Editorial The Guardian, 09.06.2015
The challenge now is for a fractured society to make multiparty politics work.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was riding for a fall, and has duly fallen. His Justice and Development party (AKP) failed to gain even a simple majority in general elections at the weekend, let alone the super-majority he wanted in order to immediately transform the Turkish political system by introducing an executive presidency. Mr Erdoğan remains president and the AKP the single largest party. Yet Turkish voters have effectively torpedoed the grand project through which Mr Erdoğan had hoped to extend his hold on the country into the far future. In theory, Mr Erdoğan could still obtain the constitutional changes he wants, via a referendum, but that seems highly unlikely. An early return to the polls might improve the party’s parliamentary position, but the momentum that enabled it to dominate Turkish politics for so long has finally been halted.
What happens now? The short answer is that everyone is going to have to reinvent themselves in a hurry. Turkey has turned away from what was in danger of becoming a permanent condition of one-party rule. It is now back to true multiparty politics, which is to be welcomed, but at which, as the AKP rightly warned during the campaign, it has not in the past been very good. Whether Mr Erdoğan and his party should now formally drop the executive presidency proposals should be top of the list for internal party discussion. The second item should be whether to invite the rightwing National Movement party (MHP) party into coalition. They would be wise to do the first, and unwise to do the second.
The second rank of AKP leaders, including Ahmet Davutoğlu, the current prime minister, will face the double challenge of coping with a weakened and probably bellicose leader in the presidential palace and with an emboldened opposition in parliament. The Kurdish HDP, in the assembly for the first time as a party rather than as a scattering of “independent” MPs, will have to balance its pursuit of Kurdish objectives with a new national role. The main opposition party, the Republican People’s party (CHP), will have to reflect on its recent shifts of strategy. All, or most, of the opposition parties will have to establish whether they can work together.
Why did the AKP suffer a reverse more severe than many, including the Guardian, had expected? At one level this is the story of a politician who began by getting almost everything right and ended by getting almost everything wrong. Mr Erdoğan initially cut through the polarised politics of his country by shrewdly lifting attractive policies from every political quarter. But, over time, what looked like the creation of a society blending moderate Islamic and secular elements began to look more like a drive to destroy or co-opt all alternative centres of power. The urban young, in particular, grew more and more resentful of the patriarchal and bullying style of such government. A slowing of economic growth did not help either, since that had been such a big card in the AKP hand. Even the search for peace with the Kurds seemed to be part of the same pattern of trying to weaken opponents prior to co-opting them, as the government twisted and turned to prevent the emergence of a Kurdish entity in northern Syria – refusing for weeks, for example, to allow help for the defenders of Kobane to get through to the besieged city just across the border with Turkey.
If so, the Kurds have had their revenge. The HDP took the risky decision to campaign nationally on a broad platform, to make women’s rights and gay rights integral parts of the platform, and to field many female candidates. That enabled it to leap over the 10% threshold for entry into parliament as a party – a threshold expressly designed, during Turkey’s military rule, to prevent just such an outcome – and was the single most important factor in the election result. Had it failed to get over the threshold, Turkey’s electoral system would have handed its seats to the AKP and other parties.
The “new Turkey” of the young and the minorities – ethnic, religious and sexual – responded enthusiastically. The danger of one-party rule has dramatically faded. But the difficulties of multiparty politics in a very fractured society must now be negotiated by leaders upon whose shoulders much responsibility has just descended.
