Turkey has to some extent left the 31 March local elections behind. The country’s long-lasting democracy has shown great success in reflecting the people’s will and respect to democratic rule in local governance. Unlike western countries, which tend to have low voter turnout, 84,6% of Turkish citizens casted their votes on Sunday. This wholeheartedly proves the internalization of democracy by all social and political groups in Turkey.

What do the election results tell us about Turkey’s political atmosphere? There are a few points worth stressing here. Firstly, the election results showed once again that the People’s Alliance sustained a political majority. The AK Party and the MHP substantially preserved their votes. The total number of votes these parties received were close to the results of the June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections. The AK Party reached the highest percent of votes in its local election history. Thus, the first prominent outcome of these results is the unrivaled power of the AK Party in Turkey’s political arena. Furthermore, the results proved that the People’s Alliance is favored by both voters of the AK Party and the MHP.

The People’s Alliance – the AK Party and MHP – preserved the majority of votes in Turkey’s local elections. The total number of votes these parties received were close to the results of the June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections. 

Second is the issue of the relative decrease of AK Party’s votes in metropolitan cities. As a result of this decrease, the AK Party lost Ankara, Antalya, Ardahan, Artvin, Bilecik, Sinop, Burdur, Bolu and Kırşehir to the CHP. Nonetheless, the success of the CHP in these metropolitan cities is related to pre-electoral alliances that the party established with the Iyi Party and the HDP. Especially in Ankara and Antalya, the support of the HDP enabled the CHP to gain a majority of the votes.

Nevertheless, although the CHP won mayoral elections in these cities, it failed to obtain the majority in provincial council elections. In almost all metropolitan cities, the AK Party and the MHP obtained a majority of the representatives in councils. This situation required cohabitation in the governance of metropolitan cities.

The third prominent result of the local elections is the reliability of elections in Turkey. Although Turkey’s opposition bloc had always made allegations of fraud or corruption in election results, they were never able to prove these claims. The success of the CHP in metropolitan cities shows that Turkey conducts free and fair elections and opposition parties can win if they garner the support of the masses.

Since there is a minor difference between the votes of AK Party and CHP candidates in Istanbul, the AK Party has applied to the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) for the re-count of votes in some ballot boxes. Although the opposition parties see this as an intervention by the AK Party, political parties in Turkey can make this recount application to the YSK as a legal right. For instance, as a result of the CHP and HDP’s application, local elections in Yalova and Ağrı had been re-counted in 2014. More, there have always been some objections about the results of ballot boxes, which cause delays in the official declaration of election results. Thus, the current ongoing legal process is not an exception for these elections.

Although the CHP won mayoral elections in Ankara, Antalya and Izmir, it failed to obtain the majority in provincial council elections. In almost all metropolitan cities, the AK Party and the MHP obtained a majority of the representatives in councils. 

Another eye-catching result of the local elections is the significant decrease of HDP votes in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Turkey. The HDP lost a significant number of its electoral base in the region. The party lost four major cities; Şırnak, Ağrı, Bitlis, and Tunceli. One of the reasons behind this failure is the successful performance of government-appointed trustees in the region. due to the cooperation between the PKK and HDP municipalities, the state appointed trustees over the last two years. The election results proved that people in the region appreciated the services provided by these trustees in these municipalities. As a result of this appreciation, the AK Party increased its votes and gained three prominent provinces from the HDP. This result also means that people of the region are against the domination of the PKK.

The last point in terms of the prominence in local elections is the dominance of nationalist and conservative politics in Turkey. One of the reasons behind the CHP’s success in metropolitan cities is due to its this character of mayoral candidates. For instance, mayoral candidates in Ankara, Antalya, and İzmir all come from a right-wing background and were able to enhance the votes of this bloc. This means that the main determinant of Turkey’s political climate is nationalist and conservative political understanding. In other words, if a party wants to win, it will not be able to ignore these dynamics in the future anymore.

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.

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.

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 perpetrators must be found regardless of who they are. Such acts are unacceptable.” These are the words remarked by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) after the PKK terror group killed a man named Mevlut Bengi and hung his body on a lamppost with a note left near the body. The terror group does not hide its violent acts but rather announces them on their official website to intimidate the Kurdish people in the region, just as they did in the case of Remzi Guler, who was killed by the PKK along with his mentally challenged son, or like the suicide attack they organized at the bus stops in Ankara, during which 36 civilians were killed and 349 were injured. Most of the time, the PKK does not only claim responsibility for the mass murders, but also pays homage to their violent attacks and murders. Many examples of it can be viewed in the pro-PKK periodical titled Yeni Özgür Politika.

On the other hand, the HDP condemns all the murders perpetrated by the PKK without referring to the terror group and always issues the same statement: “The perpetrators must be found regardless of who they are. Such acts are unacceptable.” Several people occasionally object to this approach of the party. For instance, Leyla Zana, one of the most prominent figures in the Kurdish political movement, tried this. Zana was accused of betrayal as she criticized the PKK and said: “The Kurds supporting the HDP are politically-driven while the Kurds supporting the AK Party (Justice and Development Party) are driven by their emotions.” According to the PKK, all of the Kurds who support the AK Party are traitors regardless of their motivations. Muzaffer Ayata, one of the senior names within the PKK, answered this statement of Zana in 2016 on Yeni Özgür Politika: “The traitors are probably thinking that they will not be called to account and keep feeding on the bones thrown to them. They will always be cursed and called traitors.”

Altan Tan, the HDP Diyarbakir deputy last term, criticized the PKK and the HDP while analyzing the support Erdogan received from the Kurdish people following the constitutional amendment referendum. Tan said: “There is a group who have been inclined towards the AK Party although they formerly supported the HDP. The reason is obvious: The people do not want to see a civil war breaking out or politics based on digging ditches, but rather wish to see support to democratic channels.” Tan also accused the HDP of condoning all these and added: “Some people find it very difficult to answer the question why Erdogan enjoys an increasing support. They cannot admit that the PKK has made mistakes and that digging ditches, civil war attempts, conflicts, violence and terror were wrong.” Tan is a name who joined the HDP during the party’s later stages and eventually resigned from the party. But interestingly, the HDP did not defend Zana after the PKK blacklisted her although she was from the grassroots of the movement.

In the latest elections, the HDP gained 67 seats in Parliament by receiving 11.6 percent of the vote. It was observed that the party’s vote share declined in the eastern and southeastern regions, where the Kurdish population is predominant. 30 percent of the party’s overall votes came from Turkey’s three largest cities, namely Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. So, it can be seen that the HDP’s vote share among the Kurdish population declined, while the vote share it achieved in metropolitan cities was partly due to the support given by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

The electorate leaned towards the HDP mostly because of the view that the HDP might detach from the PKK if it grows stronger, which will lead to the consolidation of civil politics and bring an end to terror. During the last parliamentarian term, the HDP was busy with practicing or legitimizing the orders and discourses of the PKK. In the general elections held on June 7, 2015, the HDP received 80 parliamentary seats. Only one month after the elections, senior PKK figure Cemil Bayik called upon people to take up arms and prepare tunnels and trenches, while the HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas said: “We call people to protect this honored resistance of digging ditches to build our autonomy; taking a step back will clash with our dignity.” PKK headed to city centers and terrorized urban spaces by digging ditches. Thousands of Kurdish people had to emigrate due to the ditches dug in front of their houses. In the early elections held on November 1, 2015, the HDP’s vote share decreased from six million to five million, while the number of its deputies went from 80 to 59.

With its 67 deputies, the HDP has another chance to choose democratic means over violence and polarization ahead of the new parliamentary term. Will the party consider the electorate’s demand of civil politics and stance against the PKK? Will they be able to show the courage to stand against the PKK, which has already been displayed by the electorate? Or are they willing to keep their violence prone policies?

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.

Commentators argue that nationalism is on the rise in Turkey. They base this assertion on two factors. One of them is that Turkey’s two nationalist parties –the MHP and the Iyi Party – were surprisingly successful in the June 24 elections. The other factor is the claim that the AK Party has switched its discourse towards nationalism and started to follow nationalist policies in recent years. Calling off the Kurdish peace process and the military operations towards the PKK in Turkey, Syria and Iraq are claimed to verify this change. Alongside these “anti-Kurdish” policies, the rise of anti-Americanism and the loss of European Union membership trajectory in Turkish foreign policy are stated to testify the rise of nationalism in Turkey. Thus, those commentators argue that the AK Party has lost its reformist side and mounted pressure on the opposition, and under AK Party rule Turkey has closed off itself to the outside world by complying with the global trend of right-wing populism.

Indeed, nationalism is often defined in contrast with internationalism. International politics can be understood with this clash of two opposing tendencies: nationalism and internationalism. In the last decade, it’s true that the globalization process of the 1990s has been declining whereas nationalism, with its left-wing and right-wing versions, has become more salient. Nationalism is viewed with suspicion and often associated with negative connotation. This ideological bias has two unfortunate results. One of them is that analysts tend to criticize nationalism rather than understand it. This leads to the second result that nationalism is reduced to exclusionary politics. Nationalism can often be exclusionary, yet that should not blind us to the fact that it can also be an inclusive force.

This is especially valid for the Turkish context. First of all, the Iyi Party has entered into parliament and this is a success for a seven-month old party. Yet, it did not adopt a doctrinal nationalist discourse in its election campaign, not to mention its overt support for Kurdish nationalist HDP’s candidate in presidential elections. The Iyi Party recommended that Selahattin Demirtas, who is kept responsible for the death of 53 people in public demonstrations in October 2014, should be released from prison in order to pursue his election campaign freely.

Secondly, the MHP was also successful in the elections yet one should not forget that its election success was a result of MHP’s change of discourse and attitudes on certain issues in recent years. The MHP stopped denying the Kurdish existence and criticizing the presidential system of leading Turkey to federalism. The MHP has also began to support the AK Party’s productive involvement with the Middle East and backed its policies of critical involvement with Israel and the West in general.

Thirdly, the AK Party has tilted towards nationalism yet it has not begun to follow a traditional form of Turkish nationalism, which targets the ex-Ottoman millets or its neighbors such as the Greeks, Armenians, and the Arabs. AK Party’s nationalism can be labelled as neo-nationalism whose founding elements can be viewed as leaving aside idealism and embracing realpolitik in its foreign policy. In line with this policy change, the AK Party has decreased the importance of soft power and directed its gaze on increasing Turkey’s material capabilities.

Not to forget that this policy change has come after as Turkey was left alone by its Western allies in its struggle to stop the June 15 coup attempt and counter terrorist attacks on its soil. And it has by no means evolved into revisionist and aggressive foreign policy. AK Party’s critical stance towards the West and the declining importance of the EU membership goal were triggered by unwelcoming attitudes of its Western allies. Turkish foreign policy towards the West has been shaped by Turkey’s search for equal relations and respect for its autonomous sovereign will.

Fourthly, those parties that adopted traditional nationalist discourse lost the elections. One of the biggest losers of the elections was the CHP and one of the main promises of this party was to repel Syrian refugees in the event of winning the elections. This shows that Turkish society does not reward exclusionary nationalism.

And lastly, it is true that there is a growing criticism towards the West in society yet it has not turned into a chauvinist nationalism. As noted above this, was caused by the Western powers’ indifference to Turkey’s sensitivities, especially Turkey’s struggle with terrorist organizations such as FETO and the PKK. Another example that Turkish society has not given in to chauvinist nationalism is that Turkish society has successfully absorbed the four million plus refugees from Syria and other places from the Middle East. This is beyond imagination for many other countries, especially as one thinks of the current refugee crisis among the EU member states.

Even though it’s not comprehensively taken into consideration in Turkey, it’s a fact that the country has a diaspora which is of great importance. The members of the Turkish diaspora have been able to vote in elections that take place at home since 2014. In addition to being able to vote in countries that they reside in, Turkish citizens that live abroad also have the right to cast their vote at custom gates in Turkey.

In regards to the recent June 24 elections, the turnout rates of the Turkish diaspora has increased. More than 50 percent of all diaspora members headed to the polls during the recent election period, which symbolizes a new record – despite continuing accusations, provocation attempts and insulting statements by some foreign voices. Nevertheless, in contrast to the previous general election in November 2015, the number of Turks abroad going to the polls had increases by 5 percent and 2 percent compared with the April 16, 2017, referendum. The number of diaspora members, who had voted, has been counted as approximately 1,5 million, that is to say, 50,05 percent of all members of the Turkish diaspora. (1,35 million Turks voted abroad and 170 thousand at Turkish custom gates). While, for instance, in Germany 811 thousand, in France 185,6 thousand, in the Netherlands 144,9 thousand and Austria 60 thousand Turkish citizens went to the polls, 46,1 thousand Turks in the United States voted as well.

By focusing on the results of the presidential elections, we see that the People’s Alliance’s candidate, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, received approximately 900 thousand votes. That is to say, 59,4 percent of all diaspora votes. This also means that the number of votes favoring “Yes” during the last referendum on April 16, 2017, has recently been exceeded by nearly 60 thousand votes. Erdogan’s party, on the other hand, has also received more than 50 percent of the votes from the Turkish diaspora (51,8 percent) while in Turkey the AK Party got circa 42 percent. In Germany, where the majority of the Turkish diaspora are living, currently 1 million 443 thousand 585 Turkish voters exist (apart from a total number of 3 million people with Turkish origin in Germany).

According to the non-official results, 421 thousand 845 Turks voted in favor of Recep Tayyip Erdogan (64,8 percent of all votes in Germany). His party received 362 thousand 543 of the votes (55,7 percent) which is also more than the number the party received in Turkey. If one concentrates on some other European countries with a high number of members of the diaspora, one observes that similar preferences have occurred (Belgium – Erdogan: 74,9 percent / AK Party 64,3 percent; the Netherlands – Erdogan: 73 percent / AK Party: 63 percent; Austria – Erdogan: 72,3 percent / AK Party: 62,5 percent; France – Erdogan: 63,7 percent / AK Party: 55 percent).

But if one concentrates on the reactions right after the election results became public, some general and estimated biases, for instance, in Germany can be observed. While German Chancellor Merkel and President Steinmeier congratulated President Erdogan by stressing the future intention “to further support and deepen the cooperation between our two countries,” some German politicians with Turkish roots once again elaborated the results in a negative tone. Even a member of the Turkish diaspora who is working for the CHP in Germany stated that Turks living in Germany and voting for Erdogan should leave Germany. While these statements belong to a member of a political party – who call themselves social-democrats – this kind of rhetoric only resembles the mentality of the far right and extremist parties, such as the AfD.

Furthermore, discussions about the integration process of Turks became popular as several commentators and politicians once again accused Turkish voters due to their preference in favor of President Erdogan. German conservative and rather nationalist circles do not try to analyze the results in depth while all opposition parties in Turkey are –falsely– considered as one democratic bloc against the incumbent government. However, whether German analysts or Turkey experts want to accept this or not; Turkey’s dynamics are not that easy to reduce to these kinds of generalizing opinions.

Apart from the known positions of nationalists, it’s an interesting phenomenon that left-wing German politicians and above all Germans with Turkish roots are taking very extreme positions with regard to the recent election results in Turkey. As if one has to prove oneself most likely in order to guarantee a continuation of a successful political career. For instance, it’s very confusing that a politician like the former chairman of the Green Party, Cem Ozdemir, stated that Turks in Germany, who voted in favor of Erdogan, are living in “parallel societies” while comparing them to AfD voters. On the other hand, however, other high-profile German politicians from the same political party, such as Baden-Württemberg’s minister-president Kretschmann, do rightly reject these kind of statements by addressing the need of an in depth analysis of the preferences of Turkish voters by using empirical methods of social research. I think it’s understandable what I want to stress.

Thus, the elections showed us that members of the Turkish diaspora are willing to participate in democratic elections. It’s presumable that Turks abroad would also participate in elections concerning German politics if there weren’t obstacles with regard to their political participation – however this topic goes beyond the borders of this column piece.

Another issue which once again became obvious during the election period is the fact that most of the Turkish population living in Germany, who’re obviously conservative-oriented, are not represented in German political circles. On the contrary, most German politicians with migration roots are totally against the opinion and preferences of these majorities. This seems to be a serious problem for German democracy from a participatory point of view. Nevertheless, the election results are considered as a chance by the Turkish diaspora to initiate new and stable bilateral relations for the upcoming future.

As the ballot boxes were closed at 5.00 p.m. in the June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections, everyone started waiting for the results impatiently. The elections marked a turning point in Turkey’s history since the new governance system was to be introduced after that. So, the voter turnout was around 87.5 percent. As from 6.30 p.m., early results of the counting started to be announced on television channels. Only a few hours later, it became certain that Recep Tayyip Erdogan would win the presidential race by a landslide and thus there would not be any need for a second tour of the presidential elections. But the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) administrators argued against this.

The pro-CHP broadcaster Halk TV only released the number of the opened ballot boxes and ignored the overall results for hours as opposed to other broadcasters. At 8.00 p.m., the CHP Election Monitoring and Coordination Committee members Bulent Tezcan, Tuncay Ozkan, Muharrem Erkek and Onursal Adiguzel organized a press meeting at the party’s head office. During the press conference, the CHP Deputy Chairman Tezcan said: “Muharrem Ince’s vote share is around 40 percent while Erdogan’s is 46 percent. Ince will win the election, we will disclose all the rigs.” The other members standing beside Tezcan during his speech did not utter a single word, but only threw strained glances with a crooked smile glued on their faces.

Two hours later, the same team issued another statement. The vote shares were not announced this time: “Some groups began celebrating too soon. We are closely monitoring the results. The figures show that the presidential election will wrap up in the second round.” And one hour later, an array of baseless allegations started to circulate on social media. Firstly, CHP supporters wrote tweets which suggested that Fox TV’s broadcasting was cut off, which were shared and retweeted by thousands of people.

In the midst of these rumors, Fox TV’s live broadcast was ongoing. After a while, a second tweet that would be shared by thousands were tweeted. This tweet claimed that even the Justice and Development Party’s (AK Party) Supreme Electoral Council members resigned in the face of the rigged elections while Erdogan called Ince and threatened him to walk out of the presidential race by telling him that his wife was abducted. Ince did not make any public appearance in the meantime. So, the CHP electorate rushed to the party’s head office and started waiting anxiously.

Then, a new development was announced by Fox TV, which supported Ince throughout the electoral process. Fox TV anchorman Ismail Kucukkaya said that he wrote to Ince on WhatsApp to ask his whereabouts, upon which Ince answered: “The man has won.” By that time, the other broadcasters had already announced Erdogan’s victory, being the latest of his unremitting victories since the first election he ran for in 1994, in which he was elected as Istanbul Mayor. As a result, President Erdogan’s vote share was 52.6 percent while Ince’s was 30.6 percent.

The following day, Muharrem Ince appeared before the press: “First of all, I would like to begin with the false news running on social media. They are all lies. The claims such as the abduction of my wife and a group of colonel’s hostage-taking me are the products of a bunch of schizophrenic minds. But taking them seriously is another problem. There is no such a thing. There are 10 million votes between [me and Erdogan]. We are not evading, we are not being threatened. Erdogan is the winner of the elections.” Ince also congratulated Erdogan, adding that he aimed to double his vote share in the future.

However, Ince’s announcement did not change the situation. Many CHP proponents, who, considering their social media profiles, are most probably university graduates and professionals, started spreading another rumor on twitter: “Ince’s statements have already showed that he is being threatened.”

The CHP Chairman Kemal Kilicdaroglu was also incensed. Apparently, he was furious at Ince, whose vote share in the presidential election was seven points higher than the CHP’s vote share in the parliamentary election. He defended the exact opposite of the bare truth in his statement: “The AK Party is the only losing party in the elections. The party has become a lame duck. Also, a dictator cannot be congratulated.” Kilicdaroglu, who has lost eight elections during his chairmanship, answered the resignation calls as follows: “In our party, we have no place for those who only care about remaining in office.”

A series of confessions began to be made within the party following Ince’s statement. They explained the backdrop of the party deputy chairs’ announcements during the election day. One of the most striking statements were issued by Hakan Bayrakci, the president of pro-CHP surveying company SONAR: “The results were evident in the polls but they would have crucified me had I declared that Erdogan would win.” The latest poll announced by Bayrakci before the elections suggested that the presidential race will wrap up in the second round.

The trauma experienced by the CHP electorate since the election day is surely in the realm of psychiatry. However, an odd picture is revealed considering the reason for the CHP deputy chairs’ announcements, the claims of rig and the following confessions, and some groups call upon people to take to the streets.

After the June 24 elections a critical question has arisen: what’s next in Turkish politics? The June 24 elections constitute a significant step in Turkey’s long history of democratization. The transition to a presidential system has now been consolidated with the victory of the AK Party-MHP alliance. This will precipitate a new wave of institutionalization, which will strive to achieve unity and stability at the state whereas the state remains open to society and societal differences. This means a fine balance between two contradictory forces of political life: identity and difference.

It is mostly due to the empowerment of democratic politics in the last 16 years that links society and its demands with the state. However, we should still insist that the political situation in Turkey begs to be analyzed in order to shed light on the question of what’s next in Turkey. The wisest start may be to spend some time on the issue of social cohesion.

Friends, Rivals or Enemies

There are three degrees of social cohesion that can be found in society. At the top of it lies consensus on the social good. All society may gather around a certain set of ethical-political values. Members of society perceive each other as “friends” and each define their identity and interests not independent of others in society.

This is followed by another situation where society is divided into multiple social groups on the basis of value or identity differences. Here, members of society perceive each other as “rivals.” Despite the fact that individuals define their identities different from each other, they share some form of interest, such as accepting the rules of competition among each other. In this type of society, one can at least testify to fair and open elections and peaceful transfer of power among rivals.

And lastly, there is a form of society in which members of society perceive each other as “enemies.” In this situation, individuals or social groups neither share a common identity and interest nor the rules of competition among each other. Here, what members of society share is a common understanding not to attack each other. One can easily put that the balance of threat keeps society from dissolving or from plunging into a bloody civil war.

Turkey characterizes the second form of society where individuals and social groups perceive each other as rivals. Since 1950 Turkey has conducted free and fair elections and despite intermittent military involvement into politics it has observed peaceful transfers of power. Increasing polarization during election times is a fact yet it has not degraded the country to a lower level of social cohesion so far.

Collectivity, Intersubjectivity or Hegemony

Another issue is the dominant way of sustaining social cohesion in society. There are three models to bring society together. One of them is to acknowledge that society remains in a form of collectivity of subjective realities. Here the individual is seen more significant than society, political community is put behind civil society, and economic relations override political and cultural ties.

The second one is to channel society to create an intersubjective reality. This model accepts each as equal and emphasizes a rational deliberation among members of society. Here a common ground in society is searched in a non-political manner.

The third model is hegemony. Here society is brought together through a hegemonic project that aims to carve up the largest and most inclusive social whole by integrating free-floating societal demands. It involves a struggle of transforming the interests and identities of others by applying various ways of persuasion.

Turkish politics seems to adopt the hegemonic model. Political relations overweigh economic relations. Rational deliberation among members of society appears to be scarce. Conflict and competition determine political life. Political actors mainly strive to create the most inclusive identity or social whole in order to hold on to power.

The post-June 24 elections era in Turkey will not nurture the character of a society of rivals. If anything, it will most likely boost society’s current state and decrease the likelihood of devolving into a society of enemies. However, it is also likely to intensify hegemonic rivalry among political actors, especially due to the increasing primacy of democratic politics in holding on to power. One should not forget that the opposition in Turkey has searched for alternative ways until recently – other than democratic politics – to hold on to power.

The main opposition party CHP faced with the rise of an intraparty opposition after the elections. Indeed, this phenomenon is not new for the CHP. After every failure in parliamentary and presidential elections, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the chairman of the party, was criticized harshly and was put under pressure for resignation. Nonetheless, the party delegates, who were appointed by Kilicdaroglu, re-elected him in each congress despite criticisms. The opposition in CHP got into action again after the June 24 elections with the demand of changing the party leadership.

Despite all the similarities, there is a significant difference between the latest mobilization of the opposition movement and the previous ones. The opposition movement now has a popular candidate for leadership who attracted the masses more than Kilicdaroglu: Muharrem Ince. Even if Ince was defeated by President Erdogan in the presidential elections, he got 30.6 percent of the votes which is approximately 8 percent higher than what the CHP got in parliamentary elections under the leadership of Kilicdaroglu. Some prominent names of the party interpret these results as an indicator of the de facto leadership of Muharrem Ince in the CHP.

Actually, Ince already ran for the chairmanship of the party against Kilicdaroglu twice. His first candidacy for chairmanship was in 2014 but he got only 415 votes against Kilicdaroglu’s 740 votes. The second one, on the other hand, was more recent. Just two months ago from the decision of snap election, Ince once again became a candidate for chairmanship of the party against Kilicdaroglu. During his short-term candidacy process, Ince blamed Kilicdaroglu for threatening delegates who supported him and forcing them to withdraw their signature to support Ince’s candidacy for chairmanship. At the end of the congress, Ince was defeated by Kilicdaroglu again.

While Ince was maintaining his criticisms towards Kilicdaroglu, the decision of snap elections totally changed the direction. Even though Kilicdaroglu worked hard for the joint candidacy of Abdullah Gül, he nominated Ince as the presidential candidate of the CHP at the end of the process. By this way, Kilicdaroglu passivized his main rival in the CHP. Ince’s failure in the elections would mean a decline in his competition against Kilicdaroglu. Additionally, while Ince was conducting his election campaign, Kilicdaroglu dissolved the names close to Ince in the CHP and prepared the candidate list for the parliamentary elections in accordance with this aim.

Nevertheless, Ince gained high popularity among the masses during the campaign process. He obtained sympathy among not only supporters of the CHP, but also the supporters of other parties. In the same period, Kilicdaroglu lost his authority within the party supporters. For instance, the CHP announced that Kilicdaroglu and Ince were going to organize joint meetings in some provinces. However, Ince’s supporters in the party reacted against this decision that they perceived an action damaging Ince’s image among the masses. As a result, these joint meetings were canceled.

After the elections, Ince underlined his success by highlighting his 30.6 percent – a figure the CHP has not reached in 41 years. He also criticized Kilicdaroglu. First, Ince stated that rather than persuading other parties to support the candidacy of Gul, Kilicdaroglu could have announced his nomination for the presidential elections earlier. Secondly, Ince criticized Kilicdaroglu for not congratulating Erdogan and his approach to the results. In this point, Ince stated that Kilicdaroglu should try to find the reasons of the decline in the votes of the party rather than emphasizing the decrease in the voting rates of the AK Party. All these indicators show that Ince may run for the chairmanship of the party again. Whether the support of the delegates will be enough for Kilicdaroglu to keep his chairmanship will be clear soon.

The June 24 elections are over. As for the big picture, there is no surprise. Many analysts in Turkey predicted the results before the election day. The day before the elections, you also read in this column that Erdogan was likely to win the elections in the first round but with a divided parliament; the HDP votes, for the first time, would pass the MHP’s, and other projections as such. Nevertheless, the results are still full of depth to analyze, and here we go with a focus on ethnic voting patterns in Turkey.

Kurdish votes were expected to play a key role in the June 24 elections. As for the parliamentary elections, whether the HDP would exceed the 10% threshold would determine the AK Party’s chance to hold a majority in parliament. As for the presidential elections, the Kurdish votes mattered as well, which is natural because in an election that requires %50+1 votes to win, you cannot neglect any significant social segments. These novelties make it necessary to analyze the voting pattern in Turkey’s eastern cities where Kurds are thought to be significant demographically speaking.

The main results of the June 24th elections on these terms are:

• The AK Party and the HDP still dominate Turkey’s elections in the east.
• The HDP continued its loss in the region – as was the case in the latest general elections of November, 2015.
• Pre-electoral alliances of other parties cost seats to the HDP.
• Turkey’s Kurdish votes do not act as a block but intra-Kurdish differences prevail in the region.

The AK Party and HDP still dominate Turkey’s elections in the east

In the eastern cities of Turkey, where the ethnic Kurdish population is in significant numbers, the competition took place between the AK Party and the HDP in this election. In the region, speaking of the parliamentary elections:

• The AK Party and the HDP shared the first spot in all the cities of the region. Whereas the AK Party won the first spot in 13 cities, the HDP came first in 11 (see map 1).

* these cities are chosen because they appear on the maps of the imaginary PKK state to be separated from Turkey. In other words, this is the area that the PKK calls Bakur (Northern) Kurdistan. In fact, the map is even conservative because some PKK maps also include cities such as Kahramanmaraş, Osmaniye, Sivas where the HDP has no promising results at all.

• While the AK Party won 62 seats from these cities in total, the numbers for the HDP, CHP, and MHP seats are, respectively, 46, 11 and 7.
• The CHP and MHP have not topped the race in any of the cities in the region. Nevertheless, the CHP reserved second rank in Ardahan, Erzincan, Gaziantep, Hatay, Malatya and Tunceli. The MHP, on the other hand, came second in Elazig, Erzurum, Igdır and Kilis (see map 2).

• The AK Party came third and, hence, is not amongst the top two parties in Igdir and Tunceli. The HDP was not among the top three parties in Elazig, Erzincan, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kilis and Malatya (see map 3).

• In the cities of Erzincan and Kilis, AK Party won all the seats.
• As for the poorest performances, the HDP could receive only 2.3% of the votes in Kilis while AK Party stayed at 14.7 % in Tunceli.
• Hüda-Par can be seen to be successful compared to other minor ethnic Kurdish parties such as Hak-Par. Hak-Par candidates entered the elections with independent candidates yet its candidates could not exceed several hundred votes. When its independent candidates in Diyarbakir and Batman are also included, Hüda-Par received over 200,000 votes.

This column has addressed only one leg of the 24 June elections, parliamentary elections. If we had analyzed not the parties in the parliamentary elections but in the presidential elections, then the AK Party gets even brighter results. Given that Erdogan received more votes than his party whereas Demirtas below his party’s vote, the presidential elections in the region are much better off for the AK Party.

The other findings of the election results are as follows and will be analyzed in the upcoming column:

• The HDP has continued losing vote rates in the region as it was the case in the latest general elections of November, 2015.
• Pre-electoral alliances of other parties cost seats to the HDP.

Eastern Turkey includes a multiplicity of ethnic groups. Other than ethnic identification, political salience of ethnicity also differs across cities in Eastern Turkey. Hence, Turkey’s Kurdish (and non-Kurdish) votes do not act as a block but intra-Kurdish differences prevail in the region.

The June 24 parliamentary and presidential elections marked a historical turning point for Turkish political life. Even though the AK Party lost its majority in the parliament (42,56%), President Erdogan won the presidential election (52,56% as the candidate of the People’s Alliance, in which the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) is the key partner). The election result first and foremost showed that the process of democratic consolidation still matters for Turkish people – contrary to the criticism raised by the domestic and external opponents of President Erdogan. The election campaign was very competitive, and the outcome was uncertain until the very end. Compared to the turnout in Western democracies, the participation in the June 24 elections was very high, at around 87 percent, which represents the strength of Turkish democracy. More importantly, the eight participating political parties received almost 99 percent of the votes bringing all parties’ voices into parliament. This outcome is particularly essential to demonstrate justice in representation. The 2002 parliamentary elections represented only 45 percent of the votes.

The election results will be bringing new dynamics into Turkish political life and democracy, but the post-election foreign policy agenda of Turkey is more complicated and challenging than the election results in domestic political debates. Turkey has been massively struggling with the PKK in Syria and Iraq to protect its national security and territorial integrity since 2015. On the other hand, Turkey and the U.S. have divergent strategies towards the regional issues in the Middle East, and both administrations could not bring any comprehensive and concrete solution to restore bilateral relations.

The S-400, F-35, and pastor Brunson case are probably points that can turn into a major crisis while there is continuing agreement over Manbij. Turkey’s relation with the European Union is another foreign policy issue that both sides need to find a new framework of understanding in order to re-energize the already contested relations. All in all, from Russia to the Middle East, from Balkans to the Gulf region, post-election Turkish foreign policy has to deal with many crucial issues as the new governance model will be established in the upcoming days.

Therefore, the first challenge for Turkish foreign policy is the question of how the new governance model will be able to deliver the foreign policy agenda of Turkey in order to maximize foreign policy interests of Turkey. The President will be the main foreign policy decision maker under the new model, and the presidential office will be more involved in foreign policy issues. The model also consists of combining the MFA with the ministry of the European Union. The EU process is one of the critical foreign policy domains that Turkey should carefully follow in the short-term while there is an increasing anti-Turkey perception among the EU institutions. President Erdogan has been a leading foreign policy decision maker since he came to power in 2002, but the new system should be designed in accordance with the presidential foreign policy model, for which the textbook example is the U.S. The institutions under the presidential office will be established and be responsible for coordinating foreign and security-related issues with the MFA.

In the post-election foreign policy agenda of Turkey, Turkey-U.S. relations will be the main topic that both sides should re-think on the advantages and limits of bilateral relations. The existing foreign and security policies are not the same as they were at the beginning of the AK Party era in 2002, regarding the formulation of foreign policy, decision-making process and the issues that Turkey has had to deal with. More importantly, the geopolitical landscape of Turkey has changed fundamentally after the Arab Spring. In the post-election period, Manbij will constitute a critical threshold to see how both countries maintain their agreement and reflect it towards the eastern part of Syria, while Turkey wants to maximize its gains against the PKK in Iraq and Syria.

The recent criticism raised by EUCOM to the Pentagon that CENTCOM should be more careful in dealing with Turkey in the region is one of the important signals that the conventional perception towards Ankara is getting more favor in the U.S to shape the bilateral relation. As it has been indicated in EUCOM’s 2008 Posture Statement, Turkey is a strategic ally for the U.S. and NATO. It is believed that the Manbij agreement is not a consequence of the necessity of recalibrating Turkish-American relations, but it is the result of EUCOM’s “lobbying” over the Pentagon. The State Department is also another institution that wants to re-energize Turkey-U.S. relations as opposed to other anti-Turkey institutions. Trump’s way of thinking is another dimension that can bring a new modality of a relationship between Turkey and the U.S.

Even though these dimensions above of the bilateral relationship are enough to open a new page between the two capitals, the S-400 and Pastor Brunson cases will be the primary determinant factors in shaping the ultimate behavior of the U.S. towards Turkey. There is increasing pressure over decision-makers in Ankara, and the U.S. is doing everything possible to discourage Turkey from purchasing S-400s. The F-35 debate is therefore crucially important. As put forth in the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2019, the U.S. insists on removing Turkey from the F-35 program. In the post-election period, therefore, Turkey should carefully rearrange its foreign policy priorities to maintain the strategic relations with the U.S. to protect its rapprochement with Russia, as well. Russia is almost as strategically significant as the U.S. in protecting Turkey’s regional security interests, particularly in the fight against the PKK.

Additionally, the Syrian crisis became an integral component of Turkish foreign policy, and it will be continuing as a strategic challenge shortly to see how Turkey will recalibrate its regional stability model in its near abroad. Protecting Turkey-held territories in Syria is one of the important dimensions for the post-election foreign policy priorities for Turkey. Maintaining the Turkish model regarding the issue of training, equipping and fighting together with local military partners will become more important to protect Turkey’s gains in Syria. The overall military and security dynamics are still the same in Syria.

Turkey will want to sustain the current agreement between Turkey, Russia, and Iran. There are two crucial dimensions that Turkey should also take into account: the direction of the Turkish-U.S. relations and the Russian position vis-à-vis Turkey’s presence in Afrin. The more rapprochements with the U.S. might bring more instability into to the Turkish-Russian relations. Therefore, the main challenge for post-election Turkish foreign policy will be the question of how Turkey readjusts a balancing approach in its relations with the two superpowers at the same time.

To avoid potential risks, especially in Turkish-American relations, Turkey and the U.S. both need to build a more interactive connection politically at a public level in order to contain probable misunderstandings. For instance, the working group established in the case of Manbij is a good example. Turkey and the U.S. also need to discuss the regional problems on a case-by-case basis, but in a complementary model and they should learn how to compartmentalize issues. Lastly, Turkey and the U.S. should step up cooperation in defense partnership by promoting collaboration in the defense industry.

There are many other foreign policy issues in the agenda of Turkish foreign policy including Turkey-Iran relations, Turkey’s strategic priorities in the Mediterranean Sea, Cyprus and many others. The election results brought more space for maneuver for President Erdogan in domestic politics, but the foreign policy challenges are still crucial as they were in the pre-election period.

Last Sunday, Turkey held one of the most symbolic elections in its recent history. The election was the final step to shift the political system of the country to a presidential one. By receiving nearly 53% of the votes, Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the first President of Turkey. His AK Party also received around 42% of the votes and become the leading party in parliament. The turnout was almost 90%, making Turkey one of the strongest democracies with the highest rate of participation in elections. The number of world leaders, including presidents of Iran, Russia, France, the U.S., and prime ministers of Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan, called Erdogan to congratulate him for the victory. Erdogan also received phone calls from leaders of Middle Eastern countries, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Iraq and Palestine.

The elections in Turkey were closely observed by actors inside and outside of the Middle East. The main reason for this is the growing importance of Turkey in regional and international politics. Erdogan’s leadership has made significant progress in becoming a regional game-changer, despite challenges and threats in domestic politics. The President followed an active foreign policy agenda towards the Middle East, particularly during the post-2011 period. In this context, Turkey has become an important player in regional crises such as Palestine-Israel, Syria, Libya and the Gulf crises. Turkey has been involved in these crises in order to both protect its own interests and the interest of its Arab allies in the region.

Erdogan’s election as the first President of the new political system in Turkey is an indication of Ankara’s continuing interest in the Middle East. It can be said that Ankara will maintain its current policy objectives with regards to the Middle East. This would be summarized in four crisis areas in the region.

The Erdogan administration will focus more on the conflict between Israel and Palestine and will continue to defend the rights of Palestinians. By following such a policy, Ankara would contradict with the policies of the U.S. and Israel. This would further damage the already tense relations between Turkey and these two actors. In the case of Gulf politics, Turkey would continue to support Qatar’s position and provide a security umbrella for its strategic partner. Ankara’s main objective will be to prevent blockading countries, namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt, to further damage the Qatari leadership and will also try to prevent Gulf states from taking tougher steps against Qatar.

Turkey’s policy toward Syria will remain unchanged in the coming period. The main goal of Erdogan’s leadership will be permanently removing the “terror corridor” that has been established by the terrorist organization, the PYD, with the support of the United States. Eliminating this region of instability will be a crucial goal for Ankara in order to establish a safe border in its South. At this point, it is vital that the U.S. does not repeat mistakes it made in the past. The U.S., which is the major supporter of the terrorist organization, the PYD, has seriously lost Ankara’s trust with this policy and has become an irrelevant actor in Turkey’s policy toward Syria. The U.S. support for the PYD has further damaged Turkey-U.S. relations in other areas. Therefore, Washington has to re-consider its policy in Syria (and Palestine), if it does not want to lose a powerful ally like Turkey.

Finally, Turkey will follow a more aggressive strategy in its policy toward Libya. This will be an important aspect of Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East in terms of its regional implications. Turkey will continue to challenge the Egyptian and Emirati attempts to destabilize Libya. Ankara will continue to support the central government in Libya and aim to bring stability in the country. Turkey’s historical and commercial links with Libya will contribute to further rapprochement between Ankara in Tripoli.

Turkey is likely to become a more influential actor in the politics of the Middle East. It is therefore vital that Western actors, as well as countries in the region, take into account Ankara’s concerns for the region. Turkey’s importance proved itself in Erdogan’s ability to create a united Islamic front against the U.S. and Israeli policies in Palestine, Ankara’s strategic gains in Syria and its capacity to stop aggressive Gulf countries in damaging the Qatari leadership. These developments will give Ankara enough confidence to follow a more active foreign policy in the coming period.

After weeks of intensive campaigning and eager anticipation, Turkey successfully accomplished yet another test of democratic maturity by holding the combined general and presidential elections last Sunday. The fact that these elections constituted a milestone for the paradigmatic transition towards the presidential government system ensured that they were fiercely fought by both the government and the opposition parties with the notable addition of public relation initiatives by the presidential candidates. These were the first general elections that were held in the aftermath of the failed military coup attempt on July 15, 2016, and as such they represented the dawn of democratic normalization and a potential end to the state of emergency that was declared after the coup.

Despite all the hype and misinformation in mainstream international media accusing President Erdogan of authoritarianism and the government for suppressing the political opposition, pretty much all the stakeholders agreed that the elections were held in an open, free and fair environment. The campaign trail was peaceful and turned the whole country into a festival zone via vibrant promotion endeavors by the parties and candidates.

On election day, voter turnout was around 87 per cent which represented one of the highest participation rates in Turkey’s democratic history, comfortably surpassing most of the established democratic polities in the world. Electoral alliances ensured that the ten per cent threshold for entry to the parliament was not applied and almost 99 per cent of the votes cast for political parties were reflected as parliamentary representation.

The incumbent Justice and Development Party (AK Party), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the Iyi Party, the Democrat Party (DP), the Felicity Party (SP) and the Great Union Party (BBP) will be represented in the forthcoming parliament. The parliament will be one of the most representative and inclusive parliaments in Turkey’s political history. So there is no discussion concerning the procedural validity or democratic legitimacy of the election results.

When it comes to gauging the winners and losers of the elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerged undoubtedly as the biggest winner with yet another crystal clear victory over his political opponents. He received over 52 per cent of the total votes and was successfully elected in the first round as the first president of Turkey under the new presidential government system. Being the dominant political actor who placed his mark on Turkey’s political, economic and social transformation over the course of the 2000s, Erdogan managed an effective campaign and confirmed once again that he retains the confidence of the Turkish electorate going forward as the most credible leader.

Erdogan has been in power as Prime Minister and President for the last sixteen years without interruption and managed to record thirteen election victories. Despite risks of democratic fatigue and popular reaction to some of the government actions by certain social groups, the personal political popularity and societal approval of Erdogan seems to withstand the toughest tests of time. While clinching his latest landslide victory in the presidential elections, he managed to receive nearly eleven million votes more than his closest rival Muharrem İnce. It is really very difficult to cite another political leader in the modern democratic world with such strong and consistent democratic credentials.

The reluctance of Western media to understand and analyze the uniqueness of the deep bond between Erdogan and the Turkish society lets them to confuse unrivaled democratic legitimacy with authoritarianism. The Turkish President displays exceptional capacity to create a popular blend of socio-economic stability, structural transformation, improved public services, increased living standards and identity politics which is translated into sustained electoral success.

But it was also interesting to note that for the first time in these elections there was a ten per cent gap between Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (52 to 42 per cent) which indicated a performance divergence. Although the People’s Alliance, comprising the AK Party (295 MPs), MHP (49 MPs) and BBP (1 MP), which was born out of the popular resistance to the July 15 coup attempt clinched a clear parliamentary majority, Erdogan in his traditional balcony speech on election night frankly expressed that he received the ‘message of the electorate’ and will oversee a thorough post-election analysis.

So far, taking electoral demands, reactions, or signals swiftly into account through rational and well-researched analyses has been one of the greatest strengths of Erdogan. Therefore, it is pretty likely that he will gather detailed reports concerning the dynamics that affected AK Party votes in certain cities as a result of candidate selections for the parliament, performance of local administrations, or certain economic policies. Therefore, the post June 24 process will witness Erdogan’s multifaceted attempts to oversee a great transformation in the institutional structures of the Turkish state, while keeping the electoral strength of his AK Party in check going forward to the municipal elections next March.

Sunday’s elections also opened a new chapter in Turkish politics as the new electoral regulations allowed alliances between different political parties, thereby making the ten per cent national threshold obsolete. As voters made it absolutely clear that local representation is important to them, legal reforms could be made to lower the national threshold or create some form of single-member district system in the near future. Incidentally, strategic voting which implied certain shifts among allied political parties was one of the most important factors leading to surprising results in view of preceding public opinion polls. As the presidential government system becomes more institutionalized, it is highly likely that strategic voting and issue-based alliances among different political groups will become more pronounced. Therefore, leading political parties and their leaders will have to adopt their ways in line with the emerging patterns of pragmatic voting behavior.

The Nationalist Action Party (MHP) clearly gained from its alliance with the AK Party and the rising national sentiments in the wake of military operations in northern Syria, gathering critical parliamentary representation with 49 MPs. The leader of the MHP, Devlet Bahceli, was among the winners of the electoral process by managing to keep his party above the eleven per cent mark and maintaining his strategic alliance with Erdogan despite the recent internal division within his party which gave birth to the Iyi Party. In the context of the strong executive that will be formed with the presidential system, MHP has great potential of acquiring a degree of political effectiveness that goes much above its numerical presence.

Another winner who came stronger from the campaign trail and election experience was Muharrem Ince who ran as the presidential candidate of the CHP. Ince, a long-time domestic opponent of CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was nominated as the presidential candidate in an almost futile race against the towering figure of President Erdogan probably in an attempt to undermine his future party leadership aspirations. Yet Ince as a pragmatic figure who could address the radical secular groups that characterize the backbone of the CHP as well as relatively conservative voters in central Anatolia displayed a surprising performance and personally received eight points higher than his party.

Differing from Kilicdaroglu in his more mature reactions, Ince congratulated Erdogan’s election victory and declared that he will continue his public meetings after the elections, signalling a leadership clash within the CHP. Both CHP and Kilicdaroglu were among the main losers as the party vote stood around a disappointing twenty two percent, while their strategic moves aimed at keeping the Iyi Party and the PKK-affiliated HDP above the ten per cent threshold caused numerous criticisms from within the party organization.

Meral Aksener, the leader of the newly established Iyi Party was another loser as she received unlimited public support from international media during the campign as the chief candidate that could undermine Erdogan’s authority. But despite all the media hype, Aksener’s personal electoral support did not even reach to the ten percent mark and her fragile party might well disintegrate in the parliament. Finally, HDP was another loser as the support for its leader Selahattin Demirtas fell three points to seven per cent, while party votes reached eleven per cent with the controversial tactical support of CHP supporters which was later criticized for legitimizing a terror-affiliated group.

As soon as election results were declared President Erdogan adopted a reconciliatory tone and expressed that the institutionalization of the presidential system will proceed through an inclusive process with the contributions of different social sectors, business actors and NGOs. He is keen to embark on a democratic normalization and development endeavor through which the state of emergency will be gradually lifted, structural reforms in the economy will be swiftly implemented and new productive synergies will be created to galvanize Turkey’s position as an emerging power in the global system. If the Western world decides to support this endeavor by accepting respectable and equitable forms of interaction with Turkey rather than portraying Erdogan as an ‘old-school third world dictator’ and blackmailing him through political or financial means, a positive environment of win-win situations could emerge sooner rather than later.

On 24 June, Turkish voters re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with 52,6 percent of the votes. His closest rival, the CHP’s candidate Muharrem Ince, received only 30,6 of the votes. By this, Erdogan got 11 million votes more than Ince, who consequently congratulated Erdogan on Monday due to his victory. The CHP Chairman Kilicdaroglu, however, rejected to congratulate Erdogan while stating that the AK Party is the loser of the elections. However, in the parliament, the People’s Alliance, which consists of the AK Party and the MHP, received more than 53,6 percent of the votes and thus achieved a majority with 344 seats in the parliament (AK Party 295 seats and MHP 50 seats, of 600). Interestingly, even Erdogan addressed his party’s parliamentary vote by stressing “we got the message,” while on Tuesday, CHP Chairman Kilicdaroglu, with no surprise and as expected, did not step down even though his party’s parliamentary votes decreased from 26 to 22 percent.

It’s perhaps too early to analyze all components of the election results in depth, but it’s quite possible to address some striking issues. First of all, these elections symbolize the ultimate transformation of Turkey’s system of government into a Turkish type of presidential system. The first step had been initiated in 2016 as the AK Party and MHP proposed a constitutional change, which was accepted by a majority in the referendum held on 16 April 2017. Now, the majority of Turks once again voted in favor of the new system by rejecting the opposition parties’ offer to turn back to a parliamentary one.

The majority of Turks once again voted in favor of the new system by rejecting the opposition parties’ offer to turn back to a parliamentary one.

The second striking issue concerns Turkey’s political stability. Apart from the fact that now eventually eight political parties will be represented in the parliament and cause a democratic diversity, the strict division of the executive and legislative branches will not cause any problems for the executive presidency. Furthermore, the fact that the President’s ministers cannot be selected from MPs anymore will cause a rather professionalization of a rapid and effective governmental acting.

The third issue is about the chronic wishful thinking of foreign media representatives. During the recent election period, we witnessed once again that several foreign media outlets disregarded various fact-based issues while supporting above all CHP’s candidate Muharrem Ince and his political campaign. It’s also not a secret that HDP’s candidate Demirtas and recently the Iyi Party’s leader Mrs. Aksener were supported by both foreign media outlets and politicians.

Although Iyi Party entered the parliament, Mrs. Aksener herself, due to not being an elected MP, will be out of the parliament and most probably her leadership will be questioned by other party leaders.

Although Mrs. Aksener’s party entered the parliament, she herself, due to not being an elected MP, will be out of parliament and it is most likely that her party leadership will be questioned by other party leaders. Thus, foreign analysts may also stop trying to manipulate their own audience by disregarding, for instance, populist and baseless statements by Muharrem Ince while permanently promoting him. Turkish voters have rejected populist and anti-refugee statements whereas Western voters increasingly favor similar promises – a fundamental difference between Turkish and Western ways of persuading voters.

Election results shows that Turkish voters reject populist and anti-refugee statements whereas Western voters increasingly favor such discriminative promises – a fundamental difference between Turkish and Western ways of persuading voters.

The fourth striking phenomenon is about the CHP’s chronic problem; that is to say, its lack of credibility. Even though the CHP tried to build a legal “National Alliance” and a de facto alliance with the HDP, it has been unsuccessful in persuading –in particular– Turkey’s conservative voters. It’s obvious that Turkey’s oldest party will never be as strong as to build the government due to its chronic problem of lacking self-criticism with regard to its radical secular past. If the CHP does not make any self-criticism in various fields there is no possibility to win any general election in Turkey. This has been proved once again.

CHP, Turkey’s oldest party, will never win any general election in Turkey if it does not face its chronic problem that of lacking self-criticism.

By not understanding Turkish voter dynamics and their preferences, it’s useless to count on foreign media support that build on baseless populism. But it seems that in the upcoming days the CHP will face a power struggle in order to elect a new party leader. By this, it’s typical for the CHP, that a person, who lost nine elections within eight years, still insist on the party’s chairmanship while commenting on the party’s presidential partial successful candidate Ince by saying that the voter turnout for him had been “below expectations.”

Turkey has entered a new era with a new system of government. It would not be wrong to state that the main objective of the opposition parties, which was to block Erdogan from winning in the first round and to cause a “divided government” between the legislative and executive branches ultimately ended in a fiasco.

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.

During his years in office as Prime Minister, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed his determination to resolve the Kurdish question at the cost of his political life. Considering the terror group PKK, which has been operating for the past 30 years and is condemned by all the political parties in Turkey, it was still hard to publicly suggest a solution on the subject back then. Firstly, 13 years ago, Erdogan delivered a speech in Diyarbakır province: “It is improper for major countries to condone the past mistakes since the problems are all ours. To be more specific, the Kurdish question is not a problem confronted by a certain part of the nation, but a problem that interests the entire nation, including myself.” In 2009, he said: “Whether you call it the Kurdish question, Southeast question or East question… No matter how we call it, we have initiated working on the question.”

With this, Erdogan embarked on the most venturous peace project in the history of the Turkish Republic, which is widely known as the Reconciliation Process. He kicked off works to negotiate with the outlawed PKK through their imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan, who was until then described as a “baby killer” by media outlets, the judiciary and the political parties that were dominated by the secular Kemalist tradition.

The Kurdish question was discussed thoroughly throughout the process, and every single taboo was faced. Introducing amnesty and building a new Turkey was being mentioned. A Committee of Wise People, which encompassed people from all segments and ideologies including nationalists, liberals, religious conservatives and seculars was formed. The Committee strived to explain the west and the east of the country to each other and convince people to the reconciliation process. Even the bases of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), who have recently formed an alliance ahead of the June 24 elections, listened to the suggestions. As the process went on, people stopped hiding their Kurdish identity and embraced it. Kurdish lessons were introduced in schools, and Kurdish political propaganda was allowed. In Nowruz celebrations that year, Ocalan, previously called a “baby killer,” addressed entire Turkey. All these developments were unimaginable for Turkey until then.

Everyone showed great enthusiasm to the process, but the first signs of the major problems in the process appeared during early 2015. After the general election held on June 7, 2015, PKK attacks abruptly gained speed with the influence of the new developments in Syria. In a short period, the reconciliation process was replaced by the ditches dug in cities and town centers, clashes and curfews. During this period, Turkey was simultaneously confronted with Daesh and PKK attacks. After a year, the military coup attempt organized by the Gulenist Terror Group (FETO) became the last straw for the Turkish nation.

Turkey faced a new fact particularly in the aftermath of the 2015 election: the ditches. Although the ditches were occasionally seen in several places before the election, the PKK systematically began digging ditches in many city and town centers following the election with the support of FETO operatives who infiltrated key state apparatuses and bureaucracy.

During the November 1 election held in the midst of this chaos, the pro-PKK Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP) vote share declined and thus the party lost 21 of its 80 deputies assigned to the Parliament with the June 7 elections. The AK Party again came to power alone and the new government was eventually formed. Instead of the reconciliation process, the new government prioritized enabling public security. Stating that they regarded the ditches as a defense mechanism, HDP co-chairs expressed autonomy discussions in the shadow of terrorism.

In 2016, a bomb attack was organized to a military shuttle in Ankara that carried both military and civilian officers. 29 people were killed in the attack while dozens were injured. The PKK’s break-away faction, namely the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), claimed responsibility for the attack.

During the ditch terror they inflicted, half of the population in Sırnak’s Cizre and Silopi districts, Diyarbakir’s Sur district and Mardin’s Nusaybin district were directly affected by the incidents. The number of people migrating from the four districts reached 93,000. The people were so enraged that Murat Karayilan, a senior PKK figure, had to express that the ditch strategy in the cities was wrong.

Turkey will go to the polls on Sunday. Currently, the counter-terror efforts are ongoing both inside and outside the country. When it comes to how the HDP views the ditches after all the incidents, the party co-chair Pervin Buldan and the party’s presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas gave the following answers with regard to the ditches that led to hundreds of casualties and displaced thousands of people: Buldan claimed, “People dug ditches in self-defense,” whereas Demirtas stated, “I do not have issued a single remark that shows support to the ditches. We should have been more insistent and courageous in our attempts to get rid of them.” (Demirtas issued a written answer as he is currently under arrest.)

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.

Despite the fact that it has been put on the back burner after the failure of the Arab Spring, the debate on alternative models of political order within the Islamic world still keeps its vivacity. These models are usually tended to be categorized with reference to their legitimacy base. And it constitutes the crux of political struggles within the Islamic world.

While the Iranian model is based on Shiite sectarianism, the Saudi model offers Sunni sectarianism or Wahhabism as its legitimacy base. Similarly, the Egyptian model wields secular Arab nationalism as its legitimacy base whereas the Turkish model rests on Islamic civilization.

These varieties of legitimacy base embody divergent political realities with national, regional and international dimensions. Iran, for instance, assumes a political community of the Shiites within its national boundaries, while it strives to structure its region on the basis of polarization between the Shiites and the rest and an international order which is grounded on the antagonism between the Islamic world led by the Shiites and the imperial West.

The Saudi case, on the other hand, embraces a political community of the Sunnis within its national borders whereas it seeks a regional order shaped around the polarity of the Sunnis and the Shiites or traditional monarchical forces and the reformists and an international order that underlines the hegemony of the West.

The Egyptian model puts forwards a political community of secular-nationalism within its national sphere especially after the coup in July 2013. This is accompanied by a regional order that rests on the polarity of traditional authoritarian political forces and their democratic enemies. Like the Saudis, this leads Egypt to team up with Israel and the Emirates and gives an unconditional backing to Western hegemony in international politics.

The Turkish model, offered by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) after 2002, presents a political community of Muslims and non-Muslim peoples in a post-nation-state framework, which is in a way reminiscent of the Ottoman “millet” system. This post-nationalist politics, therefore, puts an enormous pressure on both the Turkish nation-state and the Westphalian order in the Middle East and challenges sectarian frameworks as well. This reformist ethos also echoes on the international level by suggesting an idea of a equal and multi-civilizational world order.

Indeed, the Turkish model trumps the other models not only with its inclusiveness but also its conformity with democratic politics. Despite their vast ideological differences and a high degree of animosity towards each other, the other models share a common ground in their denial of democratic politics. These authoritarian models equate or rather reduce politics to the state and the state is identified with a particular group or political force: The Mullahs in Iran, the royal family in Saudi Arabia and the military in Egypt. Hence, there does not exist an independent sphere of politics where the plurality of political groups and societal forces encounter each other.

The Turkish model posits a democratic option. Turkey’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy has taken place in three steps. First of all, in 1950 with the introduction of multi-party politics, the state lost its monopoly over politics. Politics finally gained its independence to an extent. Power began to be shared by the bureaucrats and the representatives of the people, that is the politicians.

The second step in democratization was the enlargement of the sphere of politics at the expense of state bureaucracy. The AK Party’s first period of rule, encompassing the years from 2002 to 2010, testified the roll back of the bureaucratic tutelage after the EU reforms and constitutional referendums of 2007 and 2010. After all, the relative share of politics in power has increased dramatically.

The third step in democratization involves constructing a new institutional framework that puts the nation’s will at the center of politics and guarantees the supremacy of politics over other sectors or power centers. Turkey’s gradual switch to a presidential system started with the 2007 referendum, reached a level of maturity with the election of Erdogan to the presidential post in 2014, became the institutional structure of the country on the paper after the April 16 referendum (2017), and is now waiting to be the institutional framework in practice after the June 24 elections. The June 24 elections, therefore, is important with regards to the fact that it will complete this final round of democratization in Turkey.

Selahattin Demirtas, the jailed ex-coleader of the HDP, gave his first speech on the national public broadcaster of Turkey on Sunday (for the text of the speech, see the link). He will give his second speech on Saturday but I believe his first speech gave enough material for some content analysis. While the speech is powerful to deliver its message to those who already support Demirtas, it was also not surprising for those who are critical of him.

Demirtas began his speech by questioning the rationale and fairness of his imprisonment, which is natural for anybody who is waiting to hear their sentence in prison. Nevertheless, it does not sound so strange to those who remember his brother Nurettin Demirtas. Nurettin Demirtas was a former leader of the very same political wing. He was also arrested and kept in prison for some time. Once released, Nurettin Demirtas fled to Iraq. He, more or less, kept his position in the movement but this time on the military wing – the PKK. He recently asked for votes for the political wing, the HDP while not bothering to change his “guerilla” uniform with a suit. In my opinion, Selahattin Demirtas would not flee in case of release but his brother’s escape in the very same situation might let many to think that the brothers might meet in the Qandil region where the PKK headquarters are located. Anyhow, what makes Demirtas’s Sunday speech more interesting and unfortunately sad for me is something else.

For a person who has a chance to show that he has no intention to support a terror organization, Demirtas picked the very wrong people as his references. Among the 15 people Demirtas cited on Sunday, one –Seyh Bedrettin- started an armed rebellion against the Ottomans in the 15^th century. Another figure we heard in the speech was a semi-mystical hero, Koroglu, who rebelled against the governor of Bolu. To be fair, the Koroglu legend has a nation-wide popularity in Turkey. Nevertheless, I cannot stop but question why Demirtas kept picking the armed men to prove that he is totally peaceful and has nothing to do with violence.

Anyhow, next on the list is Sheikh Said. Demirtas paid his respect to Said in his speech but who is Said? He is the most prominent Kurdish rebellion leader of the early republican era. Said was executed once his rebellion failed but his rebellion shed the blood of many Turkish security forces, sounds familiar, huh? The next man is Seyit Rıza, a leader of another rebellion in the early republican era. He also rebelled and failed, killed and got killed. The next in the list is a trio. Deniz, Huseyin and Yusuf. They were armed, attempted to start a revolutionary guerrilla warfare against the Turkish state, were captured and executed in 1972. The next person Demirtas cited was the most troublesome for me. Mahir Cayan, another leader of a radical leftist organization, is also a documented killer who -not surprisingly- died in combat with Turkish security forces in rural Tokat.

Perhaps, the most ironic part of Demirtas’s speech was the “Yilmaz in prison” part. Yilmaz Guney was a famous actor and director. But, for God’s sake, this guy injured a man and killed another. What makes this comparison more tragic is Yilmaz Guney fled the country. Didn’t anyone tell Demirtas that his comparison of himself with Yilmaz Guney may not be a smart idea. What did Demirtas think by glorifying a man who killed a man and ran away as a fugitive?

To be fair, Demirtas also paid tribute to some unarmed men: a singer, a couple sufi slash poets, a couple prophets, and the prophet Mohammed’s grandson. Yet, nine armed men against these six is not a good ratio in a speech delivered to make one point clear: I am a man of peace. Here is my call for Demirtas. Next time you want to make it clear that you should not be in jail for alleged linkages to the PKK, do not salute the people who started armed campaigns against the state.

On 24 June, Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections will be held. Subsequent to the declaration of the date of the snap elections, on 18 April, political parties in Turkey started their campaigns and published their election programs. The upcoming elections represent a final switch to Turkey’s new system of government which was accepted by a referendum on 16 April last year. The elections to take place in the next four days are also the first elections in Turkish history according to which both elections are executed simultaneously.

To get a clear perception of the recent election period, I’ll try to point out some crucial issues.

First of all, even though Western media outlets do not address this issue, the presidential elections are conducted in a diversified political atmosphere. There are six presidential candidates representing different political and societal expectations striving for the country’s highest political position. This is actually a diversity covering most of Turkey’s dominant political camps. In addition, ten political parties are participating in the parliamentary elections. The very interesting issue during this election period is the fact that at least six parties will definitely be in the parliament subsequent to the elections due to the new law on election alliances. According to this law, which was approved by a majority vote led by the ruling AK Party and the MHP in March 2018, the country’s 10 percent electoral threshold will still be in place but it will apply to the sum of the votes of the parties in the alliance. Thus, the number of MPs will be determined according to the sum of the votes of the election alliance. Interestingly, this issue which gives the possibility also to small political parties to join the parliament, is not addressed by foreign media due to the fact that this step has been initiated by the AK Party and MHP.

Furthermore, apart from President Erdogan and his party’s campaign, one has noticed that among the opposition only the CHP’s presidential candidate, Muharrem Ince, was able to make some striking statements. President Erdogan, for instance, while conducting his campaign, stressed the need for a strong executive and legislative organ in the upcoming period. Thus, he asked the people to vote for him as well as his AK Party in parliament. On the other hand, Ince insisted on an election campaign which differentiated itself from previous CHP discourses and biases. By this, Ince tried to portray himself within a rather conservative Muslim circles-friendly and pro-HDP image, which, however, totally contradicts the CHP’s traditional positions. It’s also fascinating that while Ince has been appointed as the party’s presidential candidate, CHP Chairman Kemal Kilicdaroglu excluded all MP candidates, who are known to be close to Mr. Ince, with regard to the upcoming parliamentary elections. This image actually displayed who has the control of the party and who has concrete and real expectations from the election results.

By focusing on the other parties presidential candidates and their campaigns, its seems that no candidate was able to neither determine nor influence the political discourse during the recent two months. For instance, the MHP-split Iyi Party’s leader Meral Aksener, who runs as the Iyi Party’s presidential candidate, had no concrete proposal for Turkey’s future despite rather populist statements. For Mrs. Aksener, it’s also very frustrating due to the fact that President Erdogan did not address her once during the entire election campaign. To be honest, it cannot be said that there is public support regarding the Iyi Party even though Western politicians supported her as well.

The Kurdish left ethno-nationalist HDP’s presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas and his party HDP, though, are extraordinarily supported by foreign media and even foreign political circles. By taking the HDP’s propaganda into consideration, the misleading conclusion above all in Western circles occurs, such as the false portrayal of the party as a quite liberal-leftist party that allegedly prioritizes human rights etc. By this, the party’s actual closeness and even links to the PKK terrorist organization is disregarded by foreign media and HDP supporters. For instance, it’s even ironical that the HDP’s presidential candidate, Selahattin Demirtas, was publicly supported by his brother Nurettin Demirtas, who lives as a PKK-terrorist in Iraq’s Qandil mountains. Of course, besides various statements and positions which do support the PKK, this fact has also been disregarded by HDP supporters and Western media.

Other performances of presidential candidates, such as the Felicity Party’s Chairman Temel Karamollaoglu and the Patriotic Party’s Chairman Dogu Perincek, have been also very low. Neither certain statements of these leaders were seriously taken into account by other leaders nor their election programs seem to persuade and do excite the electorate.

Thus, it’s quite obvious that the AK Party dominates the election campaign while the CHP seems to be divided into two parts. On the one hand, Muharrem Ince is trying to win the presidential election while Kilicdaroglu sets a focus on the parliamentary election and a potential inner-party rivalry subsequent to the elections. On the other hand, it’s striking that Ince makes use of populism by not explaining several promises in depth. For instance, Ince declares that he has no problem with women who wear headscarves while he does not explain his previous and well-known anti-positions just some years ago. The same counts for his populist statements with regard to HDP voters.

The AK Party stresses the new Turkish presidential system in the upcoming period while the CHP –and all other opposition parties except the MHP– do not explain how they schedule to switch back to a parliamentary system. This issue gets even more complex when Ince states that he wants to lead the country as an executive president while Mrs. Aksener calls for a rapid future plan. Finally, it’s also very bizarre that the dominant opposition parties do not address Turkey’s fight against terrorist organizations such as the PKK, FETO  in depth – neither in the candidates’ nor the parties’ program.

Turkey is going to the polls this weekend to decide the presidential and parliamentary elections on the same day – a first in the country’s history. The elections will complete the transition into the presidential system that was decided by last year’s referendum in April 2017. Over the course of the past year, some aspects of the referendum have already been implemented and adaptation legislation has passed. The stakes are high as the president and the parliament will be decided by the Turkish public for the next five years and the presidential system will be fully implemented during that time. 

The very rationale for the change in the system was to never go back to the weak and unstable coalition governments the parliamentary systems tend to produce. The 1990s produced many weak coalition governments often under the shadow of the tutelary system maintained by the military and civilian bureaucracy. The AK Party governments brought stability in the 2000s but were continuously challenged by these forces. The 2007 presidential elections and the 2008 closure case against the AK Party are examples of this.

The AK Party’s electoral victories ensured the primacy of the elected governments against the appointed but the system continued to be a holdover from a foregone era. Once the various initiatives for a comprehensive constitutional change failed because of political reasons, the partial amendments to the constitution were made. The latest yet the most critical one of these amendments is the transition to the presidential system, approved in last year’s referendum.  

In addition to the domestic drivers of the change to the presidential system, Turkey’s foreign policy challenges and its immediate neighborhood contributed to the country’s search for more stability. The Arab Spring produced the most challenging humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, resulting in more than 3,5 million refugees for Turkey. Turkey’s border security was challenged in addition to the increased threats posed by Daesh and the PKK as a result of the Syrian Civil War. Instability in Iraq and the confrontation between the U.S. and Iran over the nuclear issue are only some of the examples of an increasingly unstable environment.

The liberal international order has been challenged by the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia in the Middle East and in Europe, and the Brexit, a product of the populist movements throughout the West, including the U.S. Turkey has had to face security, foreign policy, and economic challenges in its immediate neighborhood as well as those emanating from the unpredictability of the international system. Moreover, in an era when the U.S. has refused or been unable to provide leadership, the Western alliance has found itself increasingly fractured, unable to forge comprehensive policy solutions to a variety of challenges.

Committing to and aligning itself with an international bloc to resolve its international and domestic challenges were no longer an option for Turkey. Diversifying its relationships and compartmentalizing issues with various powers became a necessary practice to navigate an uncertain international environment. At home, the political system continued to be rife with challenges emanating from the lack of a truly civilian constitution and a system that is based on the will of the people. The need for a civilian constitution and a truly democratic system devoid of the institutional tutelage has been the central political debate of the past several decades. The official transition to the presidential system this weekend signifies a critical turning point in that effort.

Any system change would need time to be implemented and to mature over time through challenges and political crises and Turkey is no exception. It is easy to get caught up about who is going to win and what the parliamentary seat distribution is going to look like. However, it needs to be remembered that the June 24 elections are part of Turkey’s quest for domestic stability in an increasingly uncertain international environment. 

One of the most debated issues throughout the 24 June parliamentary and presidential elections in Turkey is about the results of election surveys conducted by different companies. Every week, different companies continue to announce the results of their surveys to the public. Nonetheless, even if their results are clearly examined, it is difficult to follow voter preferences via these surveys. Each company forecasts totally different results and people trying to follow the elections get confused because of discrepancies in them. Thus, it is important to ask some crucial questions to understand whether these differences arising from survey design, methodology, or sample selections and whether they reflect voter preferences in Turkey.

In Turkey, there are multiple companies conducting election surveys via different methods. Nonetheless, most of the companies chose using structured surveys rather than in-depth or semi-structured interviews. Due to the fact that structured surveys require a bigger sample to represent a real-world situation, surveys are conducted with at least 1000 people in accordance with the general tendency seen in different examples throughout the world. Nevertheless, it is obvious that most companies in Turkey face with the sampling error in their surveys related to their sample selection technique. The biggest problem is related to their random sample selection technique – which arises from the fact that they conduct their surveys with less than 5 thousand participants, which then creates a selection bias. Successful examples from the world show that random sample selections can be successful only if they are conducted with a significant sample size. When Turkey’s population, approximately 80 million, is considered, it is difficult to say that these results can reflect an approximate value. It should be reminded that selection bias problem was one of the reasons that led to the failure of U.S. survey companies during the 2016 presidential elections.

Another reason of discrepancies in results is the reliability and validity problem in surveys. Most companies do not clearly reflect their research design and formation of questionnaire to show possible biases in their results. Companies publish their results without underlining methods and techniques used in the research. Additionally, none of these companies release raw data and enable researchers to analyze possible biases and deviations from the real-world situation. However, it is one of the ethical duties of research companies to provide public access to their raw data. Additionally, it is also important to see whether the participants in surveys are exposed to directive questions, which also creates biased results. This issue is important in order to see validity of survey results.

There is another factor that should be paid attention to measure the reliability of survey results in reflecting voter preferences in Turkey. Almost none of the most experienced survey companies publicly announced the results of their surveys about the June 24 elections. Only some of the recently established small-scale companies represented their results to the public. Even if some people make speculations on the reasons of these companies not representing any results, it can be clearly understood when difficulties in conducting a large-scale survey in this busy election calendar are taken into consideration.

Overall, it is hardly easy to say that election surveys represent a real-world situation in regards to the upcoming elections in Turkey. Especially after their failure in the latest presidential elections in the U.S., the companies re-reviewed their research design and sample selection techniques and started to use more scientific methods to prevent uncertainty and inaccuracy in their results. Thus, these factors and biases arising from research design should be taken into consideration by Turkish survey companies in order to gather more reliable data from the field. This renovation can help us to understand reflections on voter preferences in the field.

Since the onset of the global economic crisis political, economic and technological competition among the global and emerging powers acquired increased pace and tenacity. While the U.S., Russia and China experience geo-political tensions with increasing frequency and face the possibility of direct confrontation beyond proxy-wars; liberal economics and free trade approaches rapidly lose their proponents in the world economy.

The political backing behind the liberal international trading system represented by institutions such as the World Trade Organization is fading, while neo-protectionism gains ground along with rising economic nationalism. Triggered by the Trump administration in the U.S. and the rising tide of nationalist/neo-populist parties in Europe and elsewhere, trade wars, currency wars, cyber-space wars, economic sanctions and accusations of technological theft are also increasing.

A fierce conflict for sustained global economic hegemony, or to use Organski’s words, to prevent a “power transition,” openly takes place between the U.S. and China. All these developments constitute crucial challenges for the political and economic authorities of emerging powers and developing countries. There is an ever-increasing pressure on decision-making communities in these countries to monitor global developments closely and formulate effective and timely responses.

Managing the Turkish economy under presidential system

Turkey is heading for a systemic transformation towards the “Presidential Government System” under such difficult global conditions. But it is exactly these difficult conditions that make Turkey’s systemic transition more important and inevitable. As such, the systemic reform that will take place in Turkey following the June 24 elections shall be conceptualized not only as a legal and political reform that will restructure the separation of powers among the executive, judiciary and the legislative branches of the government. On the contrary, it should be construed as a structural reform that would transform the macroeconomic governance architecture and socio-economic development strategy with comprehensive institutional changes.

While embarking on major institutional reform in macroeconomic governance, there are several common features that need to be taken into account from the successful development experiences across the globe:

1. Strong political leadership that supports politico-economic stability and the autonomy of key institutions formulating long-term development policies with a clear division of labor.
2. A highly qualified, professional, meritocratic, practical, fast-acting, problem-solving bureaucracy controlled by “pilot organizations” with strong channels of communication with political and economic actors.
3. A dynamic, open-minded and innovative private sector that shares common interest with the politico-bureaucratic elite as to the long-term development goals of the country and focuses on vibrant sectorial competition strategies with a global view.
4. A dynamic social structure that allows vertical mobilization through a high-quality education system, participatory institutions and structured collaboration among political, bureaucratic and market actors.

Therefore, Turkey’s initiative for institutional reform shall proceed in a way to enable smooth progress on all these accounts. When we look at the historical record of previous AK Party governments for institutional reform, it is clear that significant reforms were made to institutionalize a “regulatory state” in the first decade of the 2000s. Consequently, fiscal discipline was permanently established and the financial structure became resilient against severe international shocks.

Several institutional reforms in line with the “Post-Washington Consensus” style of prudent financial and macroeconomic regulation were successfully accomplished. Instrumental independence of the Central Bank to conduct monetary policy and autonomy of key regulatory agencies responsible for the supervision of regulation of finance, capital markets and other services were secured. This robust regulatory framework was extremely effective in constraining the negative repercussions of the global economic crisis on Turkey.

But there was one major structural problem with the overall macroeconomic management approach in that it favored the inflow of international funds to sponsor the booming construction, finance and service industries; rather than industrial production and technological know-how.

Over the course of the years following the global economic crisis Turkey tried to realize a paradigmatic transition to a more production and real economy oriented growth model with no avail. In order to precipitate a transition to a more industry-technology and export oriented growth strategy various inventories and reports were prepared, sectorial goals were determined and subsidies were released. Yet the path dependency, which remained from Turkey’s stabilization program during the early 2000s with an emphasis on fiscal discipline and the service sector, could not be broken.

Social and political volatilities from the Gezi Park protests in 2013 to the failed coup on 15 July 2016 also exerted a negative impact on the projected strategic transition. As did the hesitant attitude of the AK Party leadership on taking a leading role for industrial-technological upgrading through public-private partnership schemes since these were seen contrary to the principles of economic liberalism.

When we came to 2018, the global atmosphere concerning strategic public involvement in key industries and neo-protectionism are globally accepted practices and there is a relative sea change in terms of the public-private balances in macroeconomic management. Therefore, the political leadership in Turkey has more leeway to exert strategic activism when it comes to achieving prioritized sectorial growth objectives.

Restructuring macroeconomic management

In order to follow global developments leading to the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, Turkey needs to radically restructure both the philosophy and institutional manifestations of macroeconomic management in order to keep up with the pace of ever-fastening global competition among global and emerging powers.

Concretely speaking, the following institutional changes could be made in the existing macroeconomic governance architecture:

1. The basic law of the Central Bank could be altered to establish a dual role for the Bank focusing on price stability (inflation control) and employment (growth) as in the case American FED and several other major central banks. This will transform the current standing of the Central Bank from a purely financial management organ to a pilot institution trying to balance price and financial stability with growth and employment objectives in the real economy.
2. The current ministerial portfolio responsible for the management of macroeconomic areas is excessively dispersed. Several ministries could be merged and some of them could be made leaner in order to increase their efficiency.
3. In this context, the current Economy Ministry, Science-Industry and Technology Ministry, and Development Ministry could be merged together to form an “Industry, Trade and Development Ministry.” This ministry could play the role of a coordinating ministry such as Japan’s METI holding the pulse of the real economy and productive sectors.
4. The fiscal and financial branches of the ministerial-bureaucratic network such as the Ministry of Finance and Treasury could be brought under the roof of a “Ministry of Finance and Treasury” so that financing development and budget management could be properly coordinated.
5. A new “Ministry for Science, Higher Education and Information” could be formed to better manage science policy in close coordination with universities and institutions responsible for high-tech infrastructure.
6. An autonomous agency that brings together academics, experts, bureaucrats and key stakeholders from civil society could be formed to monitor the institutional reform process and conduct objective impact analysis such as India’s NITI or Malaysia’s PEMANDU.
7. Sector-specific incentive schemes could be prepared to boost research and development for scientific agriculture, nanotechnology, biotechnology, optics, lasers, rocket science, high-tech materials such as carbon-fiber and renewable energy technologies. Autonomous sectorial monitoring commissions could be formed within the Office of the Presidency to follow up the efficiency of these schemes.
8. Advisory positions within the Office of the Presidency could be organized into more institutionalized offices in order to allow sectorial offices for modernization of agriculture, manufacturing industry, R&D financing, entrepreneurship, export promotion and so on.
9. These presidential offices could follow up both policy formulation and implementation processes in order to solve jurisdiction problems among different ministries and assess the efficiency of devised policies, allowing policy adaptation.

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 is currently under a severe financial attack. It is quite apparent that Turkey’s macroeconomic indicators are quite healthy, and it is not possible to explain the current situation “economically”.

Attracting foreign investors relies on two main factors: the country’s economic vitality and debt ratio. Naturally, investors want to invest in countries in which they can profit handsomely. At this point, economic vitality comes into play. A country with a high growth rate has a significant potential in terms of investments as it offers high profits for firms. On the other hand, investors expect the country they are lending money to have the capacity to pay off her debts. In this respect, if a country’s debt ratio rises, its capacity to pay off her debts will decline, causing investors to withdraw their investments.

We see that Turkey has a good performance in both of these aspects. First, Turkish long-term annual economic growth rate averages out 4.8%. Moreover, despite the July 15 coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish economy grew 7.4% in the following year, showing an impressive performance and clearly demonstrating her resilience. Hence, Turkish economy is quite vital and naturally attracts investors.

Second, Turkish public debt-to-GDP ratio is around 28.5%, which places Turkey among countries with the least debt load and this ratio is much higher for most of the countries in the world. For example, France’s ratio is 97% while the U.S. and Japan hover around 105% and 253% respectively. On the other hand, Turkey’s budget deficit-to-GDP ratio is approximately 1.5%, despite being in an election year. This ratio is significantly lower than the Maastricht criterion, which is 3%. The same ratio is 2.8% for France and 2.9% for the U.K.

Lastly, Turkish external debt-to-GDP ratio is 53%. When compared to other countries such as Germany (141%), Spain (167%) and France (213%), it becomes apparent that Turkey has a very low level of external debt-to-GDP ratio.

On the other hand, like all economies, the Turkish economy has its own problems. The biggest problem for Turkey for the last two decades is her relatively high current account deficits. However, Turkey has learnt to live with this problem as she has tried to overcome it. Moreover, Turkey’s current account deficit is considerably lower right now than previous years.

When all of these factors taken into consideration, it is clear that the steep rise in the TL/Dollar exchange rate does not have an economic explanation. Not to mention that the abrupt increase in the exchange rate would require an “equally abrupt” economic cause. We know that there is none. So we are left with politics. The only viable and “abrupt” explanation left is the “surprise” snap elections, which will be held on June 24.

So, how should Turkey respond to this severe financial attack? First, it is wrong to see policy interest rate as almost the sole monetary policy tool, as assumed widely now.  The Argentinian experience is illuminating in this respect. After Argentine Peso lost 15% of her value last month while inflation was around 25%, the Central Bank of Argentina altered the interest rate three times within a week, increasing it from 27.25% to 40%. So, what happened in the end? Argentine Peso lost another 15% of its value.

The Turkish Central Bank (TCMB) increased the de facto interest rate by 300 base points, from 13.5% to 16.5%, on May 23 in order to address the financial attack, resulting in a further tightening in monetary policy and making Turkey an outlier among emerging countries in terms of real interest rate. After the steep rate hike, TL/Dollar exchange rate decreased from 4.80s to 4.40s gradually, only to increase 4.60s again swiftly with no apparent “economic” reason.

To address this “mindless” financial attack, respective ministries, such as the Ministry of Economy, along with the TCMB should establish communication channels with citizens and try to relieve their concerns. On the other hand, both the government and TCMB ought to establish good relations with financial circles that are only economically-motivated. Achieving these, Turkey will be able to weather these financial attacks. At this point, Turkey has an important leverage: the current level of the TL/Dollar exchange rate renders Turkey a tremendously attractive country for investment.

Lastly, it should be noted that TL/Dollar exchange rate will sooner or later return to normal levels, particularly after the snap elections. The Turkish state and the TCMB’s strong communications with both Turkish citizens and financial circles that are “economically motivated” would ease up this process.