Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2002, pages 56-57

Talking Turkey

Call for Early Elections Sets Off Political Crisis for Turkey’s Coalition Government

By Jon Gorvett

Summer is traditionally a time for rest and recuperation, and for Turkey’s parliament, this year was no exception. In early June, the hard-working deputies usually vote themselves a three-month paid holiday before shutting up shop and heading off to sweat out the season by the pools of their Aegean summer houses.

This time around, however, many a vacation has been quite comprehensively ruined as the country has been gripped by the worst political crisis in the government’s three-year history. The crisis also sparked off a series of events that could shape the country’s destiny for many years to come.

It all began back in May, when Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit was first rushed to the hospital, revealing for the first time in public what many had known for a long time in private—that the nation’s leader was seriously ill, and getting worse. While the veteran Ecevit struggled to return to work, his coalition partners began to plot. The talk was of how the three-party coalition government could not survive without Ecevit’s leadership, a point reinforced by increasingly public rows between the leaders of the other two parties. The instability of a coalition comprising Ecevit’s center-left Democratic Left Party (DSP), Devlet Bahceli’s rightist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and Mesut Yilmaz’ center right Motherland Party (ANAP) began to be plain to all.

The principal divisive issues were—and still are—the European Union and the IMF/World Bank-backed economic recovery program. Both require some major reforms in Turkey’s way of doing business. While the EU reforms touch particularly sensitive political spots, the IMF/WB restructuring pulls the carpet from under a number of powerful economic and financial interests. It largely has been the political changes demanded by the EU, however, that have been the main trigger in recent months. These involve abolition of the death penalty (which would save Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdish guerrilla group the PKK, from the gallows), more rights for the country’s Kurdish minority (including education in their mother tongue), and a deal on the divided island of Cyprus.

Despite repeated statements from the government that all the coalition partners were in full agreement on these issues, Bahceli finally came out into the open opposing all the above three changes back in June. He also then demanded an early general election. This threw the government into chaos and hit Turkey’s markets badly. The currency, the Turkish lira, dropped to its lowest ever against the U.S. dollar, while the stock market crumbled. Turkey’s financial and business centers had been long gambling on the idea that the current government—however unpopular it might be—would continue in office until it had completed the IMF program. Bahceli’s call seemed to throw all that up in the air.

Yet more was to come. Within a few days of Bahceli’s call for early elections, Ecevit’s party split. The fissure seems to have been opened up when Ecevit’s wife, Rasan, who is known as a power behind the throne within the DSP, moved against Husamettin Ozkan, a one-time close ally of Ecevit who recently had moved into a position to challenge Ecevit for party leadership. Rasan had Ozkan fired, in what may have been a pre-emptive strike, as Ozkan was indeed plotting with other DSP figures to mount a takeover from the ailing Ecevit. The size of his support then became clear, when four other ministers in Ecevit’s cabinet and several dozen DSP deputies resigned and joined Ozkan. One of those ministers was Ismail Cem, the foreign minister widely credited with Turkey’s recent rapprochement with Greece and tentative dialogue with Armenia.

Attention then turned to the economics minister, Kemal Dervis, who, although an independent, was known to be in sympathy with social democratic ideas, despite his World Bank pedigree and major responsibility for implementing the IMF-backed program. The Ozkan/ Cem group clearly was where Dervis wanted to go, although the markets, and, it seems, the U.S., wanted him to stay on to complete the program. Saying he would join Cem and Ozkan, Dervis resigned, but then withdrew his resignation when President Ahmet Necdet Sezer refused to accept it.

This, however, did not prevent Cem from going ahead and announcing that he was establishing a new center-left party, the New Turkey Party (YTP). By the end of July, the YTP had as many deputies in parliament as Ecevit’s DSP, making Bahceli’s MHP the largest party in parliament and in the coalition government.

The influence of the nationalist position was then further strengthened by Ecevit’s replacements for his resigned ministers. Sukru Sina Gurel, previously in charge of Turkey’s Cyprus strategy and a noted anti-EU politician, took over as deputy prime minister, while the other shifts were similarly toward those with more nationalist views. “Those within the DSP who are against the EU have got the upper hand,” said Iltar Turan of Istanbul’s Bilgi University. “What happens now all depends on what kind of interim government there is and how soon we have elections.”

Ecevit himself, however, would be unlikely to describe his current regime as “interim.” He has clung on despite his deteriorating health, the destruction of much of his party and the effective freeze on his government’s ability to act. With a majority of parties in favor of an early election, he has continued to warn that such a ballot would end in disaster—most recently saying that an election would let in the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) and the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP).

This has been the fear elsewhere as well, since elections in Turkey are such notoriously wild cards. In 1995, a general election saw the pro-Islamist Welfare Party sweep to victory, largely out of nowhere as far as many pundits were concerned, while 1999 saw another dark horse, the MHP, go from having too few votes to qualify for a single seat in 1995 to becoming the second biggest party in parliament, and now its largest. In both elections, an enormous 30 to 35 percent swing occurred as masses of “floating voters” swam to the party that had not yet had a chance to fail them.

Now, however, a recent poll by the Ankara Chamber of Commerce suggests that the “floating voter” constituency could be even greater. Of 3,200 respondents, a staggering 82.8 percent said they would not vote for their old party in the new election.

Cem’s YTP doubtless is counting on this disillusioned majority to swing its way in any fresh ballot. Yet with the potential date for voting as early as Nov. 3, it will have an uphill task to establish itself on the ground countrywide. The party has many advantages in terms of support from the country’s rich and powerful—its urban, business and financial elite—plus the tacit support of many overseas investors. All of these could also be major disadvantages in terms of the popular vote, however. Many Turks have lost their jobs due to the IMF/World Bank-backed restructuring program. Others fear that the European Union cannot really be trusted and does not really want Turkey to be a member, and view Brussels’ demands for Kurdish rights and a deal on Cyprus as ways in which the EU is seeking to break up Turkey.

As leading columnist Ismet Berkan has suggested, “The election will really be a referendum on the EU.” If it is, Turkish voters may well have a confusing choice to make. All the parties are equally supportive of Turkey becoming a member—it’s just that some are more equal than others. Some of the most consistent supporters are actually the pro-Islamists, who see EU membership as not only guaranteeing greater prosperity, but also wider political and religious freedom. Turks may indeed vote for the EU, but for a pro-Islamist group too—a result that might seem puzzling, but which makes a good deal of sense in Turkey’s political labyrinth.

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