Guest Post: Imagining the AKP’s Divergent Futures
April 7, 2015 § Leave a comment
Guest poster extraordinaire Dov Friedman is back with some inside baseball on the political prospects of Turkey’s Kurdish party and how its success or failure might determine Erdoğan’s future power inside and outside the AKP.
For 14 years, Tayyip Erdoğan has answered every doubt and challenge in Turkey’s political realm. Yet, two months shy of new parliamentary elections, analysts continue to speculate about whether the Turkish President stands poised for a political decline. In the past, this speculation has represented hope—or perhaps mere wishful thinking. These days, though, it feels laden with unease. Perhaps it grasps at a sense that in the near term, Turkey faces a political future with several, highly divergent potential outcomes.
Much of the political talk in the election run-up revolves around Selahattin Demirtaş and the HDP—the People’s Democratic Party. The HDP is an evolutionary phenomenon in Turkish politics. In one sense, it is the latest iteration of the Kurdish-oriented parties, with their locus of power in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated southeast. At the same time, under the charismatic leadership of Demirtaş, the party has a burgeoning following within the democratic left—among those uncomfortable with the old guard Kemalists of the mainstream opposition CHP.
Last August, when Erdoğan was elected president, Demirtaş surprised many with his strong showing—drawing 9.76 percent of the vote. His tally was particularly noteworthy because of Turkey’s 10 percent entry threshold for parliament. Historically, Turkish governments have maintained an uncommonly high threshold as a mechanism to keep the Kurds politically marginalized. To date, Kurdish deputies enter parliament as individual candidates and caucus together—meaning they lose a significant number of seats relative to their proportional share of the overall voting.
Demirtaş’ showing not only changed the way voters saw the HDP; it also changed the HDP’s own election calculus, as the party decided—for the first time ever—to run as a unified list in June 2015. The stakes could not be higher. If HDP passes the 10 percent threshold, it will increase its representation in parliament and—equally importantly—ensure that the AKP remains below the two-thirds supermajority threshold in parliament.
Since his third term as prime minister wound down, Erdoğan has made noise about transitioning Turkey to a presidential system. When he won the presidency in August 2014, he assumed a nominally ceremonial post, anticipating that he could convert the system while in seat. With a parliamentary supermajority, Erdoğan can ram through a drastic overhaul that will rapidly increase presidential powers. The HDP’s possible clearance of the electoral threshold stands in the way of that goal.
For Demirtaş, the challenge remains in convincing liberal voters that he will refuse to be an AKP tool. Ever since the AKP reinitiated peace talks with the Kurdish opposition, speculation mounted that the Kurds would support Erdoğan’s presidential system ambitions in exchange for a negotiated resolution and increased local autonomy. Whether the Kurdish parties initially intended to strike that deal obscures the HDP’s present view. Not only has the AKP dragged its feet in the peace process, but Demirtaş sees an opportunity to strengthen politically without the AKP. At a regular HDP parliamentary group meeting in mid-March, Demirtaş delivered a stinging rebuke of Erdoğan—designed in part to distance his party from any perceptions of a corrupt grand bargain.
If the HDP clears the threshold, Erdoğan may already have reached the zenith of his power. The AKP rank and file would then consider who might best secure their political future, and—for the first time—the answer might be someone other than Tayyip Erdoğan. That calculus might touch off the internal AKP maneuvering that could produce new leadership of the Islamist center-right.
Here, we must briefly mention Mansur Yavaş. In the 2014 municipal elections, Yavaş stood as the CHP candidate for mayor of Ankara against the AKP’s Melih Gökçek. Last April, economist and Turkey-watcher Erik Meyersson published clever analysis indicating that the AKP stole the election from Yavaş through massive invalidation of CHP votes. If HDP just barely passes the threshold, can we rule out similar election rigging to bring the HDP under the threshold? Given ongoing tensions, the risks would be enormous. One hopes the AKP might be chastened by the risks of further disenfranchising the Kurdish minority, but with Erdoğan, one can never be certain.
The more interesting question for Turkey watchers is, what happens if HDP does not pass the parliamentary threshold. A series of polls have shown HDP straddling the 10 percent barrier. This is where opinions diverge.
Even with HDP’s failure to enter parliament, some argue, Erdoğan’s power stands to decline—within the party, and thus nationally as well. Gareth Jenkins argued as much in a recent article for Turkey Analyst. Even if the AKP won the 330 mandates necessary to put Erdoğan’s favored system to a referendum, Jenkins explained, party unity, contentment, and discipline are weakening.
Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç’s outbursts at Erdoğan loyalist Gökçek—and his subtle critiques of the president himself—provided a rare glimpse behind the curtain of the normally lockstep AKP. This came on the heels of Hakan Fidan’s bizarre resignation as national intelligence chief, declaration of candidacy for parliament, withdrawal, and reappointment as head of national intelligence. Even if the AKP secures a parliamentary majority, its star is dimming. The process may simply move more slowly—Erdoğan’s “long goodbye”, as Jenkins terms it.
But there’s another, darker view of the AKP’s future. In Istanbul several weeks ago, I asked a Turkish friend with keen political insight about the bizarre Fidan episode—why had the intelligence chief made his move if he was not prepared to stand by his decision? “It was not the right time”, my friend replied. “Erdoğan can still damage him.”
As president, Erdoğan could veto ministerial appointments, and Fidan was not running to be a parliamentary back-bencher. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has shown no inclination to spar with the combative president. Though nominally he controls the parliamentary list, the ostensibly apolitical Erdoğan held enormous sway in—and some say, direct control over—its construction.
Davutoğlu’s meek, ineffectual performance as nominal leader of the government drives much of the skepticism that Erdoğan’s grip on power is loosening. Davutoğlu has made former President Abdullah Gül seem commanding by comparison. As one seasoned observer put it to me, both of these ostensible leaders are docile. Gül enjoyed flying around as a figurehead, putting a bright face on Turkey abroad. Davutoğlu enjoys his current role—able to posture as de jure leader while ceding key decision-making power to Erdoğan. If June 7 produces the status quo—a solid AKP majority without the power to overhaul the system—, why would Erdoğan not merely carry on as de facto leader?
The internal AKP reshuffling that many predict would require many more party heavyweights willing to stick their necks out—much as Bülent Arınç began to in March. The dividing question is whether such bravery exists in a party that rose and prospered under the domination of Erdoğan.
On one of my last days in Turkey, a friend who believes change is coming remarked that Erdoğan would see death by 1000 cuts. If so, who will be so bold as to draw first blood?
Guest Post: The Abysmal State Of Turkish Justice
January 31, 2013 § Leave a comment
Today’s post comes to you courtesy of Nick Danforth. Nick is a fellow Georgetowner and is a Ph.D. candidate in history currently spending his time in Turkey’s archives and writing his dissertation on national identity, democratization and U.S. foreign policy in Turkey in the 1940s and 1950s. Nick also occasionally writes about current Turkish politics, and is the proprietor of a geekily awesome new blog about Ottoman/Turkish/Middle East cartography called The Afternoon Map. If you have any interest at all in maps, go check it out. Nick’s post details the ways in which ideological polarization and using undemocratic means to pursue allegedly democratic ends has made for a hollow sense of justice in Turkey, and I think it is particularly timely given that these are the very same two issues currently tearing Egypt apart. Given the problems that Turkey faces on these fronts, it does not instill a sense of optimism for what lies ahead for the Arab world’s most populous country. But now for the topic at hand, which is Turkey, the AKP, and the courts:
Standing outside in the cold Istanbul rain on the 19th to commemorate Hrant Dink’s death – with a sign saying “For Hrant, For Justice” in Kurdish – it seemed like as good an opportunity as any to meditate on the frustrating contradictions of Turkish democracy.
For the uninitiated, Hrant Dink was a Turkish-Armenian journalist and champion of Armenian rights who was assassinated in 2007. After originally being content to charge Dink’s 17-year old shooter with acting alone, prosecutors recently decided that there was enough evidence to link Dink’s murder to a broader conspiracy. As with so much else related even peripherally to the sprawling Ergenokon case, the substance of the charge is perfectly plausible, even long overdue, but much else about it is suspect. That the shadowy people behind the killing had some shadowy ties to some of the other shadowy Ergenekon figures is all too likely, but it also fits nicely with the AKP’s ongoing efforts to blame every crime Turkey on its political enemies. The government continues to insist, to take only one of the most striking examples, that the brutal murder of three Christian missionaries in southeastern Turkey some years ago was not the work of radical Islamists, but a false flag operation, designed to look like just the sort of crime radical Islamists might have committed.
More broadly, while a number of people have documented the increasing mess the Ergenokon investigation has become, one of the things that makes these prosecutions both insidious and effective is that every round of arrests has included at least several figures who were almost certainly involved in plotting to topple a democratically elected government – alongside all the others whose only crime was being a little too critical. Tellingly, it was in one of the last and most suspect rounds of Ergenekon-related arrests that the government finally nabbed former Admiral Özden Örnek, whose “coup diary” remained one of the soundest pieces of evidence in the whole case.
The recent Paris murders were yet another example of the fact that, for far too many people like Dink who have been killed for being the wrong religion, the wrong ethnicity, or the wrong political orientation, no court’s verdict will ever convince more than half the population in this politicized climate. While many Kurds blame the government and the government blames rival Kurdish factions, the French police have gone so far as to speculate that it might have been nothing more than a crime of passion. Over the years, columnist Ismet Berkan has been fond of pointing out that when any incriminating evidence against one’s ideological allies can be dismissed – often rightly – as propaganda or disinformation, everyone will continue to believe their own version of the truth whatever facts emerge. On Saturday it was striking how many people were waving signs accusing the AKP of complicity in covering up the murder. When Muammer Güler , Istanbul’s mayor at the time of Dink’s death, was recently appointed Interior Minister, Dink’s lawyer called it another drop in a sea of shame.
The problem is not that people are overly susceptible to conspiracy theories (though that doesn’t help). The problem is that with the Dink case, as with the PKK murders and Ergenekon, there clearly was a conspiracy of some sort, but the Turkish political system in its current form cannot satisfactorily unravel it. Until the government gives its citizens reason to have faith in the independence if the judiciary and the independence of the press, its investigations, no matter how sincere or successful they are in any particular case, won’t convince anyone.
There are moments in conversations with AKP supporters where it seems like they are troubled by the undemocratic means their party has adopted in handling the Ergenekon case and the way this has politicized the country. Yet at the same time, many suggest that these means are justified by the historic magnitude of the problems they are trying to resolve. That is to say, some false arrests are a small price to pay for finally freeing Turkey from the grip of military authoritarianism. Unfortunately, it seems a similar – understandable but ultimately self-defeating – rationale is likely to justify the government’s heavy handed approach to resolving the Kurdish issue.
Negotiations with PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan already have already produced one striking example of questionable means directed at admirable ends. After a prosecutor called the legality of these negotiations into question and demanded that Turkish Intelligence Chief Hakan Fidan testify about them in court, the parliament speedily passed a law, recently upheld by the Constitutional Court, saying that the Intelligence Chief could only be forced to testify with the express approval of the Prime Minister.
The whole issue offers the depressing sight of arbitrary executive power pitted against arbitrary prosecutorial power, with the intelligence service a little bit closer to regaining the immunity it enjoyed in the heyday of the deep state. Where we once all hoped the AKP would steer Turkey toward a more democratic future in something resembling a straight line, Turkey now seems at best to be tacking towards that destination like a sailboat, moving closer to it in one direction and further away in another.
More depressing is the growing realization that in the coming year, the AKP will use the power it has amassed by bullying and censoring the press in order to win support for a policy of ending official intolerance and forced assimilation of Kurds. And those challenging the government by highlighting these undemocratic means will likely not be progressive liberals but the MHP, alongside the more nationalist wing of the CHP. With tolerance and minority rights ranged against against press freedom and rule of law, justice for Dink and his fellow citizens seems more elusive than ever.
Abortion And The Americanization of Turkish Politics
May 30, 2012 § 2 Comments
A politician blasting the media for keeping alive a story that he believes should be put to bed, courting controversy in order to change the topic from one that is politically damaging to one that is potentially more favorable, curtailing women’s rights in order to appeal to more socially conservative voters, using abortion as a wedge issue…I’m pretty clearly describing American presidential politics in the 21st century, right? In this instance, the above events are taking place in Turkey and are being orchestrated by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a way of changing the conversation away from the Uludere airstrike that killed 34 Kurdish civilians and for which the government has not apologized and has been dragging its heels to investigate. In fact, the Uludere airstrike has been such a thorn in Erdoğan’s side that he has decided instead to start a grand national debate on abortion, which he sees as being far less fraught with danger for him politically and which speaks volumes about the government’s resolve to sweep Uludere under the table.
Erodğan’s frustration at the way the Uludere strike has continued to dog him for months was clearly evident last week, when he said that the government has done all that it can do and that steps to compensate victims’ families amount to a de facto apology (incidentally, Erdoğan has not been willing to grant the same leeway to Israel that he is requesting for himself). He also accused the opposition, the PKK, “Jewish lobbies,” and the Turkish media of unnecessarily keeping the story alive and exploiting the issue, while complaining that the civilian deaths have taken the focus off the fact that smuggling is illegitimate activity (the airstrike victims were smuggling gasoline and cigarettes across the border and were mistaken for PKK terrorists). The day after making these comments to reporters, Erdoğan told those gathered at the AKP’s Women’s Congress that abortion was murder, and that those media members who “live and breathe Uludere” should take note that “every abortion is an Uludere.” Predictably, the controversy has moved away from the Uludere strike itself and is now firmly ensconced on the fact that Erdoğan would compare abortion to civilian airstrike casualties, and Erdoğan ensured yesterday that the conversation would stay on abortion by announcing plans to pass legislation limiting abortion and and possibly prohibiting it altogether along with attacking c-section deliveries as part of a foreign plot to weaken Turkey by limiting its population. Needless to say, the media focus on Uludere is over for the moment.
This is all very smart domestic politics for Erdoğan. While abortion is not such a hot button issue in Turkey as it is in the U.S., taking the stance that he has is a win-win for the prime minister. On the one hand, it is not going to cost him any voters or support since nobody has ever voted for Erdoğan under the illusion that he is a social liberal. In fact, this plays well for his core base of supporters who are socially conservative and economically (neo)liberal; the abortion issue is not going to affect Turkish trade in any meaningful way and it reinforces Erdoğan’s commitment to “traditional” values. In addition, the abortion uproar has been a masterful way for Erdoğan to change the conversation and let him get back to controlling Turkey’s political discourse. Erdoğan’s domination of Turkish politics is no accident and people should not underestimate his political instincts. Using controversy to change the subject, demagoguing opponents, and adopting hardline positions on social issues will be familiar to anyone who follows American politics, and Erdoğan is in many ways an American-style politician. While the Uludere controversy is not dead and buried for good, the recent furor has subsided and it appears that Erdoğan has weathered the storm successfully.
In addition, this whole thing suggests a hardening stance on the Kurdish issue just as the constitutional drafting process is getting underway, which is disappointing to say the least. Erdoğan has held fast to his position that he will not issue an apology over Uludere, and he and members of his government continue to make insulting remarks about the victims and imply that they were connected to the PKK. I and others have noted the importance of dealing with the simmering resentments of Turkey’s Kurdish population in the new constitution by allowing them to become full members of the Turkish polity without forcing them to abandon their language or cultural heritage, and the treatment of Uludere does not inspire confidence that this will be the case. If Erdoğan and the AKP join hands with the MHP in an effort to ram through hardline provisions on the Kurds that do not have the consensus of the entire political spectrum, the new Turkish constitution will eventually come to be as much of an obstacle for Turkey’s further political maturation as the current one.
Turkey Should Revisit Its Kurdish Opening
April 11, 2012 § 3 Comments
Turkey’s heralded “Kurdish Opening” in 2009, in which the Erdoğan government took concrete steps to better integrate Turkey’s Kurds into political and civic life by relaxing restrictions on Kurdish language and culture and even offering an amnesty to PKK members, ended badly. PKK members returning to Turkey openly exhorted Kurds to fight against the government, Kurdish politicians began calling for Kurdish autonomy, and the AKP quickly backed away from its less restrictive policies. I have pointed out before – particularly during last month’s Nevruz unrest – how crucial it is that Turkey resolve its Kurdish issue, since if it does not it will continue to create a drag on Turkey’s political development and embroil the army in a constant low grade war against PKK separatists. As big of a headache that Syria is now causing for Turkey, there exists an opportunity to use the conflict in Syria as a spur to reinvigorate the Kurdish opening and drive a wedge between Turkey’s Kurdish population and the PKK.
As Gonul Tol notes in Foreign Policy, the idea of a Syria-PKK alliance keeps Turkish leaders up at night, and separatist radicalization among Syrian Kurds will spill over into Turkey’s Kurds as well. In addition, the growing refugee crisis and mass migration into Turkey is bound to contain PKK members no matter how hard Turkey tries to keep them out, and the PKK has demonstrated its capacity to rile up Kurds in Diyarkabır province and other areas of southeastern Turkey. Tol’s takeaway from this is that Turkey needs to work especially hard to bring an end to the fighting in Syria, but any regular readers of this blog (to the extent that there are any) know that I don’t think Turkey will ever go so far as to send in its own military, and it has a very limited capacity to force an international response. I think that given the dangerous implications for Turkey with regard to its Kurdish population the longer that Syria’s descent into chaos continues, Turkey needs to be proactive and immediately take concrete steps to mollify the concerns of its Kurds. The only way to blunt the influence of the PKK is to make it clear that Turkey’s Kurds have plenty to gain through the political process and that violent separatists do the Kurdish population no favors.
There are some easy concrete steps that Ankara can take immediately. First, rather than continue to stonewall the parliamentary investigation into the Uludere airstrike that killed 35 civilians in December, the Justice Ministry should cooperate quickly and comprehensively to demonstrate that the government’s fight against the PKK will not adversely affect the Kurdish population in general.
Second, the constant demonization and harassment of the BDP and Kurdish journalists should end and Erdoğan must make clear that the BDP is a legitimate political party like every other party with seats in the parliament. Whether the BDP is the equivalent of Sinn Fein or legitimately a separate entity from the PKK, the bottom line is that the only way to isolate PKK terrorists is to prioritize a political, rather than a military, solution. Erdoğan last week declared that he would be willing to talk with Kurdish politicians who “can stand on their own feet,” but he needs to go further. Once the AKP normalizes its relationship with the BDP, the tensions between the BDP and PKK will quickly come to the surface in a public way, and which way the BDP turns will give the government a good indication of whether or not there is a serious actor willing to go the political route when speaking on behalf of Turkey’s Kurds. Relatedly, imprisoning scores of journalists for “advocating” on behalf of Kurdish autonomy is entirely self-defeating. It turns legitimate activity into criminal activity, and it sullies Turkey’s international reputation while radicalizing Kurdish civilians. Ending what is a poorly considered policy will go a long way toward building good will.
Third, Erdoğan must make sure that the new constitution gives Turkish Kurds full freedom to speak their language, celebrate their culture, and be secure in their Kurdish identity while remaining full Turkish citizens. A sense of comfort and stability in Turkey will stand in stark contrast to what is taking place right across the border in Syria, and the process of writing a new Turkish constitution is a golden opportunity to drive this point home. If Turkey’s Kurds feel that decades of official discrimination are coming to an end, they will be far less likely to sympathize with a violent separatist movement that feeds on Kurdish resentment.
Turkey is gearing up for its fighting season against the PKK, and it should pursue the PKK with all military means at its disposal. If Ankara wants to avoid a larger problem and contain Syrian blowback among its civilian Kurds, however, it needs to pair the military offensive with a goodwill offensive. This is both the ideal time to do so and an absolutely necessary time to do so with Syria quickly exploding. Bringing back and further extending the short-lived Kurdish opening of 2009 is the only way to deal with the problem at its root, and doing so will stabilize Turkish society and begin to roll back support for the PKK by presenting a real alternative to Kurdish separatism.
