mr. Erdogan’s party and its allies.“We need a very credible medium-term program, but the question is if the majority of the parliament is on the A.K.P. side, how can you manage a five-year program?” he said, using another name for Mr. Erdogan’s party.Gulsin Harman More

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      Sinn Fein Surges in Local Elections, Highlighting Northern Ireland’s Divide

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      As the party climbs, its rivals, the Democratic Unionists, are stalled, which means any compromise that could revive its power-sharing national government may remain elusive.The Irish nationalist party, Sinn Fein, cemented its status as the largest party in Northern Ireland in local election results counted over the weekend. But rather than break a political deadlock in the North, Sinn Fein’s striking gains may harden the sectarian divide that has long complicated its fragile government.Sinn Fein, the party that has historically called for uniting the North with the Republic of Ireland, gained 39 seats, for a total of 144 council members who oversee services like fixing roads and collecting trash. The Democratic Unionists, who support remaining part of the United Kingdom, managed to hold on to their existing total of 122 seats, a mediocre result that is nevertheless viewed by some in their ranks as vindication of the party’s refusal to enter a power-sharing government since last year.The combination of a surging Sinn Fein and a stalled, but defiant, Democratic Unionist Party, or D.U.P., gives neither side much incentive to compromise in restoring Northern Ireland’s assembly, which collapsed over a year ago after the D.U.P. pulled out in a dispute over the post-Brexit trade rules that govern the territory. And British officials in London seem resigned to continued paralysis, with some predicting there won’t be any movement toward a restored government until the fall.“The picture is one of unionism and nationalism both more hard-line than ever,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of politics at Queen’s University in Belfast. “That doesn’t bode too well for the prospect of power sharing, even if it does get restarted.”The chronic political dysfunction cast a long shadow over last month’s celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. That treaty ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles, by creating a government that balances power between the unionists, who favor remaining part of the United Kingdom, and the nationalists, who favor a united Irish Republic.But the government has been paralyzed for 15 months over the unionists’ claims that the post-Brexit trade arrangements, known at the Northern Ireland protocol, drive a wedge between the North and the rest of the United Kingdom. They called for the British government to all but overturn the protocol.A girl walking on the Catholic side of the peace line that separates the Catholic and Protestant communities in West Belfast.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesPrime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain struck a deal with the European Union in February that modified many of the rules, and he called on the unionists to re-enter the assembly. But the Democratic Unionists have refused, arguing that the changes fall short of the root-and-branch overhaul that they had demanded.Their objection has done nothing to prevent the agreement, known as the Windsor Framework, from being implemented. But it rallied the party’s core voters, who feel increasingly isolated in Northern Ireland, where demographic trends are moving against them. The Catholic population, which tends to be nationalist, has overtaken the Protestant population, which tends to be unionist.While the Democratic Unionists treaded water in the elections, the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party lost 21 seats, a bruising setback that analysts said would discredit its less antagonistic approach to power sharing. The Democratic Unionists also fended off a challenge from the even more hard-line Traditional Unionist Voice.Similarly, the other major Irish nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which does not have Sinn Fein’s vestigial ties to the violent resistance of the Irish Republican Army, lost 20 seats in the election. That leaves Sinn Fein as the overwhelming force among nationalist voters.Sinn Fein first emerged as the largest party in legislative elections last year, a victory that gave it the right to name a first minister in the government, with the runner-up D.U.P. naming a deputy first minister. Sinn Fein’s inability to do that because of the Democratic Unionists’ intransigence has frustrated its voters, who analysts said flocked to the polls in large numbers in these elections to register their disapproval.“Sinn Fein did better than anyone predicted they would, even Sinn Fein,” Professor Hayward said, noting that it was the first election in which the overall nationalist vote was larger than the overall unionist vote.Jeffrey Donaldson, center, the head of the Democratic Unionist Party, in February.Charles Mcquillan/Getty ImagesUntil now, Sinn Fein has campaigned heavily on kitchen-table issues like housing and health care, eschewing a direct appeal for Irish unification. But headlines in Irish nationalist papers this week called on the British government to clarify the conditions under which a poll on Irish unification would be held.Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, Britain’s top official for Northern Ireland must call a referendum if there is clear evidence that people favor breaking away from the United Kingdom and becoming part of a united Ireland. But there is no precise mechanism for measuring that sentiment.The issue of unification is also likely to come up more frequently in the Republic of Ireland, where Sinn Fein comfortably outpolls either of its rivals, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, which currently govern in a unity coalition.“They’re now really on the rise in both North and South,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, a professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. “They’re not big enough to govern on their own in the South, but they’re heading in that direction.” At the moment, Sinn Fein is pressing its advantage: The party’s leader in Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, accepted an invitation from Buckingham Palace to attend the coronation of King Charles III, declaring on Twitter that times had changed.The unionists, on the other hand, are in a familiar cul-de-sac: opposed to the status quo, but unable to propose any viable alternatives.If they continue to spurn the government, analysts say they will continue to bleed support in the broader electorate. But if they drop their opposition, the D.U.P.’s leaders fear they will be outflanked by more hard-line unionist parties.“There’s a bit of a sense of a time warp in Northern Ireland,” Professor Ferriter said. “The D.U.P. is not going to succeed in renegotiating the deal. London is not remotely interested and has already moved on. We could be in for a long, hot and boring summer.” More

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      Erdogan Is Endorsed by Sinan Ogan

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      The support of Sinan Ogan gives the Turkish president a boost as he takes on the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu.The candidate who came in third in Turkey’s presidential election last week announced on Monday that he was endorsing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the runoff vote on Sunday, granting Mr. Erdogan an additional boost against his remaining challenger.Mr. Erdogan, the dominant figure in Turkish politics for 20 years, appears to have an edge in the runoff, whose victor will shape Turkey’s domestic and foreign policies for the next five years. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Erdogan aimed to link himself in voters’ minds with the image of a strong Turkey, with expanding military might and geopolitical clout.Although most polls in the run-up to the initial vote on May 14 showed Mr. Erdogan trailing his main challenger, the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the president overcame voter anger at high inflation and frustration with the government’s initially slow response to catastrophic earthquakes in February to win 49.5 percent of the vote.Mr. Kilicdaroglu, the joint candidate of a coalition of six opposition parties that came together to try to unseat Mr. Erdogan, won 44.9 percent.In his campaign, Mr. Kilicdaroglu vowed to undo Mr. Erdogan’s legacy, which he said had damaged the economy and pushed the country away from democracy and toward one-man rule.The third-place candidate, Sinan Ogan, is a far-right nationalist who defied expectations to win 5.2 percent of the vote, preventing either of the top contenders from winning the simple majority that would have granted instant victory.In an interview with The New York Times after the first-round results were released last week, Mr. Ogan said he was negotiating with figures on both sides of the political divide to decide whom to endorse for the runoff.Sinan Ogan, who came in third in the first round of presidential voting in Turkey, with supporters in Ankara this month.Burhan Ozbilici/Associated PressHe said he was seeking to ensure that the winning candidate adopts nationalist causes, including a scheduled plan to deport millions of refugees and a refusal to cooperate with pro-Kurdish and hard-line Islamist parties that he considers connected to terrorism.In exchange for his endorsement, Mr. Ogan said he wanted a senior post in the new administration, such as vice president.But it remains unclear whether his support will deliver many voters. Mr. Ogan has no significant party apparatus to mobilize his backers, and in the eight days since the election, his hard-right electoral alliance has broken apart.Political analysts said that many voters who chose him in the first round probably did so to protest the top two contenders and so might not vote at all in the runoff.Mr. Erdogan met with Mr. Ogan on Friday, but neither man released details of what was discussed. That same day, Mr. Erdogan said in an interview with CNN that he did not want to bargain with Mr. Ogan.“I am not a person who likes to negotiate in such a manner,” Mr. Erdogan said. “It will be the people who are the kingmakers.”In announcing his endorsement of Mr. Erdogan at a news conference on Monday, Mr. Ogan said nothing of any agreement the men had reached but characterized his impact on the election as a victory for far-right causes.“We uplifted Turkish nationalists to a key role,” he said, listing the major issues facing Turkey as refugees, earthquake preparedness, the economy and the fight against terrorism.“We recommend that those who belittle our voters watch our work more closely,” he said, apparently referring to a change in rhetoric by the opposition after far-right figures such as himself did better in the election than expected. More