In the weeks before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bid for greater powers was upset at the ballot box, his followers declared their support for him in ever more effusive terms. “I say to Erdogan: ‘May my mother, father, wife and children be sacrificed for you,’” Ethem Sancak, a billionaire pharmaceutical and media company owner, declared last month.
Erdogan’s chief economic adviser was still more theatrical. “Nobody can touch the elected president of this country before I am killed, shot or hanged,” said Yigit Bulut, who had once warned that the leader’s enemies were seeking to kill him through telekinesis. “There are millions of citizens like me.”
Despite such expressions of fealty — and the cult of personality that bred them — the “big man” era of recent Turkish history may be coming to an end, with wide-ranging consequences for the country’s politics and its role in the world. Last Sunday, Erdogan’s two decade-long ascent through Turkey’s political system hit the buffers when the Justice and Development party (AKP), the Islamist-rooted movement he co-founded and led for more than a decade, was denied a majority for the first time in a general election since its creation.
“This election has broken through the old identity politics, the emphasis on a powerful leader imposing his will,” says Hakan Altinay, a world fellow at Yale University. “Turkey can no longer be viewed through the prism of cults of personality and that means there will be changes to practical politics.”
Before the election, Erdogan — who was not a candidate, but whose grab for more power dominated the poll — rampaged through the country, holding rallies two or three times a day. Ahead of one huge government-financed event a week before the vote, posters with his image were plastered on walls in almost every Istanbul street. “Resurrection again, rising again” they said, linking the president with the return of the country’s glorious Ottoman past.
But the tactic did not work. Now, in an agonising process set to last weeks, Turkey is headed for coalition government, or fresh elections, which could further jeopardise the AKP vote. Last Sunday’s poll was more than just a check on Erdogan’s plan for a shift to an even more powerful executive presidency. Some commentators are hailing the election as a historic moment, which has given a faction-ridden country a chance to shape a new political culture after years when institutions such as the judiciary, the media and even the central bank have been overwhelmed by factional fighting.
Making concessions
“After 13 years of single-party government, the opposition parties are hungry for power,” says Sinan Ulgen at Carnegie Europe, a think-tank. “They have an opportunity, but it is only one that can be seized by a consensus-driven approach. If the AKP is to remain in power, it will only do so by making concessions. This is new.”
The reverberations of such a shift would go far beyond Turkey. The country is strategically vital and its role in the Syrian war in particular has become extremely contentious. The opposition parties’ collective victory in the election makes a recalibration of Turkey’s policy, which Erdogan often casts in terms of Muslims against the West, much more likely. Diplomats say the country’s status as a Nato ally and a candidate for the European Union (EU) was gravely undermined by Erdogan’s authoritarian stance in recent years. Now it looks headed for less autocratic rule at home and more pragmatic policies abroad. “Foreign policy should be re-evaluated: It should be based not on ideology, but national interest,” says Oktay Vural, deputy leader of the right-wing Nationalist Movement party or MHP.
Turkey has long been a country of overbearing leaders and weak institutions, of factions that seek to colonise the apparatus of the state rather than allowing such bodies to set the rules of the game. “We haven’t really had sufficiently long exposure to competitive politics, to the tradition of negotiation and compromise,” says Ilter Turan, a professor of political science at Bilgi University.
Islamist politics
Sometimes it seems almost as if much of the country has been commandeered by four giant personality cults. One Islamist-rooted movement is centred around Erdogan. A rival group, based on a distinct Islamic tradition, revolves around Fethullah Gulen, an exiled preacher living in Pennsylvania. A third is focused on Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party or PKK. Then there is Turkey’s old establishment, in which the commanding figure is long dead: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular Turkish Republic. His photo is in almost every Turkish shop or office and real devotees have stickers of his signature on the back of their cars or wear Ataturk watches. Few Islamists do so: Ataturk’s heirs built the system that Islamist politics has been seeking to reshape.
Yet, the country’s tradition of strong-man politics — in all its fractured forms, whether Islamist, secular or Kurdish — owes much to the veneration of Ataturk, as a world changing hero, drummed into children from kindergarten on. This is a society in which business organisations, universities, charities and even chocolate bars are all signifiers of the movements to which an individual belongs. The story of Turkey in recent decades is largely the tale of these movements and their unceasing battles and turns of fortune. In successive cycles, secularists have imprisoned Islamists, Gulenists have persecuted secularists and Islamists have turned on Gulenists.
With last Sunday’s vote, the wheel turned once more. The opposition parties that between them command a majority in parliament have little in common. But all three insist that Erdogan’s quest for a presidential system should come to an end and that corruption allegations concerning his close circle should be investigated. Now they have a chance to shift politics their way, as long as they learn to co-operate.
The star of last Sunday’s election was Selahattin Demirtas, the charismatic 42-year-old joint leader of the left-wing, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party, or HDP. He gambled on passing the 10 per cent threshold to enter parliament. In the end, the HDP secured 13 per cent of the vote, 80 seats and deprived the AKP of its majority.
Inclusive strategy
Yet, that success was only possible because the HDP itself became more inclusive. “Our aim is to create a broader movement and to do this on the basis of Kurds and Turks living together in peace,” Demirtas told the Financial Times before the election.
It was a message that resonated: The HDP scooped up votes not just from religious Kurds alienated by Erdogan, but by secular Turks keen to stop the president from gaining more powers. Turkish flags and even banners of Ataturk were brandished at its rallies next to images of Ocalan, whose supremacy over the Kurdish movement no longer looks so secure now that the focus has shifted to Demirtas and parliament.
But it is not just the Kurdish movement that may be moving away from a cult of personality. Several of the main forces in Turkish political life are breaking away from their largely tribal past. That change is reflected in the composition of parliament, the most varied in terms of ethnicity and religion since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. There are three Armenians from three different parties, including the AKP, two members of the Yezidi sect, a Syriac Christian from the HDP and a Roma for the secularist Republican Peoples’ party or CHP.
After decades in which it was steeped in the shrill nationalism of Ataturk’s heirs, the CHP’s embrace of candidates from other ethnic groups marked a departure. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the party’s leader, actively cheered on the HDP’s bid to enter parliament.
“During the campaign, we avoided the old polemics that are usually a must of Turkish politics,” says a leading CHP MP, who argues that all three opposition parties will be pushed to the centre by the need to retain the votes they “borrowed” from rivals: “We have to realise this unique opportunity by consensus building, by magnanimity.”
The final movement in the throes of change is the AKP itself. It remains the biggest grouping in parliament, but last Sunday’s vote delivered the worst defeat in its 14-year history. There were already signs of strain and division in the party, notably between Erdogan and Ahmet Davutoglu, his handpicked successor as party leader and Prime Minister. Now it has to decide how far to follow the president, given the opposition’s insistence that he rein-in his role.
Political instability
Some of the biggest decisions remain with Erdogan, whose term expires only in 2019. He has the power to dismiss the parliament if no government emerges — which could lead to a second election in the autumn. But he has made conciliatory comments in recent days about the need to pull together a workable administration.
The president needs to avoid being seen as a source of political instability at a time when the hot-money fuelled economy is fragile and the government and perhaps the party itself is slipping beyond his control.
“There’s a big question: Is the party an Islamist movement or is it a blend of Islamism, neo-Ottomanism and worship of Erdogan?” asks Akyol. “Islamism doesn’t have this tradition of cult of personality and within the AKP, people are quietly saying that Erdogan isn’t a saviour but a burden.”
Indeed, on the opposition’s main demands — cutting alleged ties to extremists in Syria, investigating corruption and rejecting a presidential system — it is the other parties, not the AKP, that have public support. Party officials acknowledge they will need to enter into a coalition to retain power, with the possibility of a grand alliance with the secularists of the CHP. The right-wing MHP is an alternative partner.
It will take more than a simple agreement to foster consensual politics, but the peak of polarisation has passed. No one man has imposed his will on the country so completely for decades but Erdogan’s aura of political success is tarnished as never before.
Now, as Turkey struggles towards setting up a new government, it is no longer so clearly divided into rival camps. There are glimmers of a more co-operative political culture striving to be born. An era has come crashing to an end. “We have taken a big step forward in terms of learning what democracy is,” says Akyol. “Turkey is better now than it was a week ago.”
— Financial Times
