Major defeat for Erdogan as Islamist ruling party loses majority

Major defeat for Erdogan as Islamist ruling party loses majority

Published 8 June 2015

 

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was not on the ballot in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, but his ambitious agenda for Turkey was – and he lost big. The losses of his Islamist Justice and Development party, or AKP, were the most significant and painful losses in the party’s 20-year history – and the first losses for Erdogan since he emerged in 2002 to dominate the Turkish political scene. Erdogan openly proclaimed that the goal of AKP in Sunday’s election was to win at least 66 percent of the seats in parliament — the number required to make changes to the Turkish constitution. The AKP now has nearly 50 percent of the seats in parliament, short of the constitution-changing threshold. The Turkish voters, however, soundly rejected Erdogan’s ambitious agenda: Not only did the AKP not win the required majority – the party actually lost power. With 99 percent of the votes counted, the AKP had won 41 percent of the vote, down from the 49 percent it won in the last national election in 2011. It will now have only 258 seats in Turkey’s Parliament, compared with the 327 seats it has in the outgoing parliament. There are regional implications for the Erdogan and AKP loses: On Syria, Libya, and other regional issues, a subdued Erdogan and a tamer AKP may be less of an obstacle to more harmony and greater coordination among the key Sunni states in the Middle East, which is good news for the twin efforts to contain Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions and weaken Iran’s allies, on the one hand, and defeat the nihilistic forces of jihadist Islamist extremism, on the other hand.

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was not on the ballot in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, but his ambitious agenda for Turkey was – and he lost big.
The losses of his Islamist Justice and Development party, or AKP, were the most significant and painful losses in the party’s 20-year history – and the first losses for Erdogan since he emerged in 2002 to dominate the Turkish political scene.
Erdogan openly proclaimed that the goal of AKP in Sunday’s election was to win at least 66 percent of the seats in parliament — the number required to make changes to the Turkish constitution. The AKP now has nearly 50 percent of the seats in parliament, short of the constitution-changing threshold. The AKP thus cannot change the constitution on its own, and it has failed to persuade smaller parties to joint it in this effort.
Hence Erdogan’s call to the Turkish people to give his AKP the 66 percent needed for a unilateral change of the constitution – changes, he said, which would allow him to dismantle the framework of the republic which Kemal Ataturk created nearly 100 years ago.
The Turkish voters, however, soundly rejected Erdogan’s ambitious agenda: Not only did the AKP not win the required majority – the party actually lost power.
With 99 percent of the votes counted, the AKP had won 41 percent of the vote, down from the 49 percent it won in the last national election in 2011. It will now have only 258 seats in Turkey’s Parliament, compared with the 327 seats it has in the outgoing parliament (these numbers may change slightly when all votes are counted). For the ruling AKP to remake the constitution, it would have had to increase the number of its seats in parliament from the current 327 seats to 367 seats. Instead, it will have 258 seats.
The result, with 99 percent of the votes in:

• The AKP, with its 41 percent of the vote
• The traditional opposition, the secular, free-market-oriented Republican People’s party (CHP) with 25 percent
• The right-wing, populist Nationalist Movement party (MHP) with 16.5 percent
• The pro-Kurdish leftist Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP) with a surprising 12.5 percent The disappointing results handed another serious defeat to Erdogan. The AKP not only failed to get the 367 needed to make constitutional changes – the AKP now has only 258 seats, which is short of the 276 seats required to form a majority government. With the 327 seats the AKP won in 2011, it could rule without coalition partners – even though it was not enough for constitutional changes. After Sunday’s elections, the AKP will not be able to rule without coalition partners.
  Putting on a brave face, the AKP prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said that the party was the clear winner in the election and vowed to take all necessary measures to prevent harm to Turkey’s political stability.
  “Everyone should see that the AKP is the winner and leader of these elections,” Davutoglu said in a speech to supporters from the balcony of the AKP headquarters in Ankara. “No one should try to build a victory from an election they lost.”
  The New York Times notes that Erdoğan was not on the ballot, but for all intents and purposes the election was a referendum on whether to give his office extraordinary powers, and give his AKP a two-thirds majority in parliament, which would prolong his tenure as the country’s most powerful politician and allow him to remake the Ataturk republic.
  “The outcome is an end to Erdogan’s presidential ambitions,” Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkey and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Times.
  If the significant losses of the AKP and the rejection of Erdogan’s agenda were the most important take-away from the election, the second important news was the ability of several Kurdish groups to unite under the banner of the HDP and cross the 10 percent threshold, which a party must cross in order to have seats in parliament.
  Erdogan not only campaigned vigorously against Kurdish presence in Parliament – but in the run-up to the elections, more than seventy HDP offices were attacked and sacked – the last two on Friday – in an effort by Erdogan supporters to intimidate and suppress the pro-Kurdish vote.
  “This is the end of identity politics in Turkey,” Gencer Özcan, professor for international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul, told the Guardian. “The election threshold is not the only barrier that was overcome tonight in the elections, but also emotional and identity barriers have been breached.”
  “This is a golden opportunity for the HDP,” said Özcan. “Voters in Turkey endorse democracy in Turkey across identity boundaries.”
  In a clever move to expand its appeal beyond Turkey’s roughly 20 percent Kurdish population, the HDP ran on a platform defending the rights not only of ethnic minorities like the Kurds, but also of women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. The party’s expanded platform made it appealing to younger and more educated voters in Istanbul and in the suburbs of Ankara.
  Election returns show that the HDP succeeded in wooing center-left and secular voters disillusioned with Erdoğan. “The reason the HDP has won this many votes is because it has not excluded any members of this country, unlike our current rulers,” 25-year-old Siar Senci told the Guardian. “It has embraced all languages, all ethnicities and members of all faiths and promised them freedom.”
  The traditional opposition party, the secularist Republican People’s party (CHP), will be the second largest group in parliament, with 25 percent of the vote.
  The right-wing, populist Nationalist Movement party (MHP), seen as the AKP’s most likely partner if it tried to form a coalition government – both parties share an antipathy toward the Kurds and the EU, a reluctance to withdraw Turkish forces from north-east Cyprus, and suspicion of free markets and globalization – took 16.5 percent of the vote. The MHP’s deputy chairman, Oktay Vural, said on Sunday it was too early to talk about forming a coalition government with the AKP.
  “It would be wrong for me to make an assessment about a coalition, our party will assess that in the coming period. I think the AKP party will be making its own new evaluations after this outcome,” Vural said.
  Regional implications
  Erdogan aspired for Turkey to have a leading role in the Middle East and in the Islamic world. His ambition led him to try and differentiated Turkey from countries in the region even when Turkey shared these countries’ goals.
  Thus, while Turkey shared with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt, and Jordan the goal of removing Bashar-al-Assad from power, it allowed thousands of foreign fighters to pass through Turkey to join ISIS. The reason: ISIS was willing to fight not only the Assad forces, but also the Kurds in Syria, Kurds who historically supported to pro-independence sentiments among Turkish Kurds. ISIS was also willing to fight the moderate Syrian rebels supported by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt, thus weakening the influence of these countries in post-Assad Syria by weakening their proxies there.
  Turkey’s unwillingness to stem the flow of foreign fighters to ISIS also strained its relations with fellow NATO members.
  Since January, after two and half years of friction and acrimony, the main supporters of non-ISIS anti Assad rebels – Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States – have finally put their differences aside, and are now united behind supporting the moderate, non-ISIS anti-Assad rebels. The rebel groups themselves show a greater degree of cooperation and coordination, which – together with supplies of new weapon systems like anti-tank TOW missiles – have changed the balance on the battlefield against the Syrian regime.
  Turkey has so far refused to allow the U.S.-coalition to use Turkish air bases to fly missions against ISIS. Turkey has conditioned its permission for the use of its bases on the coalition planes attacking not only ISIS fighters, but also Assad forces and Hezbollah formations, and on the coalition creating a no-fly zone some ten miles wide on the Syrian side of the Syria-Turkey border. Turkey, which is home now to more than two million Syrian refugees, says that the creation of such a no-fly strip along the border would allow it to return the refugees to Syria, where they will be safe from the regime’s air attacks, and will also allow rebels to train and organize in order to pose an even stiffer challenge to the Assad regime.
  Turkey has also not endeared itself to fellow Sunni Muslim states in the region by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in the Palestinian territories – two movements which are an anathema to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States.
  Turkey and Qatar are also the only supporters of the Islamist-led government in Tripoli – while the rest of the world, and the Arab League, recognize to legitimacy of the government which won elections in Libya last summer, but which was chased out of Tripoli in August by Islamist rebels who created their own government and parliament, which Turkey and Qatar recognize (the internationally recognized Libyan government now sits in Tobruk).
  Analysts say that the diminished power of Erdogan and the AKP after Sunday’s elections may lead the new government – which will be a coalition government —- to rein in Erdogan’s inflated regional ambitions, blunt his go-it-alone tendencies, and make him more amenable to a more consensual and less confrontational approach to the region’s problem.
  “Turkey’s foreign policy will be less driven by the AKP’s ambitions, which is basically driven by a foreign policy vision to make Turkey a regional player at any cost,” Cagaptay told the Times. “The outcome of the election will take Turkey’s anti-Assad policy down a notch. The government will not be able to drive its agenda singlehandedly anymore.”
  Taking the Turkey’s anti-Assad policy down a notch – which means giving up on Erdogan’s effort always to distinguish Turkey from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Gulf States, even if they all pursue the same goals — is likely to make this policy more effective, as events in Syria since January have proven.
  On Syria, Libya, and other regional issues, a subdued Erdogan, a tamer AKP, and a restrained Turkish foreign policy may make Turkey less of an obstacle to more harmony and greater coordination among the key Sunni states in the Middle East, which is good news for the twin efforts to contain Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions and weaken Iran’s allies, on the one hand, and defeat the nihilistic forces of jihadist Islamist extremism, on the other hand.