On November 3, 2002, Turkey’s parliamentary elections resulted in a great surprise. The AK Party, which was established almost a year and a half earlier, came to power by receiving 34 per cent of the total votes and winning 363 out of 550 MP’s in the parliament. This was despite being underestimated by both media and other political parties during the election process. There was a common perception in the media that it was not possible for the AK Party to get majority of the votes in the elections since it was newly established and did not have enough power to influence voters. Nevertheless, the AK Party’s victory started an unprecedented era of Turkish political history that still continues.

Indeed, it was not easy for the AK Party to rule the country in the beginning. All actors in the system such as the army, the judiciary, political parties, and, last but not least, media were clearly against the AK Party rule. According to these actors, the AK Party was a threat to Turkey’s modernity and secular values. Moreover, the party’s chairman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was initially banned from running as a candidate in the elections due to a conviction for reciting an “Islamic” poem at a political rally, an act which the Constitutional Court considered to be against laicism in Turkey. It was a therefore a tough beginning to AK Party rule.

Despite this, the AK Party government achieved a difficult goal and the party has been in power for the past 17 years. Under the AK Party’s rule, Turkey made considerable achievements economically and sociologically, and many steps to democratize the country were taken. For instance, the state launched the first Kurdish language TV and radio channels and provided more rights to minorities. Furthermore, the Turkish economy reached the highest growth rate by 2010 as a result of economic reforms. Considering this legacy of the AK Party, what are the possible challenges and opportunities for AK Party rule in the upcoming period?

The first critical issue for the party is renewing itself to become more compatible with the dynamics of new political system.  Turkey switched to a presidential system after the June 2018 general elections, and all political parties are still experiencing some difficulties in understanding the new political dynamics under the presidential system. Since the presidential system requires 50 per cent +1 votes, cooperation between parties will become crucial for success in elections. However, parties still do not seem to understand the new rules of the game. For instance, political party members cannot differentiate between coalitions, requiring unanimity of all participating parties on all issues, and pre-electoral alliances, depending more on restricted cooperation between political parties. As a result, even a small disagreement between political parties are perceived to signal the end of alliances. The AK Party and the MHP experienced this situation in November 2018, and the CHP and the Iyi Party have been experiencing this more recently. Even the CHP and Iyi Party have been experiencing some disagreements, this disagreement may not turn into a break of their alliance as it was claimed. Thus, all parties, including the AK Party, needs to understand these dynamics.

The second eye-catching issue for the AK Party is understanding the sociological transformation of Turkish society over the last 17 years. This transformation has also affected voting behavior and has changed expectations for political parties. Almost all surveys show that the main determinant of voting behavior is no longer the ideology of political party as it was before. Instead, voters are paying more attention to secondary issues such as environmental and youth policies. This new voter profile also focuses on individual gains such as economic benefits. Because of this, the AK Party like all other parties will likely adjust their policy agenda to meet the changing expectations of voters.

The third important issue for the party is rejuvenating its members in preparation for the future. Indeed, the political participation of young people significantly increased during the AK Party rule. The AK Party government also decreased the age of candidacy in parliament from 25 to 18 and has the highest percentage of MP’s between the age of 18-29 in parliament. However, the party needs more youth participation especially in decision-making processes to attract the attention of young people.

Another issue for the party is the emergence of new splinter parties established by previous AK Party politicians. There is an ongoing discussion in the media that these parties may challenge the AK Party and split their votes, which may weaken the party’s position in the political arena. Even if it is too early to measure the impact of these parties on the AK Party government, the ongoing discussions in the media seem to suggest that these parties do not have the potential to break the AK Party’s power in politics. To be sure, if the AK Party pays attention to all these issues, these challenges may become opportunities for the party to maintain its rule in the following years.

A new era in Turkish politics began in September 2019. After a series of long-lasting and uninterrupted elections, there is now a nearly four-year election-free period ahead of Turkey. It is important to discuss the main challenges and opportunities in Turkey’s domestic politics during this term, and to analyze rumors of a potential snap election as alleged by opposition parties.

The first and the most important political issue at the top of the agenda is the consolidation of the presidential system in Turkey. Although it was approved in the April 2017 referendum, Turkey officially switched to a presidential system after the June 24 elections in 2018. The evaluation of the first year under the new system shows that there are some emerging problems, especially in its implementation. The most prominent problem being a lack of coordination between policy-makers and practitioners. Furthermore, bureaucratic problems emerged due to ambiguity in the role and function of new institutions under the system. Moreover, the failure of civil servants in adopting to the new system in some cases show the need for further consolidation of presidential system.

Because of this reason, Vice President of Turkey Fuat Oktay, conducted a series of workshops with bureaucrats, politicians, academics, and journalists to discuss the current problems. The outcome of these workshops show that the main problem is rooted in the implementation stage. As a result, some detailed reports are being prepared that aim to consolidate the presidential system and solve current problems.

The second most important emerging issue in domestic politics is uncertainty over the future of established political alliances. Political parties in Turkey have been facing important shifts in their compositions, and the next four years will also determine the future of many political parties. For example, members of the Nation’s Alliance showed different reactions towards recent incidents in Turkish politics such as appointment of trustees and the HDP’s links with the PKK. Additionally, recent changes in the leading cadre of the Iyi Party will be critical for the party’s position within the Nation’s Alliance.

When it comes to the People’s Alliance, the AK Party and the MHP maintain their cooperation without any significant problem. Nevertheless, the emergence of new parties founded by former AK Party members may create uncertainty in this two-block coalition. Since there are few details about the program and leading cadres of these new parties, it is difficult to predict what their position will be in the new political order.

Indeed, all political parties will face the challenge of both broadening the sphere of their alliances and gaining the support of the masses. Since the next parliamentary and presidential elections are planned for June 2023, parties have enough time to determine their strategies to overcome these challenges. Nevertheless, in the coming period, the AK Party and President Erdoğan will also have the responsibility of solving some deep-rooted problems facing Turkey especially in foreign policy and the economy.  Their success in resolving these problems may be effective in gaining more electoral support from the masses in future elections.

It has been eighteen years since the AK Party was founded in 2001. Contrary to previous splinter party experiences in Turkey, the party was soon able to consolidate its electorate and consequently came to power in 2002. Although none of the previous political parties were able to stay in power for such a long time, the AK Party has been in power for 17 years and is guaranteed to remain in power until 2023.

Since the AK Party is the only example of dominant party in Turkish political life, it is highly crucial to understand the underlying reasons of its success story. To do so, it is necessary to examine the breaking points in the AK Party rule.

The first breaking point was its success in the fight against long-lasting military tutelage and making democratic reforms. When the AK Party came to power, the military was very active in politics and interfered with Turkey’s democracy through a chain of military coups. Thus, the first period of the AK Party rule also suffered from the military’s dominant position in the political arena.

Because of this reason, the AK Party took necessary steps to ensure the consolidation of democracy. Promotion of minority rights, adopting a more pluralistic approach in state apparatuses, and promoting human rights were the key issues in the party’s agenda. “The AK Party embraces all citizens regardless of their gender, ethnicity, beliefs, and worldview without discrimination”, as written in the party program. The party made necessary political and judicial reforms in accordance with this aim.

Between the period beginning with the Gezi Park protests in 2013 and ending in the July 15 coup attempt in 2016, the AK Party struggled to both retain its power and keep the gains of Turkish democracy.

Nevertheless, the party confronted many challenges as a result of these reforms. Especially between 2007–2009, the military, the judiciary, political parties, and NGOs tried to overthrow the AK Party government to sustain their privileged positions in the existing political order. However, the AK Party became successful in the fight against these challenges and survived. The party’s success against these challenges was the second breaking point in the AK Party rule.

After defeating these challenges, the party has faced more serious crises in national and international arena. The period beginning with the Gezi Park protests in 2013 and ending in the July 15 coup attempt in 2016 caused trouble for the party’s rule and survival of Turkish democracy. During this period, the party struggled to both retain its power and keep the gains of Turkish democracy. Although the actions of the party had faced lots of criticism in the public, the party was able to handle the third breaking point successfully.

It is obvious that there will be more breaking points for the AK Party which will determine its future position in Turkish politics. Since the world order becomes more chaotic, the AK Party may face more challenges both in the domestic and international arena. The remainder of 2019 will be especially important for Turkey’s foreign policy and security. The regional security and the uncertainty in northern Syria will be at the top of the foreign policy agenda. Despite all the possible challenges in the foreign policy for the rest of 2019, the main challenge for the AK Party will be the consolidation of the presidential system and providing stability in the Turkish economy in 2020.

… with the entry of the masses of the population… into a modern world, the monopoly of the small, Westernized elites who shaped the first generation of post-colonial history was being challenged. And with them, the programmes, the ideologies, the very vocabulary and syntax of the public discourse, on which the new states rested. For the new urban and urbanized masses, even the new massive middle classes… were not… the old elites. Often… they resented them.  In any case, the masses of the poor did not share the belief in the Western nineteenth-century aspiration of secular progress…. in many countries of the Third World nationwide politics in the sense invented and recognized in the West since the French Revolution had never existed, or had not been allowed to function (Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991, “Chapter 12:  The Third World)

Samuel Huntington’s notorious text, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, is now nearly 25 years old. Even though Huntington’s deliberately contentious vision of global conflicts driven by monolithic cultural identities was always, at best, extremely difficult to accept, today world tensions are clearly propelled by different factors. The decisions taken by the U.S., Russian, Chinese, or EU leaderships are far more likely to be focused on economic or military-strategic concerns rather than ethnic or “civilizational” sentiments. Such culturally chauvinistic rhetoric does appear, of course, but it is utilized for economic or political reasons, and is not an end in itself. What I mean is that cultural, ethnic, or religious identities are not the primary motivation behind the major powers’ Grand Strategy decisions, and are only tools at a politician’s disposal.

While international relations are obviously still driven by the established concerns of modern nation-states, domestic politics in many societies have turned in a different direction. As countless commentators have noted, the world’s domestic politics, especially in the Western societies, have become a contest over identities. Furthermore, only some of these identities are the ethnic or religious identities that Huntington identified; just as often domestic political debates in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, and other “Western” societies are riven by tendentious debates over what, until the 1960s, was considered the “personal” as opposed to the “political.” In that peak decade of what Eric Hobsbawm termed the social and cultural revolutions, “… the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures” were cut. Lifestyle choices, gender identities, individual rights and liberties, and specific political policies towards those topics came to the forefront of activism, spearheaded by the younger generation and taking even the traditional Marxist Left by surprise.

The world’s domestic politics, especially in the Western societies, have become a contest over identities.

The advent of the Internet in the 1990s accelerated the momentum of identity politics, and devices such as smart phones have revolutionized the manner in which people consume information. But again, as numerous observers have wrung their hands over, this easy information access came with a price: electronic devices and social media now underlie highly polarized information consumption. Every owner of a smart phone has unlimited information at their fingertips anytime and anywhere, but must choose to ingest enough information to remain informed in a holistic manner on whatever issues concern them. For most people, that is simply an unattainable ideal when a day has only 24 hours to divide amongst work, family, friends, modern life’s many responsibilities, and basic physical necessities such as sleeping and eating.  

Identity politics stems from socio-economic changes

What is less analyzed or understood is that the shift to identity politics is part-and-parcel of the socio-cultural revolution mentioned above. Social media and electronic information devices simply accelerated a process that was already ongoing. In the decades immediately following WWII, living standards in the industrialized West reached unprecedented levels, the agricultural sector continued to shrink, the working classes began to recede in the 1970s (in the U.S.) and 1980s (in the other industrialized societies), and the middle classes and service sectors blossomed. For many Westerners, the old political questions of class and economic ideology lost their urgency, even disappeared altogether. That is what Daniel Bell meant when he declared the “End of Ideology.”

The shift to identity politics is part-and-parcel of the socio-cultural revolution.

Concurrently, the Left lost its ability to motivate and organize the mass political movements that had featured in modern Western public life until WWII. In the 21st Century, political movements appear more like seasonal fashions, waxing and waning like the topics trending on Twitter. Every person chooses the issues he or she feels attached to, digests the information stream only from the communities embracing that person’s stance on those issues, and then becomes irate when her or his Weltanschauung encounters contradictory information. The result is a politics of self-inflicted hysteria fueled by cognitive dissonance. Today, political activism rarely means marching on the streets, attending political rallies, or canvassing neighborhoods, and is far more likely to be about posting opinions (or rants) on various social media forums. Creating durable mass political movements based on a hierarchical, disciplined activism targeting a broad basket of socio-economic political issues now looks like a novelty from a distant past.

Mass political movements are still possible elsewhere

Lost in the hubbub about identity politics is the fact that it is a phenomenon essentially created by the social and cultural changes of the last seventy years in the industrialized West. Outside of the West, mass political movements still appear viable. Because most non-Western societies have not yet fully industrialized, they have not experienced the same cultural, economic, political, and social changes to the same extent that the West has. 

Even though political movements in industrializing societies tend to be progressive by traditional political standards, and are generally motivated by mass desire for political — especially democratic — rights, the West (governments, politicians, the media, and the general citizenry) generally perceives such movements with concern, even fear. The West generally prefers that the industrializing world’s political movements be led by socio-political elites who look and sound anodyne: no nationalism, no identity-referencing rhetoric on ethnicity or religion, no assertions of independent will or decision-making. When such rhetoric appears, and even if the movement is in fact progressive and aimed at widening the political rights of that society’s citizens, Westerners react negatively without pausing to try to understand the actual political reality behind the rhetoric. Today, that reaction is fed by social media hysteria. 

Modernization happened differently outside of the West

The main problem is that Western observers have little ability to distinguish between movements that are genuinely mass-based expressions of democratic aspirations and those that are not. The past decade and the Arab Spring provided multiple examples of Western governments completely failing to support legitimate democratic political movements in countries such as Egypt and Syria, or opposing the violent state and military responses that met those movements. 

The apparently nationalistic or religious rhetoric of political movements in industrializing societies may cause concern to Westerners who are sincere about understanding those movements. What those Westerners do not understand is that the universalizing, Enlightenment-based rhetoric that they are used to as citizens in stable, industrialized, democratic societies is the same language that was utilized by the non-Western socio-political elites who imposed modernization projects on their own societies, mostly through non-democratic and often violent means. For that reason, the masses of those societies often do not perceive that rhetoric from same perspective that Westerners do: for many in industrializing societies, that universalizing language is the language of violent oppression, of trauma, of alienation, of uprooted lives and traditions and cultures.

A quarter century after the USSR – a state based on enforcing an extremely radical and violent version of those universalist Enlightenment ideals — disintegrated, is it any wonder that the politics of the various successor states are dominated by nationalism?  How much ordem e progresso was achieved by the modernizing military juntas of Central and South America? What about the modernizing elites of Africa’s de-colonizing societies, after taking over the administrative and security institutions already established by the colonizing powers, intoning après nous le déluge in order to obtain weapons and massive development credits from those former colonizers? Did the native administrators – subordinate to the colonizers but lords over their own peoples — of the South and Southeast Asian British, Dutch, and French colonial empires quickly provide liberté, egalité, fraternité to all of the masses they inherited regardless of caste, gender, ethnicity, or religion? Unfortunately, the vast majority of Westerners have little idea about the details of how these questions have continued to develop over the past century. All they know is that political strife and violence keep breaking out in industrializing (“developing”) societies, the reasons for that turmoil seem opaque, and the rhetoric declaimed by the prominent political figures (as translated) sounds scary. 

Western misperception of Turkey

I suspect that one main reason why various observers and groups in the West see Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) as threatening is that the AK Party’s movement is socially broad-based and founded upon a variety of socio-political issues. Even though any particular individual may not support every detail or aspect of the movement’s platform, the AK Party’s wide appeal maintains support that fluctuates between 45 and 55 percent of the electorate in a society of more than 80 million people. Even worse for those Western observers, the AK Party’s appeal stretches into other Muslim societies, again for various cultural, political, religious, and social reasons. In other words, the AK Party has, so far, been successful in creating one of those organized, large-scale, enduring democratic political movements that disappeared from the Western political scene in the decades following WWII and were replaced by identity politics.  

The AK Party has, so far, been successful in creating an organized, large-scale, enduring democratic political movement that disappeared from the Western political scene in the decades following WWII. 

Those Westerners who fear the AK Party, however, fail to grasp that Turkish society’s socio-political dynamics are fundamentally different from those of their own societies. Like so much of the non-Western world, Turkey is an industrializing society that did not undergo that economic expansion after WWII which brought unprecedented living standards to the West, and which turned politics toward identity issues.

Instead, since the mid-1800s Turkish society had been dominated by a state and military elite that saw itself as the director of Turkey’s modernization process. As in other industrializing societies, those Turkish elites used the Western Enlightenment-based universalizing rhetoric to attack the traditions, values, and religion of the Turkish masses. Democratic elections were not even granted to Turkish citizens until 1950, and after that point the military repeatedly intervened into politics in order to enforce its vision of Turkey’s economic, political, and social development. The military was finally ejected from politics in 2007-2008, but then Fetullah Gulen’s cultists, who had been working themselves into positions of state institutional power since the 1970s, had to be uprooted as well. The upshot is that Turkey is only now becoming a truly democratic country — democratic not just in terms of electoral processes, but also at the institutional level, with the establishment of professionalism, transparency, and accountability for all the institutions that comprise the Turkish state. And only now are the masses of Turkish society finally in control of their own destiny.

Those Westerners who fear the AK Party fail to grasp that Turkish society’s socio-political dynamics are fundamentally different from those of their own societies.

For the same reason, Turkish elections are not determined by identity politics. Because most Turkish citizens do not yet enjoy the same level of wealth and opportunities that the typical Westerner enjoys, mass democratic movements aimed at generating more economic, political, and social equality for supporters are still possible. The AK Party embodies that trend. 

Identity politics – whether focused on race and gender issues, or the even narrower cultural issues (such as the U.S.’s long-running debates around abortion or gun ownership) currently important in the West — will not generate enough votes to determine Turkish elections for the foreseeable future. Only when Turkish democracy has deepened and stabilized, and when economic prosperity has been achieved by a much larger swath of Turkish society will identity politics begin to determine elections.     

As journalists who closely follow Turkish politics, we are used to the inner debates and quests for new leaders within the Republican People’s Party (CHP) following every election. But this ritual will be reversed in the morning of June 24 since our eyes will turn to the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) this time. No matter what the result is, some accounts will be settled within the party on the day after the election.

There are only a few examples of failure in the history of the AK Party. To name one, the party’s vote share decreased from 46.5 percent to 38.4 percent in the 2009 local election due to the serious economic shrinkage with the effect of the 2008 global economic crisis.  

But this decline did not cause any major intra-party debate despite the resignation of Abdüllatif Şener, one of the co-founders and leading names of the party. The unquestionably strong position of the party leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan expedited Erdogan’s embarking on a serious restructuring effort within the party.

Afterwards, Erdoğan consolidated his position within the party as the AK Party won the 2010 referendum by receiving 57 percent and then won the 2011 election with 46.6 percent.

However, the attempts to hinder then President Abdullah Gul’s presidential candidacy for the first presidential election with a direct national vote caused some disaccords in the party for the first time. The murmurs stopped when Erdoğan ran for and was elected president, Gül did not make any move to chair the party and Ahmet Davutoglu was assigned as the new chairman of the AK Party.

But in a short while, some groups within the party started to voice their opposition to Davutoglu. Especially a group that gathered around Binali Yıldırım managed to hamper some decisions of Davutoglu in an unprecedented way in the AK Party’s history and culture.

Meanwhile, in the general election held in 2015, the AK Party’s vote share fell to 41 percent and thus the party lost the parliamentary majority under the leadership of Davutoglu. At that point, President Erdogan, who organized rallies and meetings and always spoke in favor of the AK Party during the election campaign period, intervened and operated the Constitutional election renewal rule by showing that a government could not be founded. So, a re-election was held in November 2015, at which the AK Party had a great success by receiving 49 percent and came to power alone again.

To whom must the victory in the re-election be attributed? According to many AK Party supporters, the success was achieved thanks to the President, who did not accept the results of the first election and called for a re-election. But according to another group gathering around Davutoglu, the success was thanks to the persuasion of the President to stay one step behind between June and November and the party’s restoring of factory settings in the meantime.

A few months after the election, Davutoglu resigned from his post as prime minister and from the AK Party leadership after a series of events that have not yet been fully illuminated. The party organized a Congress, in which Binali Yildirim was elected as the new chairman and prime minister. Davutoglu and his team, meanwhile, were completely pushed aside.

An array of splits in opinion and tone played a role in the process leading up to Davutoglu’s discharge from the party, but the two most crucial aspects, in my opinion, were Davutoglu’s raising difficulties in transition to the new executive presidential system and laying claims to the election success in November 2015.

Soon after Yildirim’s assignment to the prime minister’s office, Turkey experienced a catastrophe. On the night of 15 July, 2016, the Gulenist Terror Group (FETO) attempted to stage a military coup to seize control of the country. The insurrection was ruled out thanks to the people who took to the streets to defend democracy, and Turkey underwent a tremendous transformation after that night.

As one of the most significant changes throughout this process, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which had always been the most outspoken opposition party, started siding with the AK Party for the stability and perpetuity of the country. When the MHP gave green light to the new presidential system, the endeavors in this regard were expedited. Eventually, the Constitution was amended and a referendum on whether to approve the new system was held.

The referendum results set a significant indicator displaying the changing political split in Turkey. In the general election held in November 2015, the total vote shares of the AK Party and the MHP were above 60 percent, but the “yes” campaign run by these two parties for the referendum won with a 51.4 percent vote share – with a vote difference less than 1.5 million. The referendum was followed by the June 2018 general election. The two parties ran for the election by forming an alliance on a legal basis. The AK Party declined to the June 2015 levels by receiving 42.56 percent whereas the MHP received 11.1 percent. The vote share of the People’s Alliance was almost at the same level as the “yes” votes in the referendum. (As for the presidential election of the same date; however, President Erdoğan won by receiving 52.6 percent in the first round.)

For Turkey, President Erdogan’s leadership was beyond question; his vote share was more than the sum of all his opponents’ vote share, but that did not apply to his party. The AK Party lost the parliamentary majority and the alliance with the MHP turned out to be an exigence.

This situation seems as the root cause of the problem currently experienced in the AK Party because it is believed by some that the alliance relations have drawn the AK Party’s stance closer to the MHP. This is the argument of some bashful opponents within the party. Nevertheless, the AK Party clearly rejected some demands of the MHP, such as the declaration of general amnesty. But this negative answer would nearly dissolve the People’s Alliance on the eve of the local election.

For Turkey, President Erdogan’s leadership and his vote share are kept separately from the AK Party. The AK Party lost its parliamentary majority and the alliance with the MHP turned out to be an exigence.

The 2019 local election once again verified the 48-52 percent balance, which has been persistent since the 2007 referendum, but the method of calculating ballots employed in the local election is far from showing how the 52 percent is portioned among the parties. So, although the AK Party claims to have a 44 percent vote share, the MHP electorate comprise a part of this share.

The generally accepted opinion suggests that the AK Party’s vote share this time fell under the 42 percent received in the general election whereas the MHP consolidated its power thanks to AK Party voters.

The general decline in the AK Party’s vote share, the party’s loss of Ankara and Antalya municipalities, the decision of re-running the Istanbul mayoral election at the moment when hopes for Istanbul faded… All these developments caused the critical views in the party to be voiced in a more articulate way.

Some have criticized the AK Party’s alliance with the MHP, claiming that the party has moved more in line with MHP’s rhetoric. 

The bitter criticism was issued by former Prime Minister Davutoglu. For him, the convergence with the MHP undermines the AK Party’s values and cause and makes the MHP take advantage of the AK Party votes. Davutoglu abstained from criticizing President Erdogan and called him “our leader” but went on to claim that a group, which he did not specify, surrounds Erdogan and causes him to make mistakes. This criticism is hard to swallow, and it has been uttered by a former prime minister from the AK Party who also chaired the party. As expected, these severe criticisms were met with a profound silence, the ones talking about the criticisms spoke in a low voice. President Erdogan, meanwhile, completely ignored Davutoglu’s manifesto.

But Davutoglu’s remarks led to another rumor. It was alleged that two separate groups within the AK Party were mobilized to form a new party. One of these groups gathered around Davutoglu while the other one gathered around former president Abdullah Gul and former economy minister Ali Babacan.

It will be useful to look at the profiles of Gul and Babacan in this context.

Gül repeatedly expressed his resentment for the attempt to hamper his presidential candidacy with the enactment of a law in 2014. It is also known that Gul and Erdogan had a fall out to the point of no return with their different reactions to the Gezi Park protests in 2013. Subsequently, the reactions they gave to the December 17-25 judicial coup attempts sharpened this split. Gul argued in this context that the threats must be answered within the limits of law and extraordinary legal practices must be avoided, while Erdoğan displayed a strict attitude. So, we have many reasons to believe that a similar divergence might have occurred in the scope of the stance against FETO in the aftermath of the coup attempt.

In Ahmet Davutoglu’s critique against the AK Party, he did not give the name of the President, but rather claimed that there was an inner circle of advisors that were leading to ill-judged decisions being made. 

Because of these splits in opinion, Gul allowed his mention as a joint presidential candidate of the opposition parties in 2018; and in a statement he issued later on, he said that he got such an offer and did not refuse it since he hoped for reconciliation. So, he seemed determined to run against Erdogan if conditions had been suitable. This is also hard to swallow in the AK Party culture. Gul also issued a diatribe against the YSK decision to cancel and renew the Istanbul mayoral election by comparing the decision to the illegitimate 367 ruling of the Constitutional Court that hampered his presidency in 2007.

Babacan, on the other hand, is lying low since he left office. Although he is appearing at iftar dinners nowadays, he does not make any statements, but only smiles to cameras. It is alleged that Babacan will chair the new party that will be founded with the background support of Gul. However, it is a little puzzling how a leadership will be manifested with this habit of lying low that reaches to the point of bashfulness.

As a journalist who has been closely following Turkish politics since the 1980s, has witnessed the birth of the reformist movement within the Virtue Party and its evolution to the AK Party, I can say based on my experience that some trying days await President Erdoğan and the AK Party.

There are rumors that former AK Party members will form a new political party or two. On the one side there’s the possibility of a party with the leadership of Ahmet Davutoglu and on the other, one in the leadership of Ali Babacan with support from Abdullah Gul. 

It is obvious that neither Davutoglu nor the Gul-Babacan duo has any potential to directly target or undermine Erdogan. For this very reason, they prefer to target Erdogan’s inner circle instead of Erdogan himself and hold this circle accountable for the failure.

Therefore, what really matters is the steps to be taken by the President Erdogan rather than Davutoglu’s or Gul-Babacan’s groups.

Erdogan is probably waiting for the June 23 election in order to make a move. (According to a claim, Erdogan implied at his party’s latest Central Decision and Execution Committee meeting that right before the election and after the Ramadan holiday he might send Davutoglu to the disciplinary board with the request of a complete discharge.)

The rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election on June 23 took on new meanings and significance. If the AK Party wins the election, we might see sweeping discharges in the AK Party that will not be limited to the dissident figures in the party. If they lose, the groups who are already expecting to be discharged (for various reasons) might gather and kick off a more widespread intra-party opposition movement.

No matter what the result will be, we will be talking about the AK Party on the morning of June 24.

When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became the Turkish Prime Minister in 2003, it was immediately clear that a new era had dawned in the country. Whilst Erdoğan’s AK Party had won a majority of Turkish votes, thus giving them a mandate to form a new government, many in Turkey remained sceptical as to whether Erdoğan would be able to deliver on the promises that he and his early political partner Abdullah Gül had pledged to deliver. Likewise, other Turks were skeptical over whether the social change that the new AK government would bring would be positive or negative.

Inversely, the rise of Erdoğan was widely praised throughout the west. Erdoğan’s pro-business, pro-economic growth, pro-trade and pro-enterprise stance was seen as a welcome development among western businessmen and financial markets who had long spoken of Turkey’s untapped economic potential but who could scarcely bring themselves to deal with the overly regulated and stagnating economy that unfortunately defined Turkey through much of the lattermost decades of the 20th century.

Erdoğan was likewise praised for injecting fresh energy into the overall democratic atmosphere in Turkey by challenging not just the electability of the legacy CHP, but in challenging the lethargy and complacency that often serves to define legacy parties long after such a party’s heroic founder had died.  

The rise of Erdoğan was widely praised throughout the west. His pro-business, trade, and pro-enterprise stance was seen as a welcome development among western businessmen and financial markets. 

In terms of his foreign policy, Erdoğan’s early years were defined by an enthusiasm to build on Turkey’s already strong relationship with the European Union with an aim to eventually join a bloc of nations which unlike today was defined by optimism and economic growth between the turn of the 21st century and 2008.

Finally, Erdoğan’s democratic credentials combined with his open embrace of Islam was often praised by western leaders looking for a major international figure to point to in order to illustrate that the increasingly widespread post-9/11 theory that Islam and democracy are uniquely mutually exclusive is false.

Whilst Erdoğan and the AK party have not changed in their ideology and overall mission for the country, western powers have changed both internally and in their perceptions of a remarkably consistent Turkish government and society.

Things began to change when Gülenist terrorists grew determined in their mission to overthrow the legitimate authorities in Turkey beginning in 2013. Because Gülen was able to use his wealth to influence liberal western mainstream media, the same Erdoğan hailed for being a pro-business Islamic democrat within the framework of an open and tolerant modern society was transformed into “the villain next door.”

For ordinary Turks the Gezi Park provocation was an event designed to sow social discord at the behest of foreign based actors including the U.S.-based Gülen and the infamous George Soros.

For ordinary Turks the Gezi Park provocation was an event designed to sow social discord at the behest of foreign based actors including the U.S. based Gülen and the infamous George Soros. However, rich and powerful western based individuals like Gülen and Soros were able to use their influence over the corporate western media to portray the Gezi Park provocateurs as “peaceful democrats” even though subsequent court records from Turkey have proved otherwise.

As the EU economy slowed down, Islamophobic sentiments continued to move from the periphery to the mainstream. As is often the case in times of economic downturn, the European extreme-left also became more emboldened in their calls for a new political consensus. In respect of how this effected Turkey, the otherwise opposed groups of the Islamophobic right, the Soros manipulated liberals and the extreme left, all ended up perversely agreeing on their hatred of Erdoğan’s Turkey. For the Islamophobic right, Erdoğan’s position as the world’s foremost political champion of the rights of Muslims throughout the world was seen as a threat to a worldview which seeks to portray Muslims as unilaterally wicked and Christians, secularists and Jews are uniformly innocent.

For the Soros style liberals, Erdoğan’s refusal to allow his nation’s internal affairs to be subject to malign foreign interference was a trigger for such groups to accuse Erdoğan of being some sort of anti-democratic human rights violator even though the terrorists he arrested threatened not just Turkey but the wider world. A strong argument can also be made that traditional free speech is much heathier in Turkey than in the increasingly censorship happy European Union. Finally, the European far-left that had always had a perverse soft spot for the PKK terror organisation found a strange comrade in the form of the U.S. military which, beginning under Barack Obama allied with the Syria branch of the PKK, the YPG in the Syrian conflict.

At the same time as western powers became increasingly strained in their relations with Turkey, Turkey itself continued to make new partnerships abroad. Under Erdoğan, relations with neighbouring Iran and nearby Russia improved greatly in spite of external actors attempting to prevent both whilst under Erdoğan, Turkey signed up to the international game changing Belt and Road initiative which was introduced by China in 2013.

More recent years have seen Turkey expand its economic and cultural connectivity throughout Africa with investment projects and visits by major Turkish officials becoming ever more common from South Africa to Sudan. Turkey has also come to engage ever more with the dynamic and economically vibrant Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Relations with Pakistan likewise continue to remain strong and within this context Islamabad has formally invited Turkey to participate in projects related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which aims at expanding Pacific to Afro-Mediterranean trading routes.

For the Islamophobic right, Erdoğan’s position as the world’s foremost political champion of the rights of Muslims throughout the world was seen as a threat to a worldview which seeks to portray Muslims as unilaterally wicked and Christians, secularists and Jews are uniformly innocent.

This has further led to western antagonism against Turkey not because of any Turkish maleficence against the west, but because of America’s particular tendency to exert its economic authority in order to prevent other countries from developing a multilateral foreign policy. As Turkey is among the most prominent and strong nations seeking to balance relations between the major powers of the west and those of Eurasia, Ankara has been singled out for specific harassment, particularly when it comes to Turkey’s decision to buy S-400 missile defence systems from Russia. Thus, Erdoğan is now hated in certain western quarters not in spite of, but because of his consistency and his unwillingness to compromise from a position of weakness.

In this sense, the same qualities for which many western leaders and analysts once praised Erdoğan are those which now earn him excoriation from the west. Erdoğan’s willingness to emphasize Turkey’s democratic, Islamic and modern traditions simultaneously, his championing of a high growth strategy for the economy, his willingness to engage in unique win-win agreements with partners to the west, south and east and his ability to transform Turkey from a place where the world came to admire history to a place where the world now comes to admire the present and future, remain his defining characteristics.

One must remember though, just because western leaders and policy advocates have changed their mind on Erdoğan, for most of Asia, Africa and even Latin America, Erdoğan and Turkey’s star continues to rise whilst many are questioning whether the decline of the west is temporary or permanent. 

Turkey had one of its most significant local elections yesterday. The agenda of the elections was more about national or even international issues rather than local matters. According to the unofficial election results, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) has once again come first in the elections, as it has done in every single election since 2002. Nevertheless, the party, while preserving its votes in the national scale, seems to have lost the capital Ankara while Istanbul results are so close that I am sure there will be some recounting. As this column mostly focuses on the Kurdish question, my take on the elections will be about the cities where Turkey’s Kurds live densely.

With respect to the Kurdish question, and hence, AK Party – HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) competition in the eastern and southeastern cities, the results are quite promising – if not an overwhelming glory, for the AK Party. For one thing, AK Party has retained all cities under its rule except for Erzincan, where it lost to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), not the HDP. Elazığ, Erzurum, Malatya, Muş, Bingöl, Gaziantep, Kilis, Şanlıurfa, Adıyaman, all were retained by AK Party, most of them with quite big margins.

AK Party has not lost a single city to the HDP while gaining Ağrı, Bitlis, and Şırnak back from the HDP. This is a straightforward win.

AK Party has not lost a single city to the HDP while gaining Ağrı, Bitlis, and Şırnak back from the HDP. This is a straightforward win for AK Party vis-a-vis the HDP given that the HDP has so far never lost a city municipality where it was in power. What makes it more impressive is that it is not a small shift of votes that enabled the AK Party to win in those cities. It was quite a big shift. The AK Party, according to unofficial results, received 56% of the votes in Ağrı where it only got 38% in 2014. It increased its votes from 40 to 44, and, most dramatically in Şırnak from 17 to 62 percent. The HDP, on the other hand, lost its vote share in most of places even where it usually came first. The HDP also lost Tunceli to the Turkey Communist Party (TKP) while coming first in Kars where the MHP was holding the municipality.

The AK Party won multiple towns that were under HDP control since 2014. Most striking examples are from Hakkari and Şırnak where the HDP used to come first with big margins.

Apart from these cities, the AK Party also won multiple towns that were under HDP control (under the BDP banner) since 2014. Most striking examples are from Hakkari and Şırnak where the HDP used to come first with big margins. While the AK Party seems to have won Derecik, Şemdinli and Çukurca in Hakkari, it also obtained Uludere and Beytüşşebap in Şırnak, all from the HDP. Overall, the AK Party has won four districts out of seven in Şırnak and three out of five in Hakkari. Diyarbakır, on the other hand, did not let the AK Party to win a victory in the city other than Çermik and Hani districts. Nevertheless, in pretty much all the cities of the region, even in places where the HDP came first, the AK Party has increased the number of municipal districts it won.

These results, overall, suggest that AK Party is the winner in Turkey’s eastern cities. The HDP, on the other hand, lost many municipalities it had won in 2014. While the party had gained 10 cities and 67 districts in 2014, the numbers respectively fell to 8 lost its vote share in most of the places and 50 districts in 2019. Hence, it lost 2 cities and 17 towns in the region, almost entirely to the AK Party. These results show that neither the AK Party’s electoral alliance with the nationalist MHP nor the trustee appointments resulted in a decrease in the party’s votes in the region. Quite the opposite, the AK Party increased its votes in the region and this tells us that the AK Party’s stiff counterterrorism measures against the PKK have also damaged the PKK’s political wing, the HDP.

Turkey is heading towards the final phase of its local elections, which will be held on 31 March. With no doubt, Turkey’s policymakers called for a new system of government due to various difficult experiences in the past, as building adequate and strong governments was not that easy. It was quite understandable that parties, which heavily criticized each other and even defamed one another, came together in order to find a common base for the country. As a consequence, citizens supporting each party casted doubt on the sincerity of politicians.

Nevertheless, the new presidential system entailed not a totally new, but a rather structural and stability oriented phenomenon, namely pre-election alliances. These alliances have been firm enough to be continued even in the local elections.

Turkish politics nowadays has established the roots of a two-block political landscape, although not both blocks have concrete political ambitions and systematic preferences. As is known, the “People’s Alliance,” consisting of the AK Party and MHP was established right before the 16 April, 2017, referendum and continued during the parliamentary and presidential elections last year. On the other hand, parties around the main opposition party, the Kemalist-secular CHP, made efforts to bring together entirely different, and indeed ideologically conflicting groups, such as the Kurdish-ethnic HDP, the conservative SP and the Turkish-nationalist-oriented Iyi Party.

The second bloc has less of a chance and more difficulty to persuade and broaden its electorate. This is due to their lack of a coherent election program and the lack of a shared future projection. While the People’s Alliance refers itself to a set of compatible ambitions and narratives, the Nation Alliance is based on incompatible narratives and only has one common objective – to get rid of President Erdogan.

Despite the actual alliance-seeking efforts by the CHP and other parties, they have oddly come to refuse the existence of such an alliance, even in provinces where it is obvious that the candidate is an umbrella one. If a CHP-led alliance does not have the courage to openly conduct a campaign, then political engineering will be an option, and this option will fail on election day. As a stark comparison to the Nation Alliance, President Erdogan and Devlet Bahceli have openly stressed the main framework of the People’s Alliance with regard to the local elections.

The People’s Alliance was established on the night of the July 15, 2016, coup attempt, when the AK Party and MHP leaders took a strong position against the Gulenist putschists. In addition to this, these two parties had previously come together to get work done in Turkish politics. For instance, the MHP did not boycott Abdullah Gul’s bid for presidency in the parliament in 2007 (despite strong opposition from both the pro-tutelage Kemalist officers within the CHP and the Turkish Armed Forces). More, in 2007, both parties came together to lift the headscarf ban, which resulted in a closure trial against the AK Party in 2008. Both party leaders also resisted the violent Gezi Protests in 2013.

Today, the People’s Alliance describes its main character as standing for the “people’s will,” with the only aim to “serve the nation.” However, the Nation Alliance does not seem to have any concrete political position or self-description. This ambivalence and blurriness leads to a lack of transparency. And because of this situation, the People’s Alliance has described the CHP-led alliance as the “product of secret bargaining and political engineering.”

Kemalist-secular authorities and traditional Kemalist voters are unsatisfied with a quasi-alliance between the CHP and HDP due to the fact that the latter is the political arm of the PKK terrorist organization. Senior CHP figures have announced their candidacy from the Democratic Left Party (DSP) as a protest against CHP’s alienation. This has therefore caused dispute between the CHP and DSP, and the CHP has accused the DSP for dividing votes. However, DSP Chairman Onder Aksakal has rejected such accusations and stressed that the CHP is the only actor responsible for the success of the AK Party. Aksakal also underlined the CHP’s previous efforts that failed and that were not compatible with its traditional values. These were, namely, nominating a non-CHP politician as CHP’s presidential candidate in 2014, supporting the ultra-nationalist Iyi Party with 15 CHP MPs in 2018, and of course, not accepting any electoral defeats since 2010 after Kilicdaroglu became chairman.

The 31 March local elections will most likely contribute to the transformation of Turkey’s political landscape. By this, it can be inferred that a two-bloc system will be entrenched in the future. The continuing efforts of the People’s Alliance are reinforcing this trend, while the CHP-led alliance lacks a sincere and concrete narrative. While it lacks a concrete narrative, this does not exclude the actual existence of the Nation Alliance. Time will show whether this alliance will transform in the long-run due to the political pressure felt from the electorate.

It’s been 22 years since the last coup in Turkey. We saw other coup attempts from the e-memorandum of 27 April, 2007, to the bloodiest coup attempt of 15 July, 2016. But these two failed to topple down the democratically elected government. Unlike the later two cases, the military’s intervention on 28 February, 1997, toppled down the government, banned the biggest party (Welfare Party) in parliament, and arrested many for not adhering to the republican laws (!) This last item of enforcing republican laws deserves more attention since it is a living memory in contemporary Turkish society and one major cleavage of political polarization. The coup plotters did not only push Prime Minister Erbakan to resign, but also took severe measures to affect society as a whole. The coup was not just about re-shaping the political spectrum by forcing political parties with military dictates. It was also a top-down social engineering process. A process that was destined to fail.

During and in the aftermath of the coup, the companionship of the Turkish military and judiciary carried out severe measures targeting the life styles of ordinary pious people on the street. Girls in headscarves were prevented from receiving education, as they could not enter public or private universities. One such fresh memory is the video footage of Behriye Kardeniz. She was a university student wearing a headscarf studying at the Nursery School of Sivas Cumhuriyet University. She happened to graduate in the heydays of the February 28 process. She did not simply graduate, but was also the top student of her entire program. The video footage takes place during her graduation ceremony where she was prevented from speaking while some people were shutting her mouth with their hands and pulling her headscarf.

Such encounters have tones of documented evidence, where women in headscarves went through physical and psychological intervention not only from the police or other security personnel, but also from their professors and peers. The mainstream media whitewashed such atrocities, the leading Turkish industrialists made supportive speeches for the process, and even some elected politicians took side with the military’s policies. While the policies of the coup plotters were still in charge, PM Ecevit had made a very harsh speech against the only female deputy in parliament with a headscarf. He had said that “Here [the Parliament] is not a place to challenge the state. Please bring this lady into line.” Following the speech Kavakci was forced to leave parliament and she was expelled from parliament and her Turkish citizenship was revoked.

It is this legacy that keeps the conservative and pious people of Turkey united behind the current President Erdogan to a great extent. Erdogan, himself was jailed in the process and banned from active political activities. Thousands of Turkish women had to drop out of school, thousands of students –both male and female- from Islamic education schools were denied entry to universities, and so on. These students still vote today and their memories are still fresh. Some people think that it has been 22 years since the coup and it is time to forget. I disagree. I believe the February 28 process showed and enforced the major line of division in Turkish politics and society.

The old establishment of Turkey and their supporters did not want the conservative people of Anatolia to rise in the social, economic, and political life. The latent critiques of AK Party still seems to be about its role in the vertical mobilization of Turkey’s conservative millions. They could study in higher education and become judges, parliamentary members, and so on. This has changed Turkey’s traditional social structure in which the conservative millions of Anatolia had one role to play, serve the civilized(!) and modern republican spirited people (or White Turks in short) of Turkey.

Erdogan’s AK Party has broken this power structure. But even today, women in headscarf are denied to enter such white Turkish circles. I can count multiple private universities in which you cannot see a single professor, instructor or secretary in headscarf. The same observation is valid for many other private companies, which explicitly exclude such conservative people from their staff. And this tells me that these very same circles who no longer control the state apparatus but continue to exclude pious people from their private enterprises must be missing the February 28 coup. The millions voting for Erdogan’s AK Party seem to be aware of this living polarization. Their memories of February 28 do not die because the spirit of February 28 coup plotters is still alive.

With the help of Kemalist civil society elements, in February 1997, the Turkish army toppled the government that was formed by the Islamist Welfare Party (RP) and the right-wing liberal True Path Party (DYP). The coup was called a “postmodern” coup, owing to the indirect role of the army. The army did not take control of the rule in the country as it had done twice after the 1960 and 1980 coups. It threatened the government that if it did not step down, then the army would intervene and take control of the country’s rule.

Indeed, the army was restless from the beginning of the RP-DYP coalition government. It was deemed as another nail in the coffin after the landslide victory of the RP in the 1994 local elections. In 1994, the RP won many of the municipalities in the country, including Istanbul and Ankara. The army was very well aware that losing Istanbul and Ankara was a sign of a coming political revolution that might carry away the Kemalist regime. They are the most crowded cities and in the meantime, the election results in these cities carry a symbolic meaning for the general elections and the power relations in the country. Whoever rules Istanbul, rules the country.

On its 22nd anniversary, the February 28 coup was still able to stir a heated debate in Turkey. The opponents of the coup take a liberal-democratic stance and portray it as great political violence. They argue that the coup was a suppression of the basic rights of the conservative-religious sections of society by an authoritarian state.

According to the defenders of the Ferbruary 28 coup, it was a “process,” which implies the eternity of Kemalist rule in Turkey, that was interrupted after the Kemalist state bureaucracy lost its political struggle against the AK Party in the 2000s.

The proponents of the coup on the other hand take a national security stance and defend it on the basis of the struggle against the infiltration of religious reactionary groups such as the Gulenists into state structures. They argue that had the February 28 coup been successful, the July 15, 2016, by the Gulenist cadres in the state bureaucracy, including the army, would have not taken place. According to the defenders of the Ferbruary 28 coup, the February 28 “process,” which implies the eternity of Kemalist rule in Turkey, was interrupted after the Kemalist state bureaucracy lost its political struggle against the AK Party in the 2000s.

These two alternative narratives fail to understand the political meaning of this critical event. February 28 is a way more important event for Turkish politics than what these narratives tell us. It can be reduced neither to authoritarianism nor to a national security matter. According to the standing 1982 Constitution, Turkey in essence, was not a democracy at that time. Due to the lack of a better world, the regime was said to be democratic, which means that the political rule rests on the national well, yet major decisions were taken by the National Security Council (MGK). The army-dominated MGK was the governing body of the country, and the elected government was only playing a minor role in it. The regime was therefore an oligarchy, based on the rule of the coalition of bureaucracy and big business. Thus, the coup cannot be viewed as an attempt to transgress democracy. How can a non-existing thing be violated?

Nor can the coup be called a national security measure. It was against the majority of society; it was an encroachment of the national will. How can a policy that violates the national will be viewed as a national security measure?

Then, what was the February 28 coup? It was a special moment in Turkish politics. It was a moment of the political. The political moment showed that the Kemalist regime is neither eternal nor natural. It is rather contingent, like all other political regimes. This was a huge blow to the regime, since its political legitimacy and strength was based on the perception of its naturalness and everlastingness. The coup and the events that opened the way for it opened up an un-repairable crack in the Kemalist political totality.

What was the February 28 coup? It was a special moment in Turkish politics. It was a moment of the political. The political moment showed that the Kemalist regime is neither eternal nor natural. It is rather contingent, like all other political regimes.

Thus, the coup was a futile attempt to hide the groundlessness of the existing Kemalist political order. It was a hopeless attempt to over-turn the dislocation of the regime at the face of sociological developments. That’s why the Kemalists were claiming that February 28 was a “process,” not a onetime strike at the national will, and would “continue for a millennium.” And that’s why it was handled in such a ruthless manner.

This political dimension of the coup explains why the Kemalist regime was easily toppled within the period during the early 2000s. If the liberal-democratic critique of the coup was correct, that is that the Kemalist regime was notoriously powerful to crush the national will and encroached on democracy, it would not have been possible for the AK Party to dislocate it from such power in a short period of time. And Turkey would not have evolved into a democracy in the following years.

In Turkey, one of the favorite songs of those defining themselves as “leftist” is Mills (Değirmenler in Turkish) by Bulent Ortacgil, of which the lyrics go: “You, me, against the windmills. Consciously, each of us as a vanished warrior. We flow into seas as rivers. Maybe the finest way ever is this way…”

The song is about an impossible love, which is relevant to the left wing in Turkey in the sense they consider their fight to be an impossible love, and although they know they will lose in the end, the fight is still noble to them.

This is a specific mentality, an ode to defeat that is internalized and which has almost become part of genetic codes for a certain political segment. To put otherwise, it is a victim mentality based on finding excuses for failure and defeat. There is a famous Winston Churchill quote, which was also often repeated by the late Turkish President Suleyman Demirel: “No excuse can replace success.”

When I look at the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) nowadays, I recall Ortacgil’s Mills and this particular Churchill quote Demirel was fond of because there are roughly three blocs within the party. The first one is the core crowd gathering around CHP Chairman Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The second is the crowd around Muharrem Ince, who are looking forward to seeing a CHP defeat in the 31 March local elections, and the third is the group who either passed to the Democratic Left Party (DSP) or resigned from the CHP since they could not become candidates. If the CHP enjoys an election victory under the leadership of Kilicdaroglu on March 31, the second and third groups will resolve. However, if the opposite holds true and the party faces a defeat, the last two groups will revolt and even draw a part of the first group to their side in an attempt to call for an extraordinary meeting.

One does not need to be a clairvoyant or an analyst to know the CHP and the corridor whispers to be able to predict all these things. Everything is pretty obvious.

Developments within the CHP reflect Kilicdaroglu’s purge attempts within the party. Rather than having ideological concerns, his motivation is to consolidate power and undermine rivals. 

Although the CHP is currently focused on the local election, all the leading names in the party, including Kilicdaroglu, are currently eyeing what will happen on the morning of April 1. While determining the candidates almost by himself, his main concern has been to gain strength by April 1. This is why Kilicdaroglu did not nominate anyone who acted with Ince before and has been siding with candidates who have stayed loyal to him, even though some of these individuals are accused of corruption.

Lately, CHP member Gursel Tekin issued a quite nuanced and strict written statement and a group of CHP mayors resigned while some names passed to the DSP. Also, former chairmen known as “the lords of the CHP” convened and Bodrum Mayor Mehmet Kocadon resigned from the CHP and became a candidate for Mugla Metropolitan Municipality.

All these developments reflect Kilicdaroglu’s purge attempts within the party, but rather than having ideological concerns, Kilicdaroglu’s motivation here is to consolidate his power and undermine his rivals.

But of course, such developments will negatively affect the CHP’s vote share. In that case, Kilicdaroglu will probably argue that the CHP could not win since the groups divided the party and accentuated their own identities rather than the party identity. So, his excuse for defeat is already at hand. 

Why does the CHP fail to address larger masses?

Looking at from a more general perspective, it is evident in Turkish politics that the ruling party has won all elections since 2002, with vote shares varying between 35 and 49 percent, whereas the main opposition party has always remained between 20 and 25 percent.

The AK Party has occasionally suffered declines in its vote share. However, although such fluctuations have been experienced, the CHP’s vote share hardly changed, indicating the fact that the party failed to address groups other than its own base.

Kilicdaroglu’s excuse for a possible defeat is already at hand. He will argue that the CHP failed due to the group divisions in the party, which accentuated their own identities rather than the party identity.

Since he was assigned as chairman of the party, Kilicdaroglu has been scrutinizing underlying reasons of this situation. But while doing so, he has been acting like a surgeon, searching for a cure by applying trial-and-error method on a patient lying on the operation table.

We might quickly forget about such things, but still can try taking a step back and look at the general picture: We have seen a different CHP in each election period.

Do you remember the nationalist group transferred by Kilicdaroglu in 2011 to come to the forefront in the party’s image and discourse that included names like Emine Ulker Tarhan and Suheyl Batum?

Or, do you remember the leftist, socialist, and Alevi groups that came to the forefront by emphasizing Gezi Park protests during the electoral period in 2015?

And currently, in the run up to the local elections, Kilicdaroglu has once again changed the image of the party and addressed the electorate with a different message. This time, he is directly engaging in populist behavior, accentuating the rhetoric he adopted in the June 24 elections last year. While creating ambiguities and gaps in his party’s ideology, he is prioritizing winning and leaning towards a political opportunism that can be summed up with the motto, “No matter who you are, vote for me to undermine the AK Party.”

It’s not fair for me to give advice to the CHP, but in my opinion, the party’s biggest problem since the 1950s has been that they do not have a genuine or original opinion to present to Turkey.

During the periods when the center of politics was divided and the nation was led by coalitions, the lack of ideas was not evident on the surface. But in the last 16 years, whether we like it or not, this political center has shifted towards the AK Party and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Kilicdaroglu is acting like a surgeon, searching for a cure by applying trial-and-error method on a patient lying on the operation table.

The problem is not just that the CHP does not have any ideas worth expressing to the Turkish people. More crucially, the CHP is under the illusion that its criticisms of the current government, at least some of which are quite accurate, are ideas, and has for a long time been under the spell of laziness that has restricted their ideas and discourse to these limits.

Today we know very well what the CHP is against and what it thinks should not happen in the country. But we do not know what it is for and what it can actually promise Turkey.

Criticism is obviously something that is in the very nature of being in opposition and is an extremely important element from society’s point of view. It is ridiculous to criticize the CHP for their criticisms towards the government and their works. The problem is not that the CHP criticizes, but that it does not say anything else. Due to this reason, the CHP is restricted to a discourse, the main limits of which are determined by the government.

As long as this basic parameter does not change, no matter how many times the CHP changes its strategy, it will not be able to achieve any meaningful change in its number of votes. The CHP does not need political engineering or clever strategies, but needs to come up with new ideas. In other words, the CHP needs to focus on politics rather than engineering, develop a political discourse and use strategies that bring this to the forefront.

But of course, such a new political idea that has failed to emerge in the last 16 years will not miraculously emerge right before the elections. Meaning that the CHP will experience an election just like the ones in the past. We will see whether the path that was chosen, namely “what if it works”, will work or not.

Then let us return to the beginning of this article. Everyone in the CHP, from its leader to its doorman, is not only aware of the criticisms I have expressed here, but feels them in their bones. Due to this, they compete with each other more than competing with their electoral opponents, and again, everyone in the CHP is more curious about the morning of April 1 rather than the eve of March 31.

Since Turkey’s transition to a multi-party political system as from the election held on 14 May, 1950, the country had to experience numerous interregnum periods mainly due to military coups. One of these military coups was the February 28 coup in 1997. Although 22 years has passed, the societal problems and traumas caused by the coup have not be fully recovered yet. On the other hand, the regulations marked by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan abolished the oppressive and prohibitive practices remaining from February 28.

The memories of the latest military coup attempt Turkey experienced are still fresh in the country’s collective memory while its traces are still visible in bureaucracy and society. During the atrocious coup attempt organized by a group of Gulenist Terror Group (FETO) operatives who infiltrated the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), 251 citizens were killed and 2194 were injured. The atrocity was answered by an unprecedented resistance that marked its name in Turkey’s political history. Political will and society united and repelled the coup attempters. The nation defended the political will in the streets and paid heavy prices to protect democracy, which has been a turning point in Turkey’s democracy. Upon President Erdogan’s call, people took to the streets and reclaimed the public offices and media organizations occupied by the pro-coup forces, which was a first in the country’s history of coups that goes back to 26 May, 1960. The awareness spurred and shaped by this demeanor will certainly play a crucial role in building Turkey’s future.

Turkey and military coups

As of the election on 14 May, 1950, that marked Turkey’s transition to democracy, the country has experienced a slew of overt or covert military coups. The military coup staged on 27 May, 1960, was the first one and resulted in the capital punishment of then Prime Minister and Democrat Party leader Adnan Menderes and two ministers. A junta of military officers ended the 10-year ruling power of the Democrat Party, which came to power in every election by enjoying popular support. Only 11 years later, on 12 March, 1971, the military gave a memorandum to civilian politics and forced the government, ruled by the Justice Party leader and then Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel, to resign. So, between the years 1970 and 1980, Turkey suffered a long-standing conflict between the right-wing and left-wing and had to deal with unstable coalition governments, which ended with another coup attempt staged on 12 September, 1980.

Following the 1980 coup staged under the tutelage of then Chief of General Staff Kenan Evren, Turkey confronted a long period of oppression marked by arrests, tortures, and prohibitions. The volatile democratic climate, which was established perfunctorily after the period when the military controlled political life, started to decompose again with the election victory of politicians who were not considered acceptable by the system.

The military oppression period that started in the early 1990s culminated in yet another military coup staged on 28 February, 1997. The February 28 coup is one of the most far-reaching coups in Turkey’s history since the military officers that organized the coup and their co-conspirators in bureaucracy did not only aim their political opponents but also plotted an extensive intervention that affected all segments of society. The scope of the prohibitions that were put into practice after the February 28 manifests this intent.

The February 28 coup is one of the most far-reaching coups in Turkey’s history since the military officers that organized the coup and their co-conspirators in bureaucracy did not only aim their political opponents but also plotted an extensive intervention that affected all segments of society.

The climate of February 28

Some contextualization on the process leading up to the coup is required to comprehend the political and social background of the February 28 coup. During the 1990s, Turkey could not achieve political or economic stability since it was ruled by coalition governments throughout these years. In an atmosphere where political power was in decline, other power mechanisms such as military, media, capital, bureaucracy and global forces enjoyed increasing influence on the country.

In the local election held in 1994 amid all these, the Welfare Party chaired by Prof. Necmettin Erbakan had a victory since the local candidates of the party won both in Istanbul and Ankara, the two most populous provinces of Turkey. Becoming the Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor after the election, Erdogan practiced “project municipalism,” “administration skills” and “face-to-face communication policy,” all of which added up to the formation of a role model and spread to the rest of the country.

The first reflection of the Welfare Party’s success in municipalities was seen in the 1995 general election, in which the party had a notable success by receiving 22 percent of the vote share and becoming the first party. Of course, it was hard for political engineers to accept this success. As a result, the power to form the government was not granted to the first party but to the second and third parties, namely the Homeland Party (ANAP) chaired by Mesut Yılmaz and the True Path Party (DYP) led by Tansu Ciller. However, since the ANAYOL coalition government formed by these two parties had a short lifespan, then President Suleyman Demirel assigned Erbakan to form a government, after which Erbakan and DYP formed the REFAHYOL coalition government on 28 June, 1996.

Some groups within the army and Jacobin Kemalists in the bureaucracy were disturbed in the face of this development, and their discomfort started to reflect in the media from the very beginning of the coalition. In fact, the military never wanted to recognize Erbakan as Prime Minister despite the sensitive and soothing remarks of Erbakan as well as a large part of the media outlets who defined themselves as secular, universities, judiciary, and large organizations of business world. Eventually, a series of operations to shape opinions and open intervention attempts were ignited to undermine the 54th government led by Erbakan.  

Tanks of February 28

The process that has gone down in history as the “post-modern coup of February 28” was led by a certain group of military personnel within the TSK and conducted against the civilian government of the period. While this process is referred to as such due to the 9 hour long meeting of the National Security Council held on February 28, 1997, where anti-democratic decisions were taken, it in fact refers to the well-planned coup process that had military, civilian, financial, bureaucratic and media dimensions, and which were simultaneously put into action.

One of the more symbolically important events of the February 28 process is the deployment of tanks to the streets of Sincan, Ankara by the General Staff. As a reaction to the Al-Quds night event organized by the Sincan municipality, which at the time belonged to the Welfare Party, tanks were moved to the streets of Sincan on February 4, 1997, 5 days after the event. Choosing Sincan for such a display was a direct message. While tanks were in the streets of Sincan, news about the rise of reactionism that did not reflect reality were being pushed by the media.

News of this kind were intentionally pushed by the media to legitimize the coming interference in civilian politics. Another important symbolic indicator of the era is that both de facto bans against religious people in public spaces were put into effect and anything projecting an image of religiousness was demonized and portrayed as deserving ridicule. The February 28 coup, which happened after such an atmosphere was successfully created, forced the government of Erbakan to resign on June 18, 1997, and subsequently the Welfare Party was closed on January 16, 1998, by the Constitutional Court.

Several names, including Prime Minister Erbakan, were barred from politics. In accordance with their agendas, the perpetrators of the February 28 coup implemented many bans during the process. But these bans were removed one by one in the 17 years following the electoral victory of the AK Party, founded on 14 August, 2001, under the leadership of Erdogan, in the elections held on November 3, 2002.

Gradual dismantling of the anti-democratic inheritance

The bans and rights abuses put into place with the claim that “February 28 will last a thousand years” were in effect for a long time. The reason behind the fact that these policies could continue during the AK Party era is the power held by the bureaucratic oligarchy in Turkey, which should never be neglected as an actor in Turkish politics. Along with this, despite all obstructions and interference attempts of various kinds, governments under the leadership of Erdogan removed the bans implemented as part of the February 28 process, contributing greatly to the democratization of society and politics in Turkey.

It might be hard to talk about all of them, but it is important with respect to remembering and understanding the oppression of the period that some of the important bans that were implemented by the perpetrators of the February 28 process and were removed by Erdogan are discussed here. Here, the first topic that must be mentioned are the headscarf bans. The headscarf ban was first forced on students studying in universities, and then was made more extensive, coming to include all public spaces.

Among such bans, the ban on headscarf in universities was the first to be removed in the AK Party era in 2011. In 2013, by making a change in the “Regulations Regarding the Dress and Appearance of Public Institutions Personnel,” the ban on the headscarf for female public personnel was removed. Again in 2013, four female parliament members of the AK Party attended the general assembly with headscarves, signaling that the February 28 process was over. Another regulation introduced in 2014 removed the headscarf ban for students in middle schools and high schools. Another change in the Turkish Armed Forces Dress and Appearance Regulations in 2017 made it possible for female military personnel to wear headscarves. After the removal of this ban, it was seen that some female officers in the military preferred to wear the headscarf at work.

Another ban implemented as part of the February 28 process was regarding Imam Hatip schools. In 2009, the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) made the decision to end the policy of using a different multiplier in the university admission evaluations of Imam Hatip graduates. Following this, in 2012, Imam Hatip schools in middle school were re-opened with a legislative regulation. Similarly, bans on Quran courses were removed. Following the executive order number 653 accepted in 2011, the regulation introduced as part of the February 28 process limiting the minimum age of attendants in Quran courses was removed, creating a space for families to freely make their decisions.

Another well-known attribute of the perpetrators and sympathizers of the February 28 process is their eagerness to shut down political parties. The Welfare Party and subsequently the Virtue Party were shut down by the Constitutional Court. In 2008, a case to shut down the AK Party was opened and the AK Party was saved from being shut down with a single vote. Within this context, as part of the constitutional amendments in 2010, the AK Party implemented changes in the 149th article of the Constitution, making it harder to shut down political parties. Today, the decision to shut down a political party can only be taken if the Constitutional Court reaches a two-thirds majority.

In addition to these, extremely important steps were taken to secure democracy and remove anti-democratic influences in the judiciary by the restructuring of the High Council of the Judges and Prosecutors as well as the Constitutional Court. In the fight against anti-democratic influences in the military, unprecedented regulations were introduced in the era of AK Party governments. Some of these are the re-structuring of the Supreme Military Council and the removal of military justice and martial law.

Also, due to the oppression in the February 28 process, many public personnel were blacklisted, referred to disciplinary committees and forced to resign. The numbers show this clearly as between 1997 and 2001 roughly 11 thousand teachers were forced to resign, and 3 thousand 527 teachers were dismissed. This corresponds to 11 percent of the teacher shortage experienced in the period. In this period, 33 thousand 271 teachers underwent disciplinary inspections due to certain reasons, 11 thousand 890 received disciplinary punishments and 4 thousand 625 Ministry of National Education personnel were blacklisted. National Intelligence Agency (MİT) also flagged 2 thousand 639 public personnel, 418 academics and 949 teachers as “related to reactionism” within this period.

The psychological and physical oppression of the perpetrators of the February 28 coup on generally the conservative groups of the public in Turkey, which is observable in the above stated numbers, ended in the Erdogan era. The necessary efforts were made to ensure that the Directorate of Religious Affairs, Imam Hatip Schools, Quran courses and Religious Studies Faculties had the required personnel, preventing efforts to discredit these institutions. Discriminatory policies employed on public personnel solely due to their religious identities such as blacklisting, mobbing and disciplinary action were stopped.

April 27 military memorandum, violent Taksim Gezi Park protests, judiciary attack in December 2013,  various economic attacks and finally the bloody military coup attempt of July 2016… All these failed due to the strong support of the national will towards the civilian government.

Institutionalization of the democratic atmosphere

With the military coups that had been happening almost each decade, juntas within the military imposed their decisions on politics and society. The time span in which this state of affairs changed is the 17-year-long period of AK Party governance, which was founded in 2001 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Certainly, the length of the period in which civilian politics under the leadership of Erdogan governed Turkey does not mean that military juntas have given up on coups. On the contrary, many coup attempts took place and these coup attempts were not limited to the military dimension, instead being conducted by employing different centers of power.

From the April 27 military memorandum to the violent Taksim Gezi Park protests, from the attempt in December 2013 by law enforcement and the judiciary to the economic attacks from abroad, and finally the bloody military coup attempt of July 2016, many coup attempts took place. But all these attempts failed due to the strong support of the national will towards the civilian government. Thus, as opposed to the other periods in which military coups took place, in the AK Party era, civilian politics resisted coup attempts with the authority it has taken from the nation, leading to the continued rule of democracy.On the 22nd anniversary of the February 28 coup, Turkey is at an important stage on the road of democratization. The most important thing that must be done following this stage is the creation of an atmosphere that will institutionalize these achievements. 

With almost a month left until the local elections, political parties have put all their efforts to cross the finish line in lead. All parties have made and continue to make efforts to maximize their gains in local administration. While on the one hand local elections dominate the agenda of domestic politics, there is a rising discussion on the possibility of the formation of a new political party on the other. Some political circles imply that former AK Party ministers are about to establish a new political party as an alternative against the government. Even if there have been no official statements made about these allegations, Turkey is nowadays discussing the possibility of the establishment of a new splinter party.

Indeed, Turkey’s political history is full with splinter parties founded as a result of disagreements and intra-party rivalries. The prominent examples of splinter parties in Turkey are the Great Union Party founded by Muhsin Yazicioglu, the New Turkey Party founded by former MPs of the Democratic Left Party, and Turkey Party established by Abdullatif Sener, a former minister of the AK Party currently serving as an MP for the CHP. All of these political parties were divided into various functions due to increasing conflicts and clashes of ideas at the time.

Why has the AK Party never faced any massive intra-party opposition in comparison to other political parties?

Since the AK Party has been in power for 17 years, there have always been some rumors about new splits within the party. However, even if some politicians leave the party because of the clash of interests, there has never been a massive intra-party opposition movement within the party.

Why has the AK Party never faced any massive intra-party opposition in comparison to other political parties? The answer of this question lies behind the powerful and consolidated leadership of President Erdogan, which has been acknowledged by the masses for years. Nonetheless, other political parties experienced some problems in providing consensus and the acknowledgement of the party leadership by society. For instance, both the CHP and Iyi Party have experienced a leadership crisis in the last year, which has resulted in the resignation of some prominent party officials from both parties.

Abdullah Gul, Ahmet Davutoglu, and Ali Babacan have been proposed as challengers of Erdogan’s leadership. Do these names really have the capacity to challenge Erdogan or get mass support?

When it comes to the AK Party, Erdogan’s leadership cannot be challenged by other opposition groups. In the current process, the names of Abdullah Gul, Ahmet Davutoglu, and Ali Babacan have been proposed as challengers of Erdogan’s leadership. Nevertheless, it is a well-known fact that none of these names have the capacity to challenge Erdogan’s leadership or get mass support.

These three names have served in various positions under the AK Party administration. Abdullah Gul served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prime Minister, and President. Likewise, Ahmet Davutoglu and Ali Babacan have also served in critical positions in the AK Party governments. After their terms ended, they did not have a serious impact on the dynamics of the party. This means that they could not create their own followers neither under the roof of the AK Party, nor among the voters.

Due to the fact that these names have not provided a statement either supporting or denying the allegations, it is possible to see some mobilization among former AK Party officials. Nevertheless, because of the lack of leadership and support, it is difficult for these mobilized groups to turn into a new political movement against the AK Party. Turkey’s opposition parties, on the other side, will never quit their quest for an alternative conservative party against Erdogan since they cannot perform an effective opposition in Turkish politics.

Turkey’s opposition parties including the CHP, the Iyi Party and the HDP have established a holy alliance to stop the ruling AK Party-MHP bloc. The political system, especially after the introduction of the presidential system in April 2017, has started to be structured by bipolarity. The underlying motive for both of the alliances is similar, the will to power. However, they are shaped by two different and rather opposing ideological frameworks based on their positions within the political system.

The opposition seeks to detach the AK Party-MHP bloc from power, and thus adopts a discourse of liberty. This discourse strives to convince the electorate that the ruling power is oppressive and excluding the majority of society. The ruling AK Party-MHP bloc, in contrast, puts forward a discourse of power in order to maintain and strengthen its grasp on power. This discourse seeks to persuade the electorate that its rule is inclusive and should continue to sustain the security and welfare of the country.

The CHP, Iyi Party, and HDP alliance, designed to topple the AK Party-MHP bloc, is shaped by two different and rather opposing ideological frameworks based on their positions within the political system. 

Therefore, the result of the power struggle, including the upcoming local elections on 31 March, between these two political blocs will be determined by a couple of factors. The first one is the persuasive power of each discourse or policy. For the ruling bloc, the electorate will look at whether its interests are tied to the continuation of the existing order. If the electorate feel that an election loss for the ruling bloc will destabilize the political system and lead to an insecure environment, both with respect to the economy and politico-military matters, they tend to vote for the ruling AK Party-MHP bloc. More specifically, if the AK Party-MHP ruling bloc convinces the electorate that it’s loss of power will impair the fight against terrorism (PKK, FETO and DAESH) and deteriorate the country’s economy, which had recently taken a downturn, it will guarantee the election victory.

Thus, the opposition should convince the electorate that a change in power or the replacement of the ruling bloc with the opposition will not harm the fight against terrorism and improve the country’s economy. The opposition should persuade the electorate that there is an alternative to the ruling power and that alternative is itself.

For the ruling bloc in Turkey, the electorate will look at whether its interests are tied to the continuation of the existing order. The opposition need to convince the electorate that a change in power will not harm Turkey’s fight against terrorism and will improve the country’s economy. 

This leads us to the second factor. The opposition should demonstrate that the alliance between the three political parties –here we can include the Islamist Felicity Party (SP)– form a strong and dependable force for ruling the country. The opposition alliance is formed by two secular-nationalist political parties –the CHP and the Iyi Party– and the Kurdish nationalist HDP. The integrity and coordination between the CHP and the Iyi Party is not a strong one since the CHP tilts towards the Left whereas the Iyi Party has right-wing tendencies. This creates a serious divergence of opinions over some critical issues. The relations between these two parties have already created serious ideological debates among their members and caused some party members to resign and shift sides.

The opposition is not offering a clear-cut economic program to fight with the existing economic problems such as rising inflation and unemployment rates as well as not providing a comprehensive program for urban planning

As we add the Kurdish nationalist HDP, which is the political representative of the PKK armed terrorist group, the internal contradictions of the opposition bloc intensively rises. Not only the right-wing Turkish nationalist Iyi Party members and its grassroots have reacted to this rapprochement with the HDP, but left-wing CHP members and its grassroots showed displeasure with the decision to ally with the HDP. The inclusion of the HDP into the alliance has decreased the chances for the opposition to be able to weaken the ruling bloc in the upcoming local elections. This will more likely be perceived by the electorate that the opposition bloc may endanger the fight against terrorism, especially Turkey’s struggle with the PKK’s Syrian branch, the YPG.

Moreover, the opposition is not offering a clear-cut economic program to fight with the existing economic problems such as rising inflation and unemployment rates. Not to mention that the opposition bloc has not provided a comprehensive program for urban planning and government in the run-up to the local elections. In sum, despite the rising public displeasure with the existing ruling power, the opposition seems to fail to offer itself as an alternative in the elections.     

The AK Party is expected to reveal its candidate for Istanbul on Saturday. Binali Yildirim’s name has already been discussed in circles close to the party and he may be considered as the ‘common’ candidate of the People’s Alliance – composed of the AK Party and MHP. Devlet Bahceli already announced that MHP will fully support Yildirim’s candidacy in Istanbul.

The technical detail that both party’s leading figures are talking about is the fact that Binali Yildirim is currently the president of the Turkish Grand National Assembly. In the previous weeks there were rumors that Binali Yildirim will resign from his current position in order to run for the mayoral elections. However, rumors now suggest that both Erdogan and Bahceli don’t think it’s necessary for Yildirim to resign in order to become the candidate for Istanbul.

CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu is yet to comment on this issue. Whether he is remaining silent due to the friendly meeting he held with Yildirim in December or whether he will use this as a tool during the election campaign is yet to be known.

The campaigns for Turkey’s local elections in 2019 will start in full gear next week. Above economic reasons, political analysts expect the potential military operation to be launched by the Turkish Armed Forces in the east of the Euphrates to have an impact on the campaign process and the results of the election.

Since the upcoming local elections will be the first of their kind in the new presidential system, there are some technical details that are being adjusted for these elections according to the needs of the new system in Turkey.

According to the current Turkish electoral law, which has been applied until now, the official authority to depose majors are in the hands of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. However, in the new system, the Minister of Internal Affairs can be appointed as a technical bureaucrat and does not need to be an elected representative. In this regard, the related constitutional bylaw will change and will give this authority directly to the President.

There are also some other details, like the protocol procedures or immunity issues of the mayors – that need to be regulated. These details and others are currently being studied by technocrats and whether or not changes will occur depend on the agenda of the parliament.

*Written by Selahattin Emre Celebi

There are three and a half months until the local elections in Turkey and each week as the political dynamics in the country are changing, names of the candidates, details of negotiations, and the nature of alliances are also changing.

The CHP and Iyi Party have agreed upon 21 cities – 11 has been taken by the CHP and the remaining 10 that the Iyi Party has a potential. There are rumors that the two parties will also come to an agreement on 19 other districts. However, details of these districts and the names to be put forward are expected to become clear next week.

After the party assembly meeting for determining candidates for local elections yesterday, Seyit Torun – deputy head of the CHP – made a press conference and announced 67 candidates of the CHP. Torun declared that CHP’s candidate for Ankara is Mansur Yavas, for Istanbul is Ekrem Imamoglu, Adana is Zeydan Karalar, and Antalya, Muhittin Bocek. In addition to these cities, Torun declared candidates for other cities including Ahmet Meric in Agri, Tanju Ozcan in Bolu, Rasim Yilmaz in Nigde, Ali Akyildiz in Sivas, and Fatma Kaplan Hurriyet in Kocaeli.

Within the framework of its alliance with the Iyi Party, CHP withdrew its candidate – Ahmet Akin – from Balikesir. Another controversial city during the alliance negotiations between the two parties was Adana. It was later decided that the Iyi Party will support CHP’s candidate and Zeydan Karalar was announced as the candidate for Adana yesterday. The Iyi Party will also support CHP’s Antalya candidate – Muhittin Bocek – who is currently the mayor of Konyaalti (a district of Antalya).

The most discussed candidate between the CHP and Iyi Party has been Mansur Yavas. He was finally announced as CHP’s candidate and according to the alliance between the two parties, the Iyi Party will support Mansur Yavas in Ankara.

In the local elections of 2014, Mansur Yavas was CHP’s candidate in Ankara, and he received 43.82% of the votes. AK Party’s Melih Gokcek won the elections in Ankara with 44.82% of the total votes.

There are discussions that CHP is currently having some problems in deciding about its candidate for Izmir, who will run against AK Party’s Nihat Zeybekci – ex-minister of economy. The current mayor of Izmir belongs to the CHP but is not running in the upcoming elections. There are rumors that Kemal Kilicdaroglu – head of the CHP – is planning to announce a “surprise” candidate.

On the other side of the equilibrium, the AK Party and MHP have decided to go through the cities that have already been announced. It is rumored that MHP has decided to withdraw its candidates in a couple of cities and is speculated that the AK Party will withdraw its candidates in Igdir and Kars, and support the MHP’s candidates. In the People’s Alliance so far, while the MHP has not nominated candidates in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir, the AK Party has not nominated candidates in Igdir and Kars.

According to reports from HaberTurk, the AK Party will not nominate candidates in Adana, Manisa, Mersin, and Osmaniye, where the MHP currently controls the municipalities.

*Written by Selahattin Emre Celebi

Within the past two weeks, Turkey’s governing AK Party revealed a significant number of mayor candidates for the upcoming local elections. After negotiations between the AK Party and the MHP on forming an alliance again, both parties have accelerated their preparations for the elections. As these elections are a crucial turning point for the AK Party and the consolidation of the new political system, the candidate selection process was important to establish a successful election strategy.

President Erdogan’s three-term rule, which limits running for office for a maximum of three terms, with the purpose of providing dynamism and rejuvenation in party cadres has been implemented for the first time in local elections. Due to this reason, 91 mayors of provinces and counties currently serving could not be re-nominated. The first round of candidates were announced by President Erdogan on 24 November. These included the candidates of 40 provinces, consisting of politicians, NGO leaders, governors, and former ministers. President Erdogan underlined again that competency and the merit of the candidate compose the criteria that the AK Party has used in the candidate selection process.

As the upcoming local elections are a crucial turning point for the AK Party and the consolidation of the new political system, the candidate selection process was important to establish a successful election strategy.

The second round of candidates were announced soon after, on 27 November. The most striking names in this second group were the candidates of Ankara and Izmir. The deputy chair of the AK Party, Mehmet Ozhaseki, was nominated for Ankara, while the former Minister of Economy Nihat Zeybekci became the mayoral candidate for Izmir. Ozhaseki and Zeybekci are well-known politicians throughout the country and their nomination was a sign that the AK Party is paying more attention to these metropolitan cities. Nevertheless, even if the candidacy of Binali Yildirim for Istanbul is almost certain, it is yet to be announced to the public.

The candidates for Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir form the cornerstones of the AK Party’s election strategy. As Bahceli announced, the MHP will not nominate candidates in provinces that the AK Party has, and will support the AK Party’s candidate in order to maintain the solidarity of the coalition formed during the June 24 elections. As a result of this, the People’s Alliance has already significantly gone ahead of the game. The AK Party nominated three high-profile politicians to attract the voters in these electoral districts, and these candidates have been welcomed by the MHP. Thus, the candidate selection strategy of the AK Party in these provinces received successful reflections by both parties.

President Erdogan’s three-term rule, which limits running for office for a maximum of three terms, with the purpose of providing dynamism and rejuvenation in party cadres has been implemented for the first time in local elections.

Nonetheless, the AK Party is aware of the rejuvenation demands among the masses. In accordance with this purpose, the party has made significant changes in its candidate profiles. For instance, only 10 out of 40 among the first group of candidates are currently serving mayors of their electoral districts. This shows that the AK Party is paying attention to the mobilization in local administration.

The rest of the AK Party’s candidates will be announced throughout December along with the party’s election manifesto. It is possible to see some joint candidates as part of a cooperation between the AK Party and the MHP. Negotiations on the possibilities and limitations of the alliance are being conducted precisely. The concrete results of these negotiations will be seen in the following days as the rest of the candidates are announced.

Although the AK Party and the MHP announced that they were not going to form an alliance for the upcoming local elections last month, the latest incidents forced them to come together under the People’s Alliance. The leaders of both parties held a meeting last week in order to discuss the possibilities and limitations of forming an alliance, and both leaders reflected positively on forming one.

The leader of MHP, Devlet Bahceli, stated that the MHP would not nominate its own candidates in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, the most critical provinces for the People’s Alliance, and that the MHP would support the AK Party candidates in these provinces. Thus, the People’s Alliance has once again emerged as a game changer in Turkish politics.

Before evaluating the reasons behind the re-emergence of the alliance, it is crucial to remember the reasons why the parties failed to form the alliance a couple of weeks ago. The AK Party and the MHP experienced a clash of interests on two issues. The first was on granting a partial amnesty for some prisoners, which the MHP fully supported and the AK Party was critical of. The second issue was the Council of State’s decision on the Student Oath. While the MHP applauded the decision, the AK Party harshly criticized it. As a result of these two crises, the parties announced that they were not going to form an alliance in the upcoming local elections.

The leaders of the AK Party and MHP have once again agreed on forming an alliance in the local elections in Turkey. Thus, the People’s Alliance has once again emerged as a game changer in Turkish politics.

Nevertheless, due to the latest mobilization within the opposition block, the parties had to change their stance in forming an alliance. The leader of the CHP started to seek for an alliance and had a meeting with high-ranking officials in the Iyi Party and HDP. Even if the reflections of the meeting with the HDP are still not clear, it is almost certain that the CHP and Iyi Party will form an alliance. As it was underlined in the press, both parties will pursue limited cooperation and collaboration in the local elections by nominating joint candidates in 9 provinces including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Eskisehir, Antalya, Mersin, and Adana.

The mobilization of the opposition block might damage the success of the People’s Alliance in the upcoming elections and in its aftermath. If the opposition block ensures to form an alliance in critical provinces while the members of the People’s Alliance join the elections separately, the People’s alliance may lose some votes in critical provinces. Moreover, since the main aim of the members of the Nation’s Alliance is making Turkey’s presidential system a controversial issue, they will try to destabilize Turkey’s presidential system and impose their false agenda after the elections.

The fact that the AK Party and MHP joined around the same table again proves that the consolidation of the People’s Alliance has already provided and that parties in this alliance can make any sacrifice to serve the principles of the alliance. 

The AK Party and the MHP made a clever move in coming together to discuss the possible outcomes of this failure. Both parties founded their own delegation in order to maintain healthier discussions. The MHP’s support to the AK Party’s possible candidates in three major provinces increased mutual sympathy and tolerance again. President Erdogan thanked Bahceli for his commitment to the alliance. As a result of this, it is possible to broaden the boundaries of this alliance in the following days.

Consequently, after facing a serious crisis and handling it successfully, the AK Party and MHP are at the same table once again. This process proves that the consolidation of the People’s Alliance has already provided and that parties in this alliance can make any sacrifice in order to serve the principles of the alliance based on the country’s national values, unity, and solidarity.

Turkey’s local elections in 2009 will be the ‘first’ local elections in the new presidential system, both President Erdogan and his political competitors are going through a rigorous process making their final tunes in deciding the candidates of local administrators. It was recently announced by the party spokesperson that the candidates for about 40 municipalities have been decided and now waiting to be announced by the President Erdogan tomorrow.

President Erdogan and his party have still an advantage over their competitors since the last elections as the recent public opinion polls reflect. The AK Party attached importance to polls (temayül yoklaması) in deciding the candidates. In these polls two criteria are important: the first is how candidates perceive success and the second what would be the voting inclination of voters towards candidates.

Like all local elections in Turkish political history, three cities are the most important battle grounds in the competition: İstanbul, Ankara and İzmir. Experts argue that the results in these major cities will have an important impact on the next presidential elections

Change is expected in the AK Party candidate profiles that more than half the candidates will probably be new names. For Istanbul, the candidate of AK Party is finalized: Binali Yildirim – the former and last Prime Minister of the parliamentary system who has gained esteem through his former administrative responsibilities. In Ankara, polls show that Mehmet Ozhaseki – previous Minister of Environment and Urban Planning – who has a considerable experience in local administrations (as major of Kayseri between 1998-2015)- will be the final candidate. For Izmir the mentioned name was Mahmut Ozgener – 38th President of Turkish Football Association – who was an important political figure in İzmir, but sources close to the party tell that the AK Party’s candidate for İzmir will be Nihat Zeybekci, former minister of economy.

President Erdogan’s main competitor, Kemal Kilicdaroglu – head of CHP (Republican People’s Party) – has long been flirting with Meral Aksener’s Iyi Party to come up with a common candidate in major three major cities Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir in order to consolidate opposition votes against the AK Party candidate as they are aware that one victory in Ankara or Istanbul against AK Party will have a psychological effect.

On the other hand, People’s Alliance shows glimpses of survival even though both leaders, Erdogan and Bahceli, publicly announced before that there would be no alliance in the local elections. However, both leader got together in the presidential palace recently and some say that they reached to an understanding for a partial agreement on some cities. President Erdogan wants the support of MHP in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir in return for supporting MHP’s candidates in three other cities. HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) which has been losing public support over the past five years, will apparently support CHP’s candidates in the western cities but it will depend on the candidate’s profile. CHP will be facing a grave dilemma of with whom to form an alliance: Turkish nationalist Iyi Party or Kurdish nationalist HDP?

*Written by Selahattin Emre Celebi. 

Less than five months are left to the local elections in Turkey. Political parties have already started the process of selecting their candidates. Even though it is not yet officially confirmed, Iyi Party is going to nominate Ümit Özdağ for İstanbul, Şengül Hablemitoğlu for İzmir, and İsmail Koncuk for Adana according to party sources. Before selecting the right candidate, all political parties are setting a roadmap to follow in the upcoming elections. Analyzing these roadmaps is crucial to understand main dynamics of the upcoming process.

As the governing party, the AK Party has begun to make some preparations for possible candidates. The party will organize a meeting for the party delegates in the following days in order to settle the criteria for candidate selection. Even though this criteria has not yet been clarified, President Erdogan underlined that the party would determine candidates with the participation of all party branches. Furthermore, the AK Party is focusing on choosing candidates who have a good reputation in their electoral districts. In accordance with this aim, party officials are paying close attention to the results of surveys conducted in various electoral districts to see the reflections of possible candidates.

While there have been some names debated in the press as possible candidates, the head of the local administration branch of the party announced that the process would be finalized at the end of the month. According to official statements coming from other party sources, some provincial and district heads will resign in order to run for the position of mayor.

AK Party officials are paying close attention to the results of surveys conducted in various electoral districts in order to assess the reflections of possible candidates.

When it comes to the main opposition party, the CHP is still facing serious issues, which is preventing the party from focusing on local elections. While on the one hand Muharrem Ince’s role within the party is still being questioned, the latest controversial speech of CHP deputy Ozturk Yilmaz on the Adhan (Islamic call to prayer) raised tensions within the party again. Because of this reason, the CHP spokesman warned all party officials to obey the rules of the party and to stay away from provocative speeches.

Despite these issues, the party is still discussing the possibilities and limitations of forming an alliance with other opposition parties. The CHP had a meeting with representatives from the Iyi Party and the HDP in previous weeks. Nevertheless, it is still a question as to whether the party will form an alliance or not, and how opposition parties will approach the idea of forming an alliance in the local elections. Thus, it seems that these parties will wait until last minute to announce whether they will be forming an alliance or not.

The HDP, on the contrary, is openly seeking to form an alliance, especially with the CHP. The party officials frequently call for uniting against the AK Party to gain more municipalities and weaken the party on a local level. Although the HDP officials see the formation of the “democracy block” as an obligation, the other parties have not yet replied to this call yet. Some CHP officials have welcomed this idea and are trying to convince party leadership to respond positively.

The main opposition party, the CHP, has not been able to focus on local elections due to the party being pre-occupied with the unclear role of Muharrem Ince within the party and the recent controversy regarding the Adhan.

Consequently, while parties have accelerated their preparations for the upcoming local elections, their candidates and strategies are still unclear. After the candidates are announced, all parties will start their local election campaigns on local and national levels.

Almost ten days ago, the AK Party and the MHP announced that they were not going to form an alliance in the upcoming local elections. This announcement switched Turkey’s agenda from international issues to domestic concerns. Indeed, the AK Party and the MHP have been in conflict on some policy issues such as granting a partial amnesty for some prisoners and canceling the earlier arrangement on the Student Oath by the Council of State. These two issues have increasingly deepened the divide between the two parties, hence the reason why they will be participating in the elections without forming an alliance.

After the announcement of this decision, some circles claimed that the alliance between the AK Party and the MHP had completely come to an end. However, as was explained, the decision is limited only to the upcoming local elections and the People’s Alliance, which was formed last February, will continue to be active – especially in Parliament. Since there has been a latent alliance between the AK Party and MHP since the July 15 failed coup attempt, both parties have similar concerns on Turkey’s problems and the country’s position in the international arena.

In the light of this information, it is clear that the AK Party and the MHP have been acting responsibly in order to protect the country from internal and external threats, and to consolidate Turkey’s presidential system. These critical issues function as a connection between the two to act together in parliament.

How will the AK Party and the MHP manage to protect the People’s Alliance in parliament when they become rivals in the local elections?

How will the AK Party and the MHP manage to protect this alliance in parliament when they become rivals in the local elections? This is a serious question and an uphill struggle in front of them. The latest statements from both sides show that both parties will design their election campaign to provide this power balance between them. Even if they run to gain municipalities, they will not make concessions from the principles of this alliance.

Thus, it is possible to see that both parties will protect the core principles of the alliance, which was formed around the country’s national values, unity, and solidarity. These principles, of course, will also be settled at the core of the election campaigns of the two parties. Since the alliance was formed around these principles beyond of daily politics, the parties will be careful not to exceed certain boundaries.

If the AK Party and MHP are able to balance between “being rivals” in the local elections and “being partners” in the parliament, the People’s Alliance will continue to go forward.

Indeed, the serious problems brought to the fore by the AK Party and MHP have not been solved yet. Turkey still faces terrorist threats and is maintaining its fight against terrorist organizations such as FETO, the PKK, and Daesh. Even if the domestic activities of these organizations have been minimized, they are still very active abroad. Furthermore, the presidential system of Turkey still needs time and dedication to be consolidated. These issues require strong cooperation between the AK Party and MHP in order to be solved.

For all these reasons, cooperation and communication between the AK Party and the MHP will continue in the parliament, especially on critical issues for the country’s sake. The relatively long-term rapprochement between the AK Party and the MHP after the coup attempt positively reflected on the solution to Turkey’s security problems and the switch from a parliamentary to a presidential system of government. If the parties are able to balance between “being rivals” in the local elections and “being partners” in the parliament, the People’s Alliance will continue to contribute to the solution of Turkey’s serious problems in the future.

Since 2013, Turkey has been experiencing deeply traumatic events one after the other. The country has chosen to deal with these events with a new constitution and elections, preferring something new rather than old in order to address the trauma. We are now in the final stretch of a marathon of elections that have been going on for the last two years.

After the local elections in March 2019, we will enter a 3-year period without elections, which will last until 2022. Considering the fact that we’ve continuously been under an atmosphere of elections since March 2014, which have been pretty fierce, this 3-year period will certainly feel different for the country.

Since the previous local elections held in March 2014, the nature of politics, political sociology, and voting behavior in Turkey have changed significantly.

What makes the upcoming local elections more important than a simple vote to determine local administrators is the fact that the opposition is trying to make it ‘a referendum vote’ for the Turkish government. And this effort may lead to the most critical stage of a struggle in voter sociology, which has been long ongoing.

I will attempt to explain the reasons for this.

Now that Turkey has fully transitioned to the presidential system, the government is stable and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will rule the country until June 2022. However, the situation is not the same in Parliament. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) does not hold the majority. Thus, the AK Party needs to maintain good relations with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) – its electoral ally during the 2018 elections. (The opposite also holds here, meaning that the MHP needs the AK Party as well).

The continuation of the alliance that was established prior to the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2018 had become a political necessity. Leader of the MHP, Devlet Bahceli, was the first to state this, arguing that for a presidential system to be truly established, the success of the People’s Alliance must continue in the local elections, since the opposition would rekindle discussions regarding the presidential system in case of a decrease in votes.

Bahceli was not wrong with this opinion. Similar to the efforts between the AK Party and MHP, the Nation Alliance, which was first established for the 2018 elections, between the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Iyi Party and Felicity Party also seems interested in employing a strategy of cooperation and alliance for the local elections.

While the Felicity Party does not yet appear to be a part of this equation, CHP and Iyi Party have begun flirting with the idea of an alliance. In my opinion, Bahceli’s analysis still carries its validity. However, the dynamics have significantly changed when the AK Party and MHP publicly declared following the Student Oath debate that they will not form an alliance in the local elections.

Political scene after the parliamentary elections in July 2015

To recall the last parliamentary elections, Turkish voters were roughly divided into two major blocs. The first and majority bloc represented by the People’s Alliance consists of 54% of the voter base. The Nation Alliance received 34% of the vote. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which entered the elections outside of any alliance, fortified its position in the Turkish political landscape with 12% of the vote.

When examining these results, we see that the percentage of votes received by the AK Party has decreased to the levels obtained during the 2015 July elections. This is when the party failed to receive a majority in Parliament for the first time (since coming to power in 2002). The only consolation for this was that President Erdogan was selected as the first president of the presidential system in the first round, with 52.6% of the vote. The AK Party now cooperates with the MHP in order to achieve a majority in the parliament, meaning this is a de facto legislative coalition.

MHP’s key position

In comparison to the number of votes it received, this situation gives the MHP disproportionate influence. This is how, despite being the fourth largest party in Parliament, with only 50 members, the MHP could suggest for a general pardon for prisoners convicted of certain crimes.

MHP is evidently trying to use this position as a “leverage.” The last of such cases is the recent Student Oath debate, which has been the last the straw that broke the camel’s back causing the two parties to break up and follow their own ways during the local elections of 2019.

Likewise, the slowdown of the Turkish economy, along with the rising levels of inflation and unemployment, seems to have increased public discontent regarding the AK Party prior to the election. The general election held in June 2018 has shown that while the MHP lost a significant amount of votes to the newly formed nationalist Iyi Party, it has retained its significance by drawing a similar amount of votes from the AK Party. MHP now intends to recapture the nationalist vote it lost by employing its public perception.

Some recent polls reveal a remarkable trend among voters: voters continue to switch from the AK Party to the MHP. Some studies even conclude that this dynamic may have led to the MHP gaining 20% of the total votes. These studies and polls may be the reason behind the increased confidence Bahceli has shown in his relations with the AK Party and with Erdogan.

In both the constitutional referendum and the June 2018 elections we saw that with respect to opposing FETO and defending the country from future threats of terrorism, voters tend to hold the AK Party and MHP, Erdogan and Bahceli, in the same regard. The voter base of both parties constitute a “common pool” of 53% of the total vote, and the transition of voter preferences between the two parties takes place only in that pool.

The ongoing economic turbulence in Turkey gives a golden chance to the opposition parties at capturing votes from the 53% “common pool.” The CHP and Iyi Party are working hard to claim symbolically important victories against the AK Party.

Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality undoubtedly carries the utmost significance for the AK Party in the local elections. Recalling that the elected mayor of Istanbul, Kadir Topbas, was made to resign by the AK Party and President Erdogan, Istanbul emerges as a possibly problematic area for the AK Party. Formerly to negotiate with the AK Party, MHP had suggested that it would act in favor of the AK Party and not nominate a candidate in Istanbul, expecting a similar act in a different place for their benefit. However, there was not much that the AK Party could gain from the MHP in Istanbul; for the AK Party to win Istanbul, instead of MHP, the party should have focused more on the Kurdish electorate. The same is also happening between the Iyi Party and CHP, in the lines of “We should give Istanbul to them and they should give us Ankara.”

CHP’s HDP deadlock

CHP wants to gain the majority in Istanbul but whether the Iyi Party alone would achieve this is uncertain. Thus, the CHP needs to attract HDP voters as the HDP does not have a meaningful chance of winning the city. However, getting closer to the Kurds has become the biggest taboo of Turkish politics in recent years. If CHP were to name a candidate that would draw the support of Kurdish voters, they would distance themselves from Turkish nationalist Iyi Party voters. But without the support of Kurdish voters, it is highly unlikely for the CHP to win.

AK Party and MHP have both been accusing CHP of “allying with terrorists” and saying that HDP is a direct extension of the terrorist organization, the PKK. This discourse is very effective among voters. Non-Kurdish voters, regardless of which party they vote for, do not have any doubt regarding the HDP’s close relationship with the PKK. All research confirms this striking political reality. Now, seeing that the People’s Alliance is in some kind of coma, will there be a change in this discourse? Will the AK Party adopt a more soft approach to Kurdish politics? We’ll see.

While search for an alliance during the local elections has ended for the AK Party and the MHP, these efforts are likely to continue between the Iyi Party and the CHP. If the opposition parties, including the HDP, manage to form a block despite their substantial differences in micro and macro policies and gain vote from the ruling bloc of the AK Party and MHP in the elections, for example reducing the 53% total vote of the two parties to around 45-47%, Turkey might enter a discussion of legitimacy that might last until 2022. The opposition may claim that President Erdogan and the AK Party-MHP majority in the Parliament have lost their legitimacy on the following morning of the elections.

Scramble for symbolically important municipalities

The fact that the MHP and AK Party will not form an alliance in the local elections will prevent others from calculating the votes of the two parties and saying “look, this is the state of the People’s Alliance.”

On the other hand, due to the complex system of local elections in Turkey, it is hard to determine the percentage of votes a given party has received nationwide. Therefore, the real result of the election will not be determined by vote percentages but by which parties win the symbolically important municipalities and which party wins the most municipalities in total. This is why the AK Party losing metropolitan areas such as Istanbul and Ankara means a lot to the opposition.

In previous elections, the AK Party used to run a serious election campaign in Izmir, which traditionally strongly votes for CHP, but in this election it seems like the AK Party will act more defensively and prefer to focus on retaining its previous majorities. It will be interesting to watch the AK Party’s efforts to retain its popularity not only in Istanbul and Ankara but also in cities such as Antalya, Bursa, and Balıkesir.

All these constitute the reasons why this election will be decisive for AK Party’s future. If the party shows that it has retained its influence and popularity, it will prove that it has successfully emerged from the dangerous turbulence Turkey has experienced since the last months of 2013 as the “founding” party, and will continue to carry Turkey to its future. If it experiences a significant decrease in votes and fails to rejuvenate after such a loss, it will enter a period of very hard days.

The so-called People’s Alliance between the AK Party and the MHP has been in disarray. Relations between the two parties took a downturn with the disagreement on a couple of issues, such as issuing a general pardon and the Council of State’s decision to repel the earlier arrangement on the student oath. The MHP has been pressing hard for issuing a general pardon for convicts in the run-up to local elections at the end of March. The AK Party finds it inconvenient and refutes it for it might cause a loss of confidence in the public towards the law. Yet the MHP has not taken a step back and vowed to bring the issue to the Parliament.

The Council of State’s decision to repel the arrangement on the student oath and the disagreement between the AK Party and MHP on this issue has only caused further damage to the Alliance. The student oath, which was held obligatory for elementary school students to chant every morning before classes since 1933, had been removed in 2013 on account of ethnic discrimination against non-Turkish groups in the country. The decision was also taken on the basis that it carried a high dosage of ultra-secular nationalist ideology and that it may pedagogically harm students at such an early age.

The nationalist MHP has supported the Council’s decision to repel the arrangement by claiming that removing it was one of the notorious political mistakes made in the process of the democratic opening, which basically relaxed the state’s ideological control on ethnic and religious minorities in the country. The AK Party maintained its earlier reformist position on the matter and blamed the Council of meddling within the sphere of the executive. The party also warned the Council that the country could not be brought back to the times which were characterized by bureaucratic tutelage.

The uproar on the student oath case between the two political parties openly disclosed their ideological distance. This led to public debates, some claiming that the People’s Alliance might come to an end due to the noted notable ideological difference. The native-national ideological basis shared by the two parties might collapse under growing pressure and the parties may begin to move in different ideological directions defined by separate interests.

The Alliance was officially established in May this year in the run up to the critical June 24 general elections. Yet in an unofficial form the Alliance has been with us since the unsuccessful coup attempt by Gulenist army officers on 15 July, 2016. The two political parties vowed to fight against internal and external threats (including the PKK and DAESH) and to maintain the country’s survival. Besides, in the official document of the Alliance, the two parties declared that they will work together to institutionalize and consolidate the presidential system after the June 24 elections. In addition to this, the document states that they will pursue a strategy of making Turkey not only a regional, but a global power.

Some argue that despite apparent ideological differences the Alliance will maintain itself since the causes that initially led to its formation still stand true. Thus, the two parties might have taken a strategic decision to depart temporarily in the upcoming local elections in order to increase the chances of success of the Alliance in the future.

Some others contend that in both parties tension is growing among members out of fear of identity loss. Indeed, this might alarm party members since the presidential system forces the political parties into a two-party system. The temporary alliance might turn into unification in the long run. Similar tensions and concerns can also be observed in the opposition parties.

It is too early to talk about the future of the People’s Alliance. However, it is fair to state that unless the conditions that had formed the Alliance change, it will maintain its existence with periodical fluctuations.

In 2013, the Ministry of National Education abolished the administrative regulation that ordered the recital of the Student Oath, an oath that begins by stating “I am a Turk, honest, and hardworking,” which used to be recited in schools at the beginning of each day. A teacher’s union known for being close to the MHP had opened a case in the Administrative Court regarding this decision made by the ministry. During the time in which the oath had been abolished, Turkey was conducting a series of talks with the outlawed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in order to resolve the Kurdish question.

MHP was strongly opposed to this process calling it “Dissolution Process” that was indeed called by the government as “Reconciliation Process.” The Oath was considered racist by non-Turkish groups living in Turkey and MHP saw its abolition as a concession made to the PKK.

The Student Oath Case, which was opened in 2013, was concluded in October 2018 by the 8th chamber of the Council of State. The decision ruled that the Ministry of National Education cannot abolish its own administrative regulations.

This is a problematic decision for a number of reasons. First, the ministry abolishing an administrative regulation does not create a new legal situation, meaning that the Council of State has no ground for a decision concerning it. Second, the Council of State goes beyond matters of law in its decision by stating, “Sufficient scientific ground supporting the Ministry of National Education’s decision to abolish the oath does not exist,” meaning that the court is arguing whether such a decision is right on grounds of pedagogical science rather than legality. However, the Council of State does not have the authority to conduct examinations regarding the aptness of administrative decisions. Its authority is limited to examining and supervising legal matters.

In the “Old Turkey,” to use the term coined by the AK Party, courts often examined the “aptness” of government decisions and acted as if they were opposition parties, banning certain behavior. It has been a long time since this situation was named “judicial tutelage” and many efforts were made to end it.

The government has tried to change judicial cadres in order to end this practice by Kemalist and statist groups. However, these changes led to the rise of FETO in the judicial system, and this terrorist organization tried to establish its own practice of “tutelage.”

Following FETO’s bloody coup attempt on July 15, 2016, extensive crackdowns occurred in the judicial system in order to eliminate FETO members and prevent such attempts of establishing a “tutelage” from occurring again. More than half of the judges and prosecutors working at the time were dismissed. While all this was happening, the greatest supporter of President Erdogan and the AK Party was MHP and its leader Devlet Bahceli.

The Council of State’s decision discussed above thus raises questions as to whether or not those close the MHP among the judiciary came to power after the FETO crackdowns and whether they are prominent enough to show such strength against the government.

The strong open support Bahceli displayed for the Student Oath and his criticisms targeting AK Party’s former Minister of Justice Bekir Bozdag, who comes from an ethnic Kurdish background, makes the MHP’s stance on the subject very clear. MHP wants the oath back in schools.

All these together are issues that made it difficult to continue with the People’s Alliance during the local elections. Unlike MHP leader Bahceli, President Erdogan never brought these issues to the agenda until 23 October. However, the general atmosphere from Erdogan’s surroundings was that MHP’s demands in regards to the pardon of prisoners and the Student Oath was not going to be accepted.

When Devlet Bahceli was at the lectern to speak before his party’s group meeting on October 23, as always, he looked angry and stiff. In this speech, Bahceli announced that the MHP had stopped looking for ways to form an alliance with the AK Party during the local elections. He also used ambiguous language about the future of the People’s Alliance. Due to the questions launched at him after he finished his speech, Bahceli stated that the “People’s Alliance is continuing.” However, it’s not difficult to suggest that the alliance had cracked.

President Erdogan spoke after Bahceli’s speech and his decision to end the alliance possibility during local elections and bluntly stated, “Everyone can go their own ways.” While Erdogan had stated this in regards to the local elections, I think the most important part of his speech was when he defended Bekir Bozdag against Devlet Bahceli and said that “We have no other oath apart from our National Anthem.” Erdogan’s disapproval of this type of Turkish nationalism was also an illustration that the President wanted to highlight the difference between the AK Party and MHP.

Now, it’s possible to see the People’s Alliance in some kind of coma or in the fridge. Although both sides suggest that the alliance is continuing, we’ll only see the reality of this when the MHP votes either in favor or against the 2019 budget formation, which is still being discussed in Parliament. If the MHP votes against the budget then not only will the People’s Alliance die, but the newly established presidential system will also enter a serious crisis due to its failure in processing its first budget. If MHP votes in favor of the budget, this will show that the People’s Alliance will continue.

Of course, the MHP can choose to abstain from voting. In this case, the budget will pass with AK Party votes. However, the People’s Alliance will maintain to sleep in a coma.

It’s highly likely that we’ll see whether this alliance will continue and what the new rules for the two parties will be after the local elections. After observing their votes, the AK Party and MHP will do a cost-benefit analysis in order to observe how the alliance suits them best.

A couple of days ago, the Council of State in Turkey made a controversial decision and canceled the removal of Student Oath in schools. Until 2013, reciting the Student Oath in schools was an obligation at the beginning of each school day. The reason behind its removal in schools was justified with it being against the self-awareness and self-realization of students by imposing specific values.

Each student had to proclaim the oath, whose 1997 version reads the following:

“I am a Turk, honest, and hardworking. My principle is to protect the younger to respect the elder, to love my homeland and my nation more than myself. My ideal is to rise, to progress.

O Great Atatürk ! On the path that you have paved, I swear to walk incessantly toward the aims that you have set.

My existence shall be dedicated to the Turkish existence. How happy is the one who says “I am a Turk!”

After the decision made by the Council of State, the issue has been discussed through various dimensions. On the one side, there are supporters of the decision, believing that the Student Oath is necessary in order to safeguard nationalist and Republican values. Some circles view the decision of the Council of State as a revival of the Kemalist ideology in Turkey, while some others focus on how it provides nationalist sentiment among Turkish children. Members of these groups insist on the revival of the Student Oath although the judicial process has not yet ended.

On the other side, there are opponents of the decision, who believe that this will create deficiencies on the rational thinking capabilities of children, by forcing them to obey the rules and commit their “assigned duties.” Some in this group underline the deep-rooted effects of collectivism on their generation and the dilemma between their feelings and imposed ideas, which caused bigger troubles for them in the following years of their lives.

Women who I have spoken to harshly criticize the decision made: “Are we going to promote self-development and individuality or top-down values on children? Since the practices of the early Republican period forcefully focused on the understanding of top-down and unilateral values, this oath does not create individuals that are capable of internalizing rational decision-making in their lives. If the decision of the Council of the State is implemented, the following generations will also carry this burden.”

Some people in this circle are also uncomfortable with the nationalistic emphasis in the text. The oath was originally written in 1933, at a time when the nationalist tendencies were on the rise in Europe, as well as in Turkey. Some opponents pay attention to this fact and state that there is a necessity for a major revision in the nature of the text if the sides insist on its obligation. While the original text has been subject to major changes, these did not transform the substance and only covered the linguistic modifications of the text.

Opponents of the Student Oath are also worried about the reversal of further democratic gains, such as the removal of the headscarf ban in public spaces. The AK Party has taken significant steps towards democratization of Turkey in political, social, and economic areas. The removal of the Student Oath was one of the examples of these democratization efforts. The decision of the Council of State was perceived as taking a step back from these efforts and turning to the old habits where judicial power acted as the guard of the Kemalist regime and intervened into politics.

Even though the Council of State made a decision on the Student Oath, judicial processes have not yet ended. The Ministry of Education has appealed to the superior court and it will take some time for the final decision to be received. However, it seems that this issue will remain high on the political agenda in Turkey for a long time.

Nowadays, Turkey’s political agenda is full with international issues. The new term in Turkey-U.S. relations after the release of Pastor Brunson has become a matter of curiosity in the last couple of days. Moreover, the missing Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, seems to have shifted the U.S. approach against Saudi Arabia and thus will affect the current dynamics in the Middle East.

Under this ambiguous environment, Turkey’s domestic agenda and the upcoming local elections have become of secondary importance for the public. Nonetheless, political parties have already began to concentrate on their possible strategies in the local elections.

As part of their preparations for local elections, Turkey’s political parties held consultation and evaluation meetings in order to draw a road map. All parties had an idea on the possibilities and limitations in choosing the right candidate. The governing AK Party, for instance, underlined that the upcoming elections would be a turning point for Turkey’s future and it was an obligation to increase both the vote rate and the number of mayors in order to successfully implement the new presidential system. Party officials and members contributed to the ongoing discussions on possible electoral strategies in accordance with this purpose.

One of the major issues that will determine electoral strategy is whether the AK Party and the MHP will form an alliance in order to maximize their benefits. Since the unofficial meetings between the two parties have just started, it is still not possible to clarify this issue. Nevertheless, it should be underlined that both parties pay a significant attention to forming an alliance and are trying to form a consensus on possible ways of achieving this. It seems that the further details of this issue will surface in the following days.

On the other hand, preparation meetings held by the MHP and the Iyi Party revealed the increasing tension between these two parties. Even though both parties have had hot discussions since the June 24 elections, the degree of discussions altered in the last days. The Iyi Party blamed the MHP for betraying nationalist ideals by forming an alliance with the AK Party.

Since the Iyi Party faced serious existential crises after the June 24 elections and was about to collapse, it is now trying to find a new identity and purpose for existence. In accordance with this aim, the party is working to develop a nationalistic stance instead of its catch-all approach, which failed in the previous elections.

The main opposition party, the CHP, has also been discussing possible election strategies. During the meetings held, party officials criticized the party’s current discourse on being so elitist and left-wing oriented. The solution proposed for this problem was to adopt rightist and populist discourse in the upcoming local elections in order to change the image of the party.

At this point, the CHP faces a serious dilemma in deciding whether or not to form an alliance with the Iyi Party and the HDP. Due to the fact that the Nation Alliance failed in the last elections, the party is hesitant to cooperate with these parties. While an intra-party group is working hard to convince the sides to form an alliance with the HDP, some party officials are wary of this and are aware of the risks.

However, the supporting group sees this as the only way of achieving success in the local elections. The more nationalist wing of the party wants to form an alliance with the Iyi Party, especially in Ankara and some provinces in the Mediterranean and Aegean.

Even if consultation and evaluation meetings were a stage for drawing a road map for the local elections, political parties still need more time to finalize their strategies. Due to this, parties are expected to focus more on domestic policy in the upcoming days.

Almost 24 years ago, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current president of Turkey, had been elected as Mayor of Istanbul. Although he was one of the most popular candidates, the media did not pay much attention to his election campaign, which was so intrinsic and far beyond being ordinary. Erdogan not only proposed a unique and comprehensive map for local government, he, at the same time, foresaw a new type of governance for the country. Unlike other candidates, he was aware of the changing world order and grounded his campaign in consensual rhetoric.

“Erdogan-type politics” has become a role model in local administration since that time. Candidates standing for mayoral elections in Istanbul and other metropolitan cities claimed their dedication to follow his type of politics if they were to be elected. It must be emphasized that reflections of Erdogan-type politics on a local level still need to be examined in detail. Since he has become a role model for mayors, the main characteristics of his leading style should be understood.

Nowadays, the questions of “what is the true character of a successful mayor” and “what do people expect from mayors” has come to the forefront again. Since political parties have begun their search for the most suitable candidates, they have been taking these questions seriously. More, as was reflected in the press, some parties conducted surveys and opinion polls in order to find the best candidates serving the interests of the public. For instance, the CHP decided to use multiple methods in determining its candidates – including opinion polls, tendency surveys, and preparation reports. It is expected to see all parties to use diverse methods in determining their candidates in local representation.

Political parties take the expectations of the public into consideration. As it is one of the main characteristics identified with Erdogan-type politics, sincerity and honesty are very crucial for the personality of candidates. Surveys also show that people tend to vote for candidates that they perceive as one of them. Thus, candidates that have strong ties with the public in their electoral district have a higher chance of being selected.

Another characteristic of a proper candidate is being innovatory and reformist. The public expect to see candidates to have their own agenda beyond the political party they represent. They appreciate projects based on innovation themes or concepts rather than ordinary projects. Moreover, people want candidates to propose both short and long-term projects resolving the current problems in the local area. Indeed, Erdogan-type politics was successful in proposing both short and long-term solutions to existing local problems. For instance, Erdogan was successful in resolving the garbage problem in Istanbul in the short-term and the city’s water problem in the long-term. Thus, these capabilities are still crucial for the election of a mayor in the current period.

The public also tend to vote for candidates who they can contact when they need to. Indeed, mayors are failing to “reach people’s hearts” with the growing effect of social media. Especially after the popularity of social media, people have been increasingly complaining about the gap between politicians and society. Although social media is a good tool for politicians to reach out to the wider public, since being a high-context culture, people in Turkey still prefer direct contact. As President Erdogan pays attention to this himself, he has underlined that mayors ought to get in contact with people face-to-face rather than relying on social media channels.

There are a lot of issues that need to be underlined in answering the question as to what people expect from mayors. Nevertheless, even if this is not examined in detail, the characteristics of Erdogan-type politics are still crucial in order to be a successful mayor. Political parties should pay more attention to this since local elections are only around the corner.

By February 2018 pre-electoral alliances became one of the game changers in Turkish politics. Even though all legal amendments and regulations regarding pre-electoral alliances were designed for the projected elections in 2019, the decision to hold early elections on June 24 completely changed this direction. Thus, the June 24 parliamentary elections brought new opportunities for collaboration to political parties on a legal basis.

Nowadays, Turkey has been discussing the possibility of pre-electoral alliances in local elections. Last week, chairman of the MHP – Devlet Bahceli – announced that they are open to discuss the issue of pre-electoral alliances in local elections – even though this will not be easy to formulate. While Bahceli indicated his reservations based upon a concern for the rules and nature of local elections, he brought this issue to the forefront again. President Erdogan responded positively to Bahceli’s call and stated that this could be a topic to discuss in the following days.

As has been underlined by the leaders of the AK Party and MHP, framing the rules of alliances in local elections will be different to parliamentary elections. Indeed, there are several variables that affect the formulation of alliances in local elections. Firstly, local dynamics play a fundamental role in local elections. Voters consider close-knit relations and candidate profiles more seriously in comparison to parliamentary elections. Turkey’s political culture is shaped through regionalism, which is a crucial determinant on voting behavior. People tend to vote for candidates rather than political parties and the votes of political parties show a change in local elections. For instance, since its establishment, the AK Party has always received a lower vote in local elections when compared to the vote share in parliamentary elections.

The second variable that affects the formation of alliances is related to the lack of legal infrastructure. The amendment adopted in February only regulates pre-electoral alliances in parliamentary elections. Both presidential and local elections were excluded. Thus, there is need for a new amendment that regulates official alliances on a local level. When it comes to examples from the world, we see that there are regulations on pre-electoral alliances in local elections in federal states such as Mexico and Brazil. Turkey should pay attention to frame possibilities and limitations to formulate a legal basis under a unitary structure.

For all these reasons, parties should take these factors into consideration before framing the rules of alliances in local elections. Until now, all discussions have concentrated on the positive and negative effects of alliances on the election results in metropolitan cities. Nonetheless, if there is need for a detailed framework, these questions should also be asked: how will alliances be formed in the AK Party-dominated and the MHP-dominated electoral districts? What will be ways of forming alliances in districts where voting rates between the two parties are close? Do these parties prefer to have a common candidate not running under a party banner? How will the CHP, HDP, Good Party, and the Felicity Party formulate their election strategy if forming official alliances becomes possible? What will be the strategy of these parties, especially in metropolitan cities? These questions are fundamental in designing pre-electoral alliances in local elections.

All these variables reflect that there is a need for maximizing gains and minimizing costs when determining the rules of pre-electoral alliances. All these parties should seriously calculate how alliances will reflect their voting rates. Finally, political parties should pay attention to design electoral stimulations for each district and make categorizations in order to see their total gains and losses.

The opposition in Turkey is now trying to polarize society through statements made by artists. Does every artist have to be a blind opponent of their country’s government and why does Turkey’s opposition throw a tantrum when artists call for unity?

There is a topic that has been keeping Turkish media busy these days: statements made by prominent artists about contemporary Turkish politics and how these statements have angered the opposition.

Ahmit Umit, a crime fiction author, Bulent Ortacgil, and Mazhar Alanson, both songwriters and singers are famous and reputable in their fields.

Nevertheless, they are not mentioned in Turkey’s opposition media outlets with a favorable connotation due to statements they made in interviews during the past month. Not only media outlets, but social media users were also busy lynching these artists on Twitter.

But what exactly did these artists say, which unleashed such a storm of criticism?

In an interview a month ago, Ahmet Umit made statements such as;

“I believe that we will be able to overcome the problems in our country by accepting each other for who we are and keeping in mind that ‘this is our country and it will be to our benefit if it develops and grows.’ We will never get anywhere if we separate each other. If we unite and start to show empathy towards each other, we become a strong country and nobody can divide us.”

“You can’t be the opposition by only criticizing the government, their deficiencies should be criticized, but their positive policies should also be supported.”

“This country belongs to all of us, we are all on the same ship. If you try puncturing a hole in the lower surface of the ship, we’ll all go down. If there is no Turkey, there’s no us.”

“I love my country. I have traveled all over the world, and I have never seen another country with such a beautiful history and geography. I will live in this land as long as I die.”

A few weeks later, in an interview, Alanson stated:

“We have become polarized nowadays. We have to solve this.”

“The majority of this country is Muslim and live their lives accordingly. That’s how it is.”

“Laicism will never fade away in this land as some claim it will. No one should be afraid. If we accept the facts of our country, we will all be happier.”

“I love Ataturk, but I also love my Prophet.”

In an interview published a day later, Ortacgil made similar remarks;

“What happened on July 15th was terrible. I have been against all kinds of coups throughout my life. On July 15, hundreds of people were killed to stop the coup attempt. A great disaster happened that night.”

“We have to negotiate with the opposition as well as with the government. The results of the election must be respected.”

“When we look at the vote share as well, will you just ignore 52 percent in government? Or the remaining 48 percent in the opposition? The president was elected with 52 percent of the votes. The opposition must accept it. And if the government considers the demands of the opposition, this problem will be solved.”

All these statements are legitimate, sensible, prudent, and aim to bring a divided society together. Social media users who tried to lynch these artists on social media criticized their works and suggested that artists should always be in opposition to the government, as “so-called leftists.”

Fatih Yasli from the Turkish newspaper BirGun went further and claimed, “the new regime is attempting to push its normality on the opposing side through names that are listened to, watched, and respected, and through individuals who have not been labeled ‘partizan,’ but are accepted as ‘neutral.’”

He added that, “this regime has not been able to establish a ‘cultural hegemony’ in the past 16 years and knows pretty well that it won’t be able to do it from now on.”

“They are well aware that they do not have their own novelists, directors, poets, and musicians, or rather that all in their arms reach are below the average and have no prestige.”

This critique from Yasli raised questions – whether establishing a “cultural hegemony” was a positive thing, or what particular statements made these 3 artists pro-government and pro-AK Party. They’re already famous and well respected for the work they produce, so what would they gain from being partisan? And even if they hold a positive stance towards the government, is this enough to call them ‘toady,’ lynch them and underestimate their identity as an artist?

Support for these artists came from one of Turkey’s most popular singers, Haluk Levent, who emphasized that “the artists of this country also have the right to agree with the government. You cannot call every artist that likes the government ‘toady.’”

A somewhat different scenario: Making U-turns after coming under fire

In the above situations, the opposition tried to criticize these artists for the opinions they displayed. However, the case of Derya Koroglu, from the well-known Turkish music band ‘Yeni Turku’ shows the extent of ‘neighborhood pressure’ from the opposition.

After an interview with Sabah’s Tuba Kalcik, Derya Koroglu stated: “Do not believe the words they ‘made me say’ by intentionally putting parts of my speech together. There is no change in my position.”

The only important and ‘political’ statements made in the interview in regards to Turkish politics were, “In Turkey, the left needs to listen to the demands of the people,” and that “Yeni Turku emerged from a leftist worldview, but at the same time we can be considered as ‘conservative’ since we preserve and protect our national values.”

Sabah newspaper published a section of the voice recording of Koroglu’s speech, in which it became clear that these were indeed his own words, reflecting his own opinion. There was no addition to the interview or to the artist’s explanations.

This case is one of my examples that reflect how the opposition’s oppression can make people shy away from their own opinions.

Koroglu’s attitude after the interview clearly showed how violent the opposition can be in terms of ‘neighborhood pressure,’ which was falsely accepted by the opposition camp to be exclusive to the conservatives.

Kalcik, who conducted the interview, made the following remarks after the events took fold: “They can only keep their ideology alive with such hatred. They punish those who do not speak as ‘they’ wish by marginalizing them.”

Kalcik concluded with her final words: “They are trying to lock these artists up in ghettos. They’re trying to destroy their reputation by claiming ‘You either belong with us or you deserve to be levelled-down.’ I wonder in which direction this intolerance will go…”

*Written by Suna Nur Sarihan 

On Saturday 18 August, the AK Party held its Sixth Ordinary Congress in which it created new executive boards. Since the establishment of the party, all ordinary and extraordinary congresses have been seriously important in determining the party’s politics in the following terms. These congresses have been important not only due to the creation of new executive boards but also because they underline the party’s position on ongoing critical issues. The last Congress included important messages on current issues such as the ongoing U.S.-Turkey row and the state of the Turkish economy.

It is important to evaluate the changes in the newly formed executive boards of the party before going deeper into other issues. The AK Party, as was expected, made significant changes in both the Central Executive Board (MYK) and the Central Decision Board (MKYK). Almost half of these authorization bodies were renewed. More, both in the MYK and the MKYK, women and young people were appointed to sensitive positions. For instance, the youngest member of the MKYK is a 20-year-old female. This reflects the fact that, contrary to its rivals, the AK Party takes the rejuvenation of the party’s bodies as a serious issue and puts words into practice. The party places importance on young leading cadres both within its internal bodies and among its members of parliament; the AK Party currently has one of the youngest populations in the parliament.

As was mentioned, the Sixth Ordinary Congress was striking due to the strong messages that were given by President Erdogan during a speech he made in which he emphasized Turkey’s position on current ongoing issues. This was especially necessary to the ongoing crisis with the U.S. In his speech, President Erdogan heavily criticized the Trump administration’s latest discourse on Turkey and commented on the future of Turkey-U.S. relations. The most striking comment made in this regard was: “We will not surrender to those who act like a strategic partner but make us a strategic target.” This clearly reflects the fact that Turkey will not take a step back in its approach to the latest issue. Thus, contrary to all political and economic manipulative acts, Turkey is determined to protect its rule of law and autonomy.

Another prominent issue that arose in the Congress was President Erdogan’s call for a fight against exchange rate manipulations. Underlining the latest manipulations, Erdogan echoed his call for the Turkish people to challenge these manipulations. In addition to this, he announced new economic plans in order to prevent the vulnerability of the Turkish economy. All these developments indicate that Turkey’s fight against international manipulations on its economy will gain momentum in the upcoming period.

Beyond all these factors, the Congress and the formation of new executive boards are crucial for the party’s success in the upcoming local elections that will take place in March 2019. The executive bodies were without doubt formed in accordance with the requirements of the election campaign, and therefore the AK Party’s newly formed executive bodies include politicians that have strong local representation.

For all these reasons, the latest congress was not only important because of domestic policy issues, but also because it has reflections on Turkey’s relations and position in the international arena. The messages given at the Congress strongly underlines the fact that despite all manipulative acts coming from both national and international levels, Turkey will not make any concessions to its principals.

The AK Party is about to celebrate its 17th foundation anniversary. Since the party was established on August 14, 2001, it became one of the game changers in Turkish politics. Turkey went under a great transformation in the political, economic, and cultural areas under the AK Party governments. Understanding Turkey’s transformation in these prominent areas in the last seventeen years requires analyzing the main paradigms in AK Party politics.

One of the things that made the AK Party successful in politics is related to its catch-all characteristic. The party has overcome the classical line of right-wing politics via using catch-all party formation. To do so, the party offered a new political identity and a new style of politics in Turkish political structure and transformed the classical right-Islamist-center right political alignments. Instead of making politics for demands of certain sections in society, the AK Party, interested in all problems of Turkish people, has pursued a more inclusive political style and thus has become Turkey’s largest catch-all party.

As in all other catch-all parties, the party leadership was crucial to attract and mobilize the supporters of the party. Even though the role of Erdogan was very effective in the party’s politics since the beginning, his determinant role on the party had increased in time. As a founding father of the party, his discourse on the party’s politics was the key element not only in decision-making processes but also in shaping and reformulating the lines of the party’s structure in some circumstances. Thus, with the effect of Erdogan’s role and his undeniable charismatic leadership in Turkish politics, the AK Party also strengthened its popularity among masses and became invincible.

Another prominent issue that makes AK Party politics different than other political actors is its unique ideological position in the Turkish political sphere. Even if the party has never had a certain and clear-cut ideological baggage, it settled its ideological position as neither a right-wing nor a left-wing party; but as a conservative democratic organization. With the help of conservative democracy, the party integrated incompatible concepts such as traditional and modern, secular and religious, and morality and rationality, in its understanding and get massive support from various circles of society.

This unique ideological concept also made the party embrace all citizens regardless of their gender, ethnicity, beliefs, and worldviews. In accordance with this, the party emphasized fundamental rights and freedoms excessively in its program since the beginning. Human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, democratization, and civil society were the main issues that the party brought to the forefront of its agenda.

All of these factors created a strong bond between the masses and the party. President Erdogan has always been at the center of this special relationship. Erdogan’s leadership style also empowered and transformed this relationship in a positive way. Thus, the tie between a leader and the public came to a peak under his leading role. In other words, he fulfilled the duties of his predecessors, Menderes and Ozal, and transformed the line of politics fundamentally.

Obviously, there is a need to analyze the AK Party’s politics and its function in Turkey’s transformation process in detail. Additionally, there is also a need for evaluating Erdogan’s specific role in this transformation process since the beginning. The SETA Foundation is organizing a symposium in understanding the role of the AK Party on August 14 in Ankara. This special event will also help researchers and academics of Turkish politics to ask further questions in order to understand the role of the AK Party during the transformation of political, cultural, and social spheres in Turkey.

Last week this column listed four results of the June 24 elections for Turkey’s electorates in the eastern cities, where the country’s Kurds live en masse and which are included in the maps of the imaginary PKK state. They were firstly, the AK Party and the HDP still dominate Turkey’s elections in the east, secondly, the HDP continued its loss in the region – as was the case in the last general elections of November, 2015, thirdly, pre-electoral alliances of other parties cost seats to the HDP, and finally, Turkey’s Kurdish votes do not act as a block but intra-Kurdish differences prevail in the region.

The first one was discussed but the second and third are for this week’s analysis. To begin with, the HDP continued its loss in the region, as was the case in the latest general elections of November, 2015. When compared to the November 2015 elections in the region, the HDP lost most votes in Sirnak (a decrease from 85% to 70%) and Hakkari (from 83% to 70%). In the June elections of 2015, the HDP had received more than 60% of the votes in eleven cities, which dropped to 8 in the November 2015 elections, and finally dropped to 5 in the elections that took place two weeks ago. The most striking drop took place in Bitlis where the HDP received over 60% of the votes in the preceding elections but where the AK Party has become the leading party this past June.

 

The AK Party, on the other hand, could not reach to vote rates over 60 in the region in the general elections, but it did receive more than half of the votes in Kilis, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Adıyaman, Malatya, Elazig, Bingol, and Erzurum. In the presidential elections, which took place on the same day, AK Party’s candidate Erdogan received over 70% of the votes in Kilis, Elazig, and Erzurum, and over 60% of the votes in Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Adıyaman, Bingol, Erzincan and Malatya.

 

Together with last week’s analysis you read here, these results show that the AK Party and the HDP still dominate the region, where the balance of power tilted towards the HDP during the June 2015 elections, but is now even – if not towards the AK Party. Nevertheless, there is more to the story. Another finding of the June 2018 elections is a novel one.

The pre-electoral coalitions cost the HDP seats in Parliament

The June 24 general elections were bipolar elections both nationwide and in the east. In the east, as it is obvious now, the real race took place between the AK Party and the HDP. For the rest of the country, the elections were mostly between the people’s bloc (cumhur ittifakı) of the AK Party, MHP and BBP and the nation bloc (millet itifakı) of the CHP, Iyi Party and the Felicity Party.

While the race in the eastern cities was not between the AK Party-led and CHP-led blocs, the blocs still made an impact. For example, the HDP could not win a seat in the city of Adiyaman where it got 15,41% of the votes. The CHP, on the other hand, obtained a seat with a vote rate of 12,05. The reason was novel but simple. As a result of the pre-electoral coalition forming process, the Iyi Party and Felicity Party votes were also added to the CHP’s, which in total surpassed the HDP votes.

The examples are not limited to Adiyaman or to the HDP. The other parties also switched seats depending on the total votes of the blocs in different cities but the HDP –which did not take place in any pre-electoral coalition- had nothing but losses with this new regulation.

A final finding of the June 24 elections in Turkey is that neither Turkey’s eastern votes nor its Kurdish votes act as a bloc but intra-eastern and intra-Kurdish differences prevail in the country. Since this findings reaches deeper levels of the region’s sociological facts, let’s tackle it in the next column.

If further proof regarding the orientalist framing of Turkey’s June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections were needed, the interpretations in the Western media from Washington to Berlin would provide it. Rather than understanding how the election and transition process to the new political system transforms Turkish domestic politics towards a more multipolar direction, they seek to fixate Turkey with extraordinary conceptualizations, each of them displaying their own trajectories.

Hyper-nationalism, ultra-nationalism, religious-nationalism, dictatorship, one-person rule and Islamo-fascism constitute some of the concepts that the Turkey watchers in the West chose in analyzing the result of the June 24 election. This is not new. Since 2013, Turkey has been a central phenomenon in the Western world. The new Turkish politics, however, is heading towards a different direction, which will strengthen Turkish politics and democracy. This newly emerging structure of Turkish politics will pose more significant challenges for the AK Party.

During the 1990s, Turkey had a multipolar domestic political landscape with many political parties. Each party dominated different segments of the political sociology of Turkey and competed to shape Turkish political life. Rivalry among them was inherent in the political atmosphere and was enhanced by competition and ideology spread in various segments of politics. The multipolar political system did not necessarily display a democratic approach. It was unipolar in terms of the extraordinary power status of the Turkish military over the political sphere.

As the June 24 election results showed again, there is only one power center in Turkish politics. The AK Party and President Erdogan continue to stay at the power center. Much debate goes on, however, whether Turkish politics is unipolar, multipolar, or hegemonic – all types of power regarding the regulation of politics and daily life articulated around the AK Party and President Erdogan. A hegemonic Turkish politics is one that has one dominant party without a significant major political party that can balance the AK Party or a strong leadership that can galvanize the opposition blocks against Erdogan and the AK Party. In this kind of Turkish politics, the AK Party and President Erdogan are supposed to act unilaterally with little or no cooperation from other parties to resolve major internal and external issues or to maintain the lead. More to the point, as current Turkish politics, especially during the election campaign demonstrated, no combinations of other political parties as a part of forming a balancing alliance against Erdogan have the power of mobilization.

A multipolar political system, in contrast, has several parties, which compete with each other but need engagement against each other in order to resolve internal issues and maintain the coalition to win the elections. The Turkish model of allying with politics proved these kinds of attempts in the pre-AK Party era many times.

Current Turkish politics emerged and probably will continue after the June 24 election, following the establishment of the new executive presidential system that does not fit either of these models. Instead, it is similar to what Huntington labeled in his most-cited article to understand the structure of international politics in the post-Cold War world; the emerging Turkish political landscape is a mixture of one political party, which is no longer hegemonic to consolidate power unilaterally. Turkish politics in the post-June 24 presidential election might be called, as Huntington describes in defining international politics regarding polarity, a uni-multipolar political system. A uni-multipolar political system in the Turkish context has one dominant power that is unable to dominate the entire political discourse.

This means two things for the future of Turkish politics. First, concerning the first round of the presidential election, the most powerful candidate needs at least one party’s support from the right wing of the Turkish political spectrum. If the candidate cannot win the presidential election in the first round, there is no given victory for the right wing in the second round. More importantly, there is no granted majority in the parliament for the dominant party – as the last election result demonstrated. Secondly, the single hegemonic party–as in the case of Turkey; the AK Party– can maintain its power and resolve key issues only in cooperation with some of the other minor parties.

In this uni-multipolar new Turkish political landscape, the domestic power structure has three different levels and political blocks. At the top, the AK Party, consolidating its power via conservatism, democratic nationalism and an Islamic friendly approach, has preeminence in every domain of influence. As the last election underlines, the MHP is part of the collective political values. On the second level, the CHP is positioned as the principal opposition party, that is the dominant or challenger actors in the coastal areas of Turkey’s west but with its accumulation and mobilization influence and capabilities do not expand to the entire country as compared to the AK Party. The CHP articulates its mobilization around secularism, secular-nationalism, Westernism, and populism. On the third level, there comes the nationalist Kurdish party, HDP, whose influence in the southeastern part of Turkey is no less than the AK Party. Following the emergence of the Iyi Party, as the potential representative of hybrid-nationalism and the new right in Turkey, holding around 10 percent of the votes, there is still a probability of the establishment of a fourth level.

The uni-multipolar structure of new Turkish politics with the establishment of the presidential system generates its own different patterns of competition. Under the condition of uni-multipolarity, counterbalancing the dominant party is very difficult, as the AK Party continues to strengthen its power and to maintain its alliance with the MHP – the nationalist party. There are also other minor parties that want to bandwagon with the AK Party for their own profit. The AK Party’s unique relationship with the MHP will be providing leverage against the alternative power block, but ultimately will be consolidating MHP’s power capacity, which can transform ad hoc the alliance between the two parties as their modus operandi for the next elections.

The new presidential system is extremely important in order to consolidate this type of Turkish politics, in which one party cannot win the presidential election alone. In this new system, the parliament became extremely important as contrary to the claims that the parliament would lose its veto power.

The Turkish political system is not unipolar, in which a single party acts unilaterally, but has a dominant power whose influence is possible through cooperation with other parties or power blocks. The AK Party’s primacy in the domestic distribution of power capabilities is one of the most salient features of the current Turkish politics, but the new dynamics with regards to the new system requires more cooperation to sustain its supremacy.

Sunday’s elections in Turkey have finalized the transition to the presidential system with the victory of President Erdogan and his party. Erdogan has advocated and campaigned for this system change since his years as the Prime Minister, arguing that Turkey needed a political system based on the people’s will not on the will of the civilian and military bureaucratic elites. Having handled serious domestic and foreign policy crises over the years, including party closure cases and a failed coup attempt, Erdogan’s campaign for the presidential system has been accepted by the Turkish electorate. Sunday’s elections results are a proof of this reality.

The AK Party has passed legislation in the past year to prepare and adjust to the new system but there will be more work to be done in order to restructure the executive branch. The AK Party’s seats in parliament is short of a parliamentary majority, which means that it will need to recruit the support of other parties, starting with the MHP, to implement the party program and election promises. The MHP has worked with the AK Party and entered into an alliance in the elections, which provides a ground for further cooperation. As I wrote before the elections, the parliamentary distribution will not hamper the creation of the cabinet and functioning of the executive branch.

As the presidential system requires the restructuring of the political system and fine-tuning of the relationship between the executive and the legislative branches, many details have yet to be worked out. But, President Erdogan has created the necessary groundwork to implement his agenda effectively by striking an alliance with the MHP, which has achieved better than expected results in the election. For major legislative action as well as budget negotiations, Erdogan will likely seek support from the MHP. The MHP will continue to be a key role in the legislative process as it has in the past.

One of the most serious consequences of the elections might be the leadership question in the CHP. The CHP’s presidential candidate Ince has openly challenged the current party leader Kilicdaroglu in the past for electoral failures. Sunday’s results show a large gap between Ince’s votes (%30.64) and the CHP’s electoral showing (%22.64). Ince’s relative success and the party’s perceived failure can pave the road for Ince to challenge Kilicdaroglu once again. However, if there is an understanding between the two leaders that the party voters would vote strategically to ensure that the HDP passed the electoral threshold, such a inter-party rift may not be imminent. However, the 8% discrepancy will most likely force yet another debate around the CHP’s leadership.

While the adjustments to the new system are implemented, the March 2019 local elections will be just around the corner. Political parties will enter the new year in campaign mode and the local elections results can serve as an indicator of party performances. Local elections in Turkey always have a different dynamic than general elections, as they can depend much more on local politics. The March elections will not be different but it will have less impact on the executive branch. It will serve more as an indicator of satisfaction with party performances in parliament. Political parties will focus on agenda items that will help them in local elections. This could mean that parties would have more incentive to strike a compromise with President Erdogan to show the electorate that they are in the business of delivering their election promises instead of obstructing.

The June 24 elections are historic not only for sealing the deal on the adoption of the presidential system but also providing political stability for the next five years. There will always be crises and spoilers that will test the new system. However, in this last election, the Turkish public has spoken definitively.

The June 24 parliamentary and presidential elections resulted in a great victory for President Erdogan and the leading AK Party. While the party got 42.5 percent of the votes, President Erdogan has been selected to become the first president of Turkey under the presidential system by winning 52.5 percent of votes.

The MHP, the alliance partner of the AK Party, got 11.2 percent of the votes and passed the 10 percent threshold contrary to the claims of opinion polls. As a result, the People’s Alliance got the majority of seats in parliament. On the contrary, the Nation Alliance consisting of the CHP, the Iyi Party, and the Felicity Party faced with a disappointment because of the results.

The alliance could not get the majority in the parliament and none of the presidential candidates of this alliance succeeded in the elections. While the members of this alliance were aiming to push President Erdogan into a second-round runoff against Muharrem Ince, the presidential candidate of the CHP, the elections ended in the first round with the victory of Erdogan. Above all, the turnout in the elections was higher than 85 percent, which proves the health of Turkish democracy compared to other democracies in the world.

While the results of the elections are analyzed, it is seen that despite the sixteen years of experience in office, the AK Party is still the only party who can manage to get votes from various circles of society. Except from Igdir, Tunceli, and Hakkari, the party got MPs from all provinces, which show that the AK Party is the only party successful in bringing different groups together. Additionally, the party increased its votes in 17 provinces most of which are in Eastern and Southeastern regions of the country. Thus, contrary to some claims, the party still gets the great majority of votes from these two regions and Kurdish people support the AK Party governments in majority.

Nonetheless, the party experienced some decrease in its votes in the parliament especially in Istanbul, Ankara, Konya, Bursa, and Kayseri. During his balcony speech, President Erdogan stated that they had received the message of voters and would evaluate the results in order to understand the reasons lying behind this fall. In any case, the party obtained a significant victory in its 13th election in the last 16 years.

Another striking result of the election was the success of the MHP in parliamentary elections. While pre-election surveys were claiming that the party would get around 5-8 percent of the votes, the party got 11.2 percent and showed that it was still representing the center for nationalist voters. As its splinter party, the Iyi Party got 10 percent of the votes and fell behind the MHP. These results prove that despite all the manipulations and maneuvers of the Nation Alliance, the MHP can consolidate its voters in elections.

Last but not least, it is obvious that the CHP is the most unsuccessful party in the elections. The party faced with a sharp decline and lost approximately 4 percent of its votes. Because of the ongoing campaign among CHP voters, a significant amount of CHP supporters voted for the HDP in the parliamentary elections. The HDP substituted losses from Kurdish voters with the supports of the CHP and passed the threshold. Nonetheless, the results of the elections show that the CHP is in a crisis now and the gap between the party’s and Ince’s votes creates ambiguity in the future of the party. Thus, the results of the elections show that the leader of the CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is going to face challenges in holding the party’s chairmanship and controlling party organs in the next days.

Turkey will have one of its historic elections tomorrow. The elections will be the first of its kind in many ways in the history of Turkish democracy. To start with, the parliamentary and presidential elections will be held on the same day. Following the elections, the presidential system that was adopted in the referendum of April 2017 will be implemented in full scale.

Another novelty for this election are the pre-electoral coalitions. We will see two such coalitions and three individually running parties in the ballot for the parliamentary elections. As for the presidential elections, there will be six candidates.

For the parliamentary elections, we see two pre-electoral coalitions. The first is the People’s Alliance (Cumhur Ittifaki) of the ruling AK Party and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Ideologically, the former is a socially conservative, economically liberal, politically reformist party. The latter is known to be an ultra-nationalist party. The MHP will not run for the presidential elections and will support the AK Party’s candidate Erdogan. Another minor ultranationalist party, the Great Union Party (BBP) is also a part of the bloc but its banner will not appear on the ballot. Interestingly, Erdogan also has the support of another nationalist party, but this time a Kurdish nationalist one. The Free Cause Party (HÜDA-PAR) is not a part of the Cumhur Ittifaki but has declared that it will support Erdogan for the presidential elections.

On the other side, we see the Nation Alliance (Millet Ittifaki) of the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), ultranationalist Good Party (IP), and the Felicity Party (SP) as a moderate Islamist party. All three parties, nevertheless, will run separately for the presidential elections. The minor center-right Democratic Party is also part of the bloc but will not appear on the ballots with its banner.

Besides these pre-electoral coalitions, HÜDA-PAR, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), and Patriotic Party (VP) will also separately run for the parliamentary elections and the latter two will also compete in the presidential elections with their own candidates.

What makes the elections difficult is not necessarily the number of parties running in it but its novelties. The alliances make the electoral threshold irrelevant for smaller parties such as the MHP, IP and SP. Many SP supporters did not vote for the SP in earlier elections because their votes would be wasted with no chance of the SP passing the threshold. Now the party is free of this constraint and we can see its true potential. Further, this election will be the IP’s first test on the ballot, which also makes it hard to predict its votes. Since the IP has split from the MHP and we don’t know how big a slice it took with it, we also do not know the MHP’s current vote share.

As a further complication, it is also difficult to predict the HDP’s votes because a number of CHP voters on social media declared that they will vote for the HDP in the parliamentary elections. They call it strategic voting. This way, these voters want to push the HDP over the 10 percent electoral threshold. The logic is simple. Since the HDP and AK party are the only effective parties in the heavily Kurdish populated eastern and southeastern Turkish constituencies, HDP’s absence in parliament will give the AK Party at least 60 extra seats. Such CHP voters would rather see those seats occupied by HDP MPs.

Besides all these novelties and uncertainties, it is hard to predict the results of Sunday’s elections. Nevertheless, pretty much all public polls and the general expectation in the public opinion have an overwhelming consensus on some points. For one, nobody expects a change in the order of the parties compared to the previous parliamentary elections. This is true at least for the top two. The Turkish public is pretty sure that the AK Party will top the elections, followed by the CHP.

The third party will not be the MHP this time. Although the party received around half a million more votes than the HDP in  the November 2015 elections, the IP’s split from the MHP is likely to place the HDP in the third spot. While many can easily name the top three parties in the post-election parliament in order, we do not know whether the AK Party can have the majority in parliament. With the existence of pre-electoral coalitions, we will have a higher number of parties in parliament. In such a scenario, the only way for the AK Party to hold the majority is if the HDP does not pass the 10 percent threshold.

Hence, polls show that the AK Party will come first in both ballots but what we do not know whether it can hold the majority in parliament and whether it can get 50%+1 votes in order to win the presidential elections in the first round. Many would bet for a victory for Erdogan (after all, he has quite a reputation for winning elections) but with a divided parliament, which will make politics quite hot for the following months in terms of the relations between the executive and legislative branches.

Since last Thursday, members of the Turkish diaspora all over the world have been going to polls to vote for Turkey’s snap elections to be held on 24 June. There are approximately 3 million Turkish citizens who are able to vote in the elections. As one can guess, 3 million is a number of great importance as it makes up 5 percent of Turkey’s total electorate.

Turks who have been living abroad for over fifty years received the right to vote abroad for the first time during the presidential elections in 2014, when Turks elected their president for the first time through popular vote. Prior to this, it was difficult for most expats to go to Turkish custom gates, which was the only place they could vote during elections. In 2014, only 530 thousand Turks abroad went to the polls due to some organizational problems. However, this number increased during the general elections on 7 June, 2015 up to 1,06 million and to 1,3 million during the snap elections in November of the same year. The number of all diaspora votes all over the world (including the votes casted at Turkish custom gates) also increased to 1,4 million during last years referendum. Interestingly, this is also the number of Turkish voters who live in Germany.

During the last referendum on 16 April 2017, more than 800 thousand Turks living abroad supported Turkey’s constitutional change with “Yes.” Now, the AK Party, for instance, hopes to encourage at least 1 million voters to go to the polls in order to support the party and its presidential candidate. With regard to the previous election results, one notices a certain pattern according to which nearly two thirds of all members of the Turkish diaspora support both the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling party.

By focusing on the 2017 referendum results, for instance, it is striking that 75 percent of the votes in Belgium, 65 percent of the votes in France and 63 percent of the votes in Germany were given in favor of the new system of government. By this, it should be clear that in particular regarding the presidential elections, votes from the Turkish diaspora might be of great importance and even have a decisive meaning. In this sense, the AK Party additionally prepared a special election program for the Turkish diaspora in which the specific needs of Turks abroad are addressed in depth. On the other hand, it’s also an interesting and positive step that the main opposition party also took the diaspora into consideration by addressing it in its general election program – though, being not concrete but rather superficial. Nevertheless, it is a worthy and interesting issue that the diaspora’s ability to change the election results is seriously taken into account, even by opposition circles.

However, there are unfortunately two issues, which disturb and affect the diaspora in a negative way during election periods. First of all, people living abroad have to face and cannot understand the ban regarding campaign appearances on, for instance, German soil, as has been the case during both the last referendum and even the current 24 June elections. Furthermore, it’s observed that while the campaign ban is strictly executed regarding the AK Party, in particular HDP events, to which PKK supporters and HDP politicians join, are generally tolerated.

The second issue is about the negative behavior of both German officials and even private persons who are biased to obstruct if a relation to the recent Turkish government is noticed. Loads of rented meeting and conference rooms are getting cancelled in order to prevent programs in favor of, for instance, Turkey’s new system of government. At the same time, unfortunately, HDP supporters, who are very close to and openly sympathize with the PKK, are welcomed on various platforms. In this sense, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that even the Green Party MP, Cem Ozdemir publicly supports the Kurdish left-nationalist HDP and has displayed his support by attending the party’s events in Germany.

Nevertheless, these kinds of efforts most probably wouldn’t change most of the diaspora members’ political positions. On the contrary, members of the Turkish diaspora are going to be much more encouraged to vote in accordance with their own standpoints. Thus, it’s definitely a positive step since Turks abroad are also able to vote during elections in the country of which they hold citizenship. While it is not possible for millions of people who live abroad to vote during general or local elections in the country they live in, the right to vote regarding Turkey’s elections thus is perceived more seriously. However, it seems that some native citizens in countries where the Turkish diaspora does exist, develop an increasingly negative attitude regarding Turks’ right to vote, their political preferences, the increasing visibility of the election process and its importance by having an influence on the election results.

In two weeks, Turkish people will go to the polls to elect the members of their Parliament and President. In this process, political parties are still running their campaigns in order to increase their votes. The running AK Party is designing its campaign on the basis of the progress made by Turkey under the AK Party governments. Furthermore, the party also proposes new projects to accelerate this progress in the new era, which is called “the rise.” Nonetheless, some opposition parties cannot keep away from falling into the trap of populism and use populist discourse in accordance with their strategic needs. Because of this reason, it is important to examine prominent dimensions of election strategies of political parties.

Because the AK Party had already initiated its campaign towards the next elections and conducted meetings throughout the country before the announcement of snap elections, it is the most prepared party compared to others. After the snap election decisions, the party accelerated and broadened the scope of the campaign.

Indeed, the party’s electoral strategy has depended on a two-dimensional political space. In the first space, the party prefers traditional methods based on direct contact with masses and visiting people’s houses. It is well known that President Erdogan cares about this method very much and urges party branches to listen to the demands of people face to face. Additionally, the party also organizes mass meetings in each province of the country in order to reach to people as part of this method in the field.

On the other side, the party also prefers to use innovative methods via internet and social networks. All party representatives use social media channels actively especially to widen their voter base. The details of the AK Party’s election strategy are shared day by day on the party’s official website and social media channels. The combination of these two dimensions turns the party’s campaign into a more dynamic and active process. This is one of the reasons that makes the party’s campaign more successful compared to the strategies of other parties.

The main opposition party CHP also uses two-dimensional methods in its campaign strategy. Nonetheless, the gap between the presidential election campaign and parliamentary campaign causes some crisis within the party structure. Because Kilicdaroglu and Ince are conducting their election campaigns separately, they have a contradictory discourse. For instance, they have different opinions about each other’s success and possible vote rate in the elections.

Even if Kilicdaroglu eliminated the intra-party opposition movement cadres, most of who are close to Muharrem Ince rather than himself, the possible scenarios after the elections indicate that there can be another escalation in the intra-party opposition movement to change Kilicdaroglu’s leadership. As a result of this dispute, the party supporters do not want Kilicdaroglu to get ahead of Ince during the election campaign. For this reason, Kilicdaroglu had to cancel the joint meetings he planned to have with Ince. Additionally, Ince’s use of populist discourse in the campaign causes Kilicdaroglu to remain in the background. Thus, it is possible to say that this duality in party politics may bring another escalation in intra-party opposition after the elections.

Other political parties also use diversified political campaigns. The MHP pays attention to direct contact with people rather than organizing large-scale meetings. The Iyi Party, on the other side, tries to introduce itself to the masses and designs its campaign on this basement. All parties will maintain their campaigns until the elections. However, according to YSK rules, pre-election restrictions will be implemented by June 14 and parties will have to re-organize their campaign strategies according to these restrictions.

In two weeks time Turkey will hold one of its historical elections. They are historical because they are the first elections after the Turkish constituent decided to switch to a presidential system in April 2017. The AK Party-MHP alliance’s victory will consolidate a presidential system whereas the CHP-Iyi Party-SP alliance’s election success will put it under question and make way to switch back to the old parliamentary regime. Thus, the June 24 elections are more about structural matters that design the rules of the game for political actors rather than a competition between political parties over good governance.

The AK Party-MHP alliance campaigns to uplift the country with a presidential system to an upper league in international politics where only democratic and powerful countries reside. The CHP-Iyi Party-SP alliance, in contrast, criticizes Turkey’s presidential system of being one-man rule and promises to restore the old parliamentary system. The AK Party-MHP alliance’s presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during his public meetings insists that other candidates, especially CHP’s candidate Muharrem Ince, are not competent for the post. Erdogan deliberately targets Ince and strikes him of not even having been elected to the post of CHP’s general secretary. His incompetency, for Erdogan, stems from his lack of experience in governing the state and unbridgeable gap with the public due to Kemalist CHP’s authoritarian and elitist past.

In response to Erdogan’s verbal charges, other candidates especially CHP’s Ince, who seems to outshine the other candidates in the opposition camp with Erdogan’s help, takes pains to show he is as competent as Erdogan and has a strong touch with the people. He does not hesitate to deride Erdogan and target pro-Erdogan media to show that he is strong. He also puts a showcase image that he’s a man of the people by riding a bike before the crowd in his public meetings and distributes photos in which he drives a tractor or praying in a mosque with the villagers.

Alongside his populistic gestures, Muharrem Ince often seems to forget his party’s basic campaign message, which is restoring the old parliamentary system. He seems to embrace the presidential system.

Alongside these rather populistic gestures, Ince often seems to forget his party’s basic campaign message, which is restoring the old parliamentary system. He seems to embrace the presidential system and poses himself as the most important rival of Erdogan for the presidential post. Yet Ince’s unamenable attitudes have seemed to cause a serious discomfort for the other candidates in the opposition bloc. Last week, Iyi Party’s leader Meral Aksener called the leaders of her alliance partners to an urgent meeting to discuss the preparation of a road-map that responds to the question of how to restore the old parliamentary system in the aftermath of the elections. After the meeting, CHP’s leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and Iyi Party leader Meral Aksener gave a joint press conference where they declared that both leaders were in agreement and committed to the plan of switching back to the parliamentary system.

It is obvious that Ince’s move to the front and to be the primary rival of Erdogan has worried Aksener. If Aksener does not show a considerable success in the elections, her leadership within her newly founded party will be questioned. There are some figures, such as Umit Ozdag, in the party waiting for the right moment to take over the party leadership.

If Aksener does not show a considerable success in the elections, her leadership will be questioned. There are figures, such as Umit Ozdag, waiting for the right moment to take over the party leadership.

Not to mention Kilicdaroglu’s fear of losing his seat as the CHP’s leader in the event of Ince’s confrontation with Erdogan ends up with the CHP’s increase of its votes. This may trigger a process of soul searching within the party and cause a leadership change. That’s why Kilicdaroglu discharged many of Ince’s men from the party in the run-up to the preparation of the party’s list of parliamentary candidates. Kilicdaroglu undercut the support for Ince within the party cadres.

All in all, a roust may hit the opposition parties, especially after the elections. The main reason for this will be the lack of a comprehensive and well-defined political project shared by all opposition parties, which can produce a united front. The absence of such a political project not only makes the division within and the parties visible but also curtails its chance of winning the elections.

Turkey will hold one of the most critical elections in its history on June 24. They are critical because they are not an exchange of seats between political parties or transfer of power from one political party to another in a democratic country. On June 24, the people will rather decide whether the country should revert the old oligarchic regime in which the bureaucracy used to hold power and sovereignty or whether it should consolidate its burgeoning democratic regime in which power and sovereignty lay with the people. Besides, on June 24 the people will also decide whether the country should gain more autonomy in international politics or continue its age-old foreign policy of disengagement and dependency.

The AK Party-MHP alliance proposes to render the people’s will as the ultimate authority in the country’s political life and make Turkey great again in international politics. The CHP-Iyi Party-SP alliance, on the other hand, claims to restore the republican ideals of “Old Turkey,” which are characterized by modernist authoritarianism and bring the country back in line with the civilization, namely the West. Thus, the elections on June 24 will rather portray a moment of historical decision on the country’s regime type and national independence.

Indeed, the themes of democracy and independence will put their seal on the elections. Around these themes we have three scenarios for the post-election Turkey. In the first scenario, President Erdogan wins the presidential elections and the AK Party-MHP alliance gains the majority in parliament. This will mean that the people still hold on to their decision to switch to the presidential system on April 16, 2017. If this happens, the presidential system will be consolidated and democracy will be recognized as the only game in town.

For this will put pressure on the opposition to recognize the rule of the people’s will as the supreme will in politics and therefore the search for bringing the country back to an oligarchic regime will get shelved for good. This might also be accompanied by the democratization of the opposition’s view of international politics through its recognition of the country’s political authenticity and autonomous political will. More, terrorist organizations such as the PKK will face contraction of room for maneuver and FETO will give up hope for a comeback.

In the second scenario, President Erdogan wins the presidential election and the CHP-Iyi Party-SP alliance obtains the majority in parliament. This will display that the people still support the decision to switch to a presidential system and the consolidation of the democratic regime, yet they find the political actor –the AK Party-MHP alliance– unsuitable for this task. Encouraged with these results, the opposition will follow a politics of destabilization by blocking the presidential decrees in parliament and attempt to convince the people that the presidential system is not that good for the country. This will open up the door for changing the country’s direction back to oligarchy, emboldening the terrorist organizations such as the PKK and FETO and increasing the chances for foreign powers to influence the country’s domestic and foreign policies.

In the third scenario, President Erdogan loses the presidential election and the CHP-Iyi Party-SP alliance gains the majority in parliament. This will show that the people have changed their decision to switch to a presidential system and do not believe that President Erdogan or the AK Party-MHP alliance are suited for the task of democratizing the country’s domestic and international politics. In this situation, the opposition parties and their partners in the state apparatus will immediately attempt to take control of the country and embark on stifling the people’s demand for democratization. The people will doubtlessly show a considerable resistance to the restoration of the status quo ante at the outset, yet the lack of leadership and organization on the part of the popular front will in time give the upper hand to the oligarchic forces. In that political vacuum, the PKK will at once start a war of attrition in Northern Syria and Eastern Turkey whereas FETO will pick itself up and become a significant actor in the state apparatus once again.

Depending on the results of the election and whether the presidential election goes to the second round, one thing is certain: a new domestic makeup is waiting for Turkey.