A soft revolution in Turkey

Politicians are good at making wishes but electorates can be capricious in granting them, as the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan learnt the hard way on June 7. That was the day Turkey held a general election, and Erdogan went to cast vote, confident that at the end of the day he would find that he would be mandated anew; to reform the Turkish constitution, to introduce a presidential rule, to extend his own powers. He went into the election as the most successful politician in the recent history of Turkey, having had three terms as prime minister with an absolute majority. To cap that he became the first democratically-elected president garnering more than half of the popular vote — but it all went horribly wrong for a man who believed that wrong couldn’t happen to him.

The wished-for majority did not happen, and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) not only lost its overall majority, it also witnessed, gut-wrenchingly, the minority pro-Kurdish party end up with 13 per cent of the vote, three per cent more than the 10 per cent threshold that they had to clear in order to turn their parliamentary candidates into sitting members. The AKP, with 41 per cent of the vote, retains the largest parliamentary presence, which is insufficient to form a government without coalition. There are now about 40 days in which the AKP has to cobble a working government together. If it does not, then the future is uncertain, with a re-run of the election a stark possibility.

There is something of an irony in the position that Erdogan and his party now find themselves in, as his wounds are self-inflicted. He gambled on bringing the Kurds into the electoral process, widening the democratic footprint and addressing the principal Kurdish demand of parliamentary representation. What he had not included in the calculus was that his was a deeply divisive rule: the country was polarised as never before, the new generation was not palatable to his distinct authoritarianism, and a wide variety of politically incorrect statements on women’s rights were being uttered from his office. Suddenly, the political Left, the young and the liberals had a party to vote for that was fielding a host of women candidates while welcoming supporters who went far beyond the rally-point of Kurdish nationalism. Taken alone, the Kurds may not have made it across the 10 per cent threshold, but with backlash voters ticking the box for the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) it was passed and with room to spare.

It is no understatement to call this a revolution in Turkish politics, and it may represent the first signs that the handbrake is being applied to the rush to the right, as embodied by Erdogan and the AKP. The Big Wish of Erdogan was for what he called ‘the New Turkey’, which was duly handed to him, but not quite in the format he had wished. What the people of Turkey decided was that they did not want an executive presidency — which came as a rather ‘new’ finding for Erdogan. They voted tactically and stopped Erdogan dead in his tracks.

The Parliament is going to look very different. There are now 96 women MPs up from 79, gay candidates won seats for the HDP, and for the first time there are Kurdish MPs, a full 80 of them. They are unlikely to be sitting quietly. Kurds make up one-fifth of the Turkish population and there is much they have to say and do in coming weeks and months. The HDP has broken the mould of ethnic identity politics and Erdogan, the man who always got it right, got it so wrong that he and his party are going to have to rethink every wish they ever had.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 11^th, 2015.

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