Talking Turkey

Turkey’s Political Pot Boils, With Elections Still Three Years Away

By Jon Gorvett

With an Ankara court’s decision in June to ban Turkey’s main opposition party, there was little let up in the political heat during August, with a furious round of new party building taking place. Ironically, however, the curious situation has emerged in which, although there are more political groupings than ever, far fewer Turks today seem interested in voting for any of them.

Perhaps the most unpopular grouping of all is the country’s three-party ruling coalition—comprising veteran Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party (DSP), Deputy Prime Minister Devlet Bahceli’s far-right National Action Party (MHP), and Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz’s center-right Motherland Party (ANAP). According to a recent survey by the polling company ANAR, all three put together would garner less than the 10 percent national threshold of votes necessary to qualify for representation in parliament.

Nor does the opposition fare much better. Tansu Ciller’s True Path Party has less than 5 percent support, while Recai Kutan’s new pro-Islamist Saadet Party has even less than that. Hardly satisfactory results for opposition parties facing such an obviously unpopular government, now two and a half years in office.

There are, however, two groups in the ANAR poll that look more like winners in any future election. One consists of people who would “vote for none of the above” (around 20 percent), and the other of those who would vote for Tayyip Erdogan’s new Ak Party—the “White” Party—which was officially launched in mid-August. The Ak Party is made up largely of former Virtue Party deputies—the same pro-Islamist party led by Kutan that the courts shut down in June. Erdogan himself was once mayor of Istanbul, then banned from politics for two years following a speech he had made some years earlier in which he had said the “mosques are our barracks, the minarets are our bayonets.” (Never mind that he was quoting from a poem by Ziya Gokalp, one of the founding fathers of Turkish nationalism who routinely is studied in the nation’s schools.) Erdogan was found guilty of advocating shariah law and banned by Turkey’s fiercely secular courts. Now he’s back, however, and riding a wave of popularity that seems to be around 30 percent in most polls. This would be enough to give the Ak Party a pretty hefty single-party majority were an election held tomorrow.

Which is, of course, one major reason why any balloting now is highly unlikely. Ecevit’s mandate runs to 2004, giving him no reason to contemplate a new vote, while the fragile financial markets and Turkey’s foreign lenders—notably the IMF—would take a dim view of the instability an election would generate. Meanwhile, the fact that none of the ruling parties is doing well in the polls provides a further incentive for them to cling together in office. It is unlikely that any of the three would leave the coalition.

This poses a problem particularly for the far-right MHP, which has been presenting itself as the defender of Turkey’s national interests against the IMF and the international markets. It already has lost ministers in the tussle over telecommunications privatization and tobacco sector liberalization, and may well lose more, as the introduction of the free market the IMF is pushing hits the MHP’s voting base particularly hard. This is located in the Anatolian heartlands, with its small businesses and farmers. The squeeze is therefore on the MHP, which is also helping Erdogan’s “reformists.” They, in their earlier incarnations as Virtue and before that as Welfare (the pro-Islamist party banned in 1998 that then gave birth to Virtue), also had taken votes from the rural and small business communities.

Erdogan also seems to be benefitting from the so-called “volatility factor.” This can be summed up as representing the huge number of Turkish voters who switch from one party to another at election time—often across left-right boundaries as well as secular-religious ones. They can deliver a thumping 20 to 25 percent swing, usually to a party that seems untainted by government. Welfare gained a massive swing in 1995, as did the MHP in 1999. An early election might deliver much the same swing vote to the Ak Party.

Yet how new is the Ak Party? While it has been presenting itself in the country’s media as a force for change, determined to shake up the status quo, its members seem strangely at odds with such a radical new image. Meral Aksener, a former ANAP deputy who, just after Virtue was banned, joined the Ak Party—in what was a dramatic coup for them—subsequently resigned from their ranks, charging that Erdogan “still held to the National View.” Aksener was referring to the ideology of Turkey’s pro-Islamist movement as outlined by its founder, Necmettin Erbakan, which toes a far harder line than anything Erdogan publicly espouses.

The other side, however, claimed that in fact Aksener had resigned because the Ak Party would not give a position to Mehmet Agar, a former DYP minister who was widely held to be involved in the Susurluk incident, a 1996 case which appeared to provide strong evidence of links between the Turkish state and organized crime. Just how much of a new politician Agar could be said to be is a big question. On economic policy, the Ak Party seems to employ a great deal of nationalist rhetoric against the IMF policy. They have no suggestions, however, as to how the country could be pulled out of its current crisis on its own. This is a major weakness when financial policy is headline news.

Yet the Ak Party does have other factors working for it—one of which is its opponents’ terrible weakness. While two new parties have arisen from the ashes of Virtue, the center-left also has been splitting, with a “new” party about to be formed by veteran politician Erdal Inonu. This would effectively be a de-merging of the center-left after the 1995 joining together of Murat Karayalcin’s Social Democratic People’s Party (SHP) and Deniz Baykal’s Republican People’s Party (CHP). Inonu’s group would pull away those CHP members disillusioned by Baykal and effectively re-form the SHP, making three center-left parties when Ecevit’s DSP is added in.

Meanwhile, on the center right, Yilmaz’s ANAP also is having trouble with “splitters.” Former Interior Minister Saddetin Tantan—who was fired by Yilmaz after conducting criminal investigations into a number of ANAP ministers—has announced his wish to form a new party. At the same time, the ANAP party congress in early August saw a number of challenges to Yilmaz’ leadership—all beaten off, but indicative of dissent within the ranks.

The likelihood of more parties being formed is, therefore, high. This also illustrates a trend many commentators have observed in Turkish political parties: that an absence of internal democracy repeatedly leads to splintering, as central party leaderships make it well nigh impossible for any kind of internal renewal. Evidence of this is Sema Piskinsut’s challenge to Ecevit’s leadership of the DSP back in May. She announced herself as a candidate for the leadership, but was forbidden from addressing the party congress. Her son, who had accompanied her, was beaten up. Similarly, Lutfullah Kayalar, a challenger to Yilmaz, arrived at the ANAP congress to find his supporters forbidden entrance and no seat provided him by the congress organizers. A year earlier, Virtue had seen a strong internal challenge from leading “reformist” Abdullah Gul. Beaten in the ballot against Recai Kutan, the “reformists”—the forerunners of the Ak Party—then were excluded completely from the party executive, leading to a further party split.

Such machinations illustrate the fact that many of Turkey’s parties are formed as the result of internal feuds, rather than of a popular mass movement in society at large. With this disconnection between the groupings listed on the ballot and the grievances and aspirations of Turks, it is little wonder that the national parties are so unpopular. A thorough overhaul, however, seems a gargantuan task. In the meantime, the suspicion is that the new bosses of Turkey’s parties may be much the same as the old ones.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.