For the first time in its democratic history, Turkey faces repeat elections. The four parties in the parliament (AKP, CHP, MHP and HDP) have failed to form a (coalition) government that could secure a vote of confidence in the parliament. Last week, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu informed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he has been unable to form a coalition with other parties. Breaking with the unofficial convention of offering the main opposition party (CHP) an opportunity to try its luck in government formation (because CHP refuses to legitimize the illegally built 1,150-room palace of Erdogan), Erdogan declared that new elections will be held on Nov. 1, 2015.
That a mere four-party parliament has been unable to form a government that could secure majority support seems hard to believe; it is almost nonsensical. There are a number of immediately visible reasons for this outcome. On one hand, serious graft allegations against the AKP since December 2013 and that Erdogan will likely be heavily involved in the government (against his constitutional mandate) led other parties to be very cautious about forming a coalition with AKP to avoid guilt by association. On the other hand, Nationalist MHP’s antics along ethnic and non-ethnic lines (i.e., vetoing coalition governments that include Kurdish HDP and voting against parliamentary inquiries into AKP governance) undermined an opposition opportunity to hold AKP to account.
Intriguingly, during the same time frame, there have been sharp changes to Turkey’s Kurdish and ISIS policies. The AKP government, which is purported to have supported ISIS logistically and militarily for years, decided that it was time to take action against ISIS in Syria and Turkey. Simultaneously, Turkish forces have bombed PKK targets in the Qandil Mountains of Northern Iraq since late July, killing and wounding hundreds of PKK members. However, observers note that most of Turkey’s attacks outside its borders were not aimed at ISIS but rather at PKK, which calls the government’s motives in attacking ISIS into question.
Some believe that Erdogan is “gambling” with the repeat election call: since he did not achieve his desired outcome in the June elections, he is simply trying his hand again in attempts to win a majority. There is partial truth to this suggestion, yet “survival” is a more appropriate term to describe Erdogan’s motivation; the president does not have an alternative option. The question is, what danger is Erdogan facing?
In order to understand the dynamics of repeat election politicking, we must first understand the context within which the AKP and Erdogan operate as well as the value he places on having a parliamentary majority.
The graft allegations of December 2013 left indelible scars on AKP and Erdogan, seriously marring their legacy. The sheer extent of the clientelistic network laid bare in the post-2013 period reveals the degree to which Erdogan needs to maintain control of the country and the government. First, unless Erdogan either directly or indirectly retains government control, the graft scandal will eventually catch up to him. The opposition is simply eyeing an opportunity to initiate the judicial inquiry into the allegations; losing the government will pave the way for this (because Erdogan wields extensive influence over the legislative and judicial branches as well as the government and the bureaucracy). Second, losing the government will mean the clientelistic network and the benefits that accrue to Erdogan’s cronies will also vanish, undermining an important pillar of Erdogan’s power and popularity. Put differently, if Erdogan loses control of the government in any way, his time is up.
Erdogan’s recent interest in introducing a presidential system in Turkey stems from his desire to control the entire executive branch, despite that Turkish citizens, by contrast, are overwhelmingly opposed to a presidential system. A somewhat obscure threat in the pre-election period has now found its meaning. Erdogan had presciently forewarned that if the electorate gives him 400 deputies in the parliament (enough to introduce a constitutional change to a presidential system), things would go “peacefully,” which was primarily in reference to the Kurdish resolution process. The negation of the sentence would imply that failure to obtain 400 seats in the parliament should lead to lack of peace.
The June elections empowered the HDP, disallowing the AKP win an outright majority and making the party lose votes and seats for the first time since 2002. As a result, Erdogan has derailed the Kurdish peace process by questioning its legitimacy despite the fact that he initiated the process in 2012. Despite two years of nonviolence, PKK and other Kurdish targets, including the HDP, became the recipients of violent attacks by governmental or unidentified groups. The Turkish operation against ISIS was used as a cover for the military’s attack on PKK targets. The outcome to date is more than 60 Turkish security personnel casualties as well as dozens of Kurdish civilians. It appears that Erdogan employs tactics from the political playbook of the 1980s to honor his pre-election promise.
Many governments in the past manipulated foreign policy or security issues to prop up their popularity and electoral lot, more commonly known as diversionary foreign policy; hence, what Erdogan is engaging in is not terribly uncommon. Three factors set it apart, however, and therefore deem it potentially problematic. First, most Turkish citizens are fully aware of the post-election developments and have increasingly called out Erdogan and AKP as the responsible parties for the increasing violence, implying that Erdogan’s diversionary tactics are not working. Second, Erdogan’s recent ISIS and PKK policies are likely to carry major repercussions, seriously affecting other countries’ policies in the region. This is particularly the case for the United States’ policies in Syria and Iraq. Worse, Erdogan might have paved the way for Turkey to become the next Pakistan. A region already boiling over can certainly do without additional tensions. Finally, the Kurdish issue, which was very close to being solved peacefully within the democratic framework of the unitary Turkish state, now faces an indefinite setback.
The Erdogan regime’s survival rests on the success of a campaign built on chaos, ethnic bloodshed and stimulation of nationalist sentiment among ethnic Turks. In repeat elections, the reasoning goes, ethnic Turks will move away from nationalist MHP and Kurdish HDP to flock in support of the AKP. Nonetheless, the overall outlook of the parliament should essentially stay unchanged. Polls indicate no signs of an end to the downward spiral of the AKP. The party continues to lose popularity while HDP and CHP see a slight uptick in their expected vote shares. If the new elections in November result in another hung parliament, we might see Erdogan’s grand ambitions to come to a fiery end, opening a new, unwritten chapter in Turkish politics.
A.Kadir Yildirim, Ph.D., is a research scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. His main research interests include democratization, political economy, political Islam, the politics of the Middle East and Turkish politics.