The mild-mannered team leaders from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe put it with their usual circumspection: the Turkish constitutional referendum on 16 April “took place on an unlevel playing field”. I’ll say.
Enormous sums of public money were spent by the Yes campaign on television advertising. Every town in Turkey was hung with vast banners showing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the word “Evet”, meaning “yes”. By contrast, you had to search hard to find any sign of a No campaign: an occasional banner in more or less safe spots such as central Istanbul, stickers that some brave soul had pasted up on a wall, a couple of nervous kids handing out leaflets near the sanctuary of the modest No headquarters. It felt like an underground movement.
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