What Will Happen After Turkey’s Elections on Sunday
June 4, 2015 § 7 Comments
When Turkish voters go to the polls this Sunday, it will mark the end of what has been an interminable 15 month long election cycle in Turkey encompassing municipal elections, a presidential election, and finally parliamentary elections. This would be have been taxing under the best of circumstances, but given the factors involved – including but not limited to the transition of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from prime minister to president, the fate of Erdoğan’s desired constitutional overhaul and prospective presidential system, the pending forced retirement of term-limited AKP legislators, the ongoing fallout from the Syrian civil war, the Kurdish peace process hanging on by a thread, the increasingly nationalist tone of the government following the 2013 Gezi protests, the war between the AKP and its former Gülenist allies, worsening assaults on freedom of speech and expression, and allegations of rampant AKP corruption – the last 15 months have been rough on Turkish society and Turkey’s political system, to say the least. Many of my Turkish friends are eager for Sunday’s election to be behind them and hope that this will mark a turning point of some sort that puts an end to what has been a volatile time by any measure.
Despite this fervent wish, not only are the parliamentary elections unlikely to bring much stability, but there is a significant likelihood that the immediate and medium-term aftermath will be even stormier than the past couple of years. There are too many variables in play that hinge on the election’s results, and many of them will create chaos irrespective of the outcome. Rather than do a deep dive into what the actual outcome of the elections themselves will be – for that you can read excellent previews from Carnegie Europe, the Center for American Progress, and my friend Aaron Stein, and your first and last source for polling and polling analysis should be the indispensable James in Turkey blog – I thought I’d highlight some issues to watch out for that are main drivers of Turkish political volatility and that will be magnified in the election’s aftermath.
The most immediately pressing issue is the role of Turkish Kurds going forward. The outcome of the election will primarily hinge on the success or failure of the Kurdish HDP in passing the 10% vote threshold – the world’s highest such threshold – that is required for a party to sit in the Grand National Assembly, and nearly everything that happens is going to follow from this result. When the last legal polls were published last week (publishing polls is prohibited within ten days of the election), the HDP was hovering between 10.2% and 10.6%. For comparison’s sake, the HDP’s candidate in the presidential election, Selahattin Demirtaş, received 9.76%, which surprised most observers as he was not expected to do so well, and most analysts attributed his success to his personal appeal rather than to the party’s. Demirtaş is the party leader and is thus the public face of the HDP for this election as well, but he needs to improve his party’s performance by pulling off two difficult maneuvers that are diametrically opposed. He has to simultaneously attract disaffected liberals who voted for the AKP or CHP in past elections and attract religiously conservative Kurds who voted for the AKP in 2002, 2007, and 2011. Without siphoning off voters in both of these groups, the 10% threshold is going to be hard to crack as there is not a large enough base for the party to rely on its traditional Kurdish supporters alone. While I hope that the HDP makes it into the Assembly since it represents a new and important voice, my gut tells me that it will not. Aside from having a tough uphill climb, it is operating in an environment in which the AKP has an enormous incentive to ensure that the HDP does not make it in (more on that below) and is close enough to the 10% line that some well placed election fraud – such as occurred in last year’s municipal elections – will guarantee that it falls short.
If this happens, Turkey is going to experience protests and unrest on a scale that equals and likely surpasses those that rocked the country during the Gezi protests of June 2013. The southeast of the country, where the majority of Turkey’s Kurds reside, is going to be a disaster zone, since it will be impossible to convince Kurds that the HDP lost fair and square. Turkish Kurds are highly distrustful of the government and believe that the government has been supporting ISIS in an effort to stamp out Kurdish nationalism. Kurds blame the government for not actively aiding Kurdish fighters in the fight against ISIS for the Syrian town of Kobane and for preventing the fighters from being resupplied, and this resentment is not one that will merely linger and eventually dissipate. Kurds also see the handwriting on the wall of a potential coalition between the AKP and the ultra-nationalist MHP if the AKP does not receive enough seats to form a government outright, and such a result will mean the cessation of any conciliatory moves in the name of the Kurdish peace process. In short, Turkish Kurds believe that the government has sold them out and will continue to do so in the future, and if the HDP does not receive a high enough vote share on Sunday, there is going to be unrest on a mass scale. It will also raise the question of how Kurds fit into Turkey’s political system, since the decision by the HDP to run as a party rather than as independents signals a Kurdish desire to renounce violence and separatism, and to work within the confines of Turkish politics. If this gesture is rebuffed in a way that convinces Kurds that the government is fraudulently trying to keep them out, it will be a terrible squandering of a historic moment in relations between Kurds and the Turkish state. It will tell Kurds that their grievances will never be redressed through politics, and it will empower the PKK and those who are inclined toward terrorism and separatism, unleashing a new round of violence similar to that which racked Turkey in the 1990s.
If the HDP does not crack the threshold, Kurds are not the only ones who will be upset. HDP votes will be reapportioned, with the AKP receiving most of them as the largest overall vote getter and the only other party that receives votes in the HDP’s stronghold of southeastern Turkey, and this could boost the AKP’s share to a 3/5 supermajority of 330 seats (the party currently has 311). This matters because Erdoğan’s single-minded focus since becoming president last summer has been on remaking Turkey’s political system into a presidential one, and 330 seats is the number he needs in order to submit a new constitution to a referendum. It is for this reason that he needs the HDP to fall short of the magic 10% number, and without that happening, not only is his dream of an empowered presidency dead in the water, the AKP is not guaranteed to reach the 276 seats it needs to form a government outright and may be forced to form a coalition for the first time since coming to power in 2002. The incentive for the party and for Erdoğan personally is to suppress the HDP’s vote, which is why both Erdoğan – who is constitutionally not allowed to campaign for any party and is prohibited from being a party member, but who in reality is still the de facto leader of the AKP – and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu have been striking hard at the HDP and Demirtaş every chance they get. The prospect of an even more powerful President Erdoğan terrifies many non-AKP supporters, which is why if the HDP does not make it into the parliament, protests and unrest will not be limited to Kurds and southeastern Turkey. Anecdotally, there are a not insignificant number of erstwhile CHP supporters who are planning to vote for the HDP, and Istanbul and Izmir are likely to erupt should the AKP receive a supermajority on the back of a failed HDP bid. If I am right about the HDP ultimately falling short, Turkey is going to be in for a long and contentious summer, with all of the now-familiar scenes that have accompanied recent summers – tear gas, TOMA water cannons, police beating protestors, and mass arrests on vague and undefined terrorism charges.
Even if the HDP does garner 10%, another prevailing source of instability will be the continuing unraveling and unpredictability of Erdoğan, whose behavior has become nuttier as time goes on. If he does not get his presidential system, he is not going to react well to what will be his first real loss in over a decade, and for a guy used to getting what he wants – thousand room palaces, gilded drinking glasses, having his spy chief remain in his post despite said spy chief resigning and announcing a run for parliament – this will be a new reality for him. Erdoğan has built an independent power base of advisers and sycophants that make up a parallel government and that Turks now refer to in shorthand as “the Palace” and he intends to use it. If his presidential dreams are dashed, there is no telling what he will do and to what lengths he will go to try and get what he wants, but one can guarantee that whatever he does will be divisive and damaging to Turkish democracy, which as Erik Meyersson points out, is hanging on by a thread as it is even in the context of the very elections that purportedly legitimate Turkey as democratic. The perpetuation of Turkey’s current parliamentary system also means that the maneuvering between Erdoğan and the Palace on the one hand and Davutoğlu and the prime minister’s office on the other will continue, with jockeying between the dueling power bases. The AKP is already divided between the two camps, as personified by the spat between deputy prime minister and co-AKP founder Bülent Arınç and Ankara mayor “Mad” Melih Gökçek, and a setback for the prospective presidential system is not going to end this fight. It will continue to divide the AKP and prolong the Twilight Zone aspect of nobody knowing who is actually in charge and whether Erdoğan or Davutoğlu is running the country and the party. So long as the party controlling the government is unstable – and the AKP is as unstable as it has ever been – it is going to filter down into every aspect of governance, and while it may lead to the AKP’s downfall, which many will welcome, it may also lead to chaos for Turkey itself.
If the HDP does not get enough votes and the AKP does get to 330, this does not guarantee stability either. While Erdoğan has cowed dissident party members for years, there is significant dissension in the ranks. There is no guarantee that the AKP will march forward in lockstep toward unlimited Erdoğan despotism, and certainly the other parties are not going to lay down quietly without a fight. There will be nastiness ahead during the struggle over the terms of the new constitution within the Assembly, and then the real fighting will take place in the run-up to the referendum. As bad as things have been during the perpetual campaign of the past year and a half, it will be that much worse during the campaigning over the very future of Turkey’s political system. The talk of lobbies – Jewish, Armenian, interest rate, Greek, robot, preacher’s, blood, chaos, gay, atheist, and Alevi are among Erdoğan’s greatest hits – and foreign conspiracies will only intensify as Erdoğan seeks to paint all of his opponents as enemies not of him but of the “New Turkey” and of Turkish progress. If you think what has come up until now has been bad, just wait for what comes once Erdoğan really turns on the afterburners.
Finally, there is the question of whether the end of this seemingly perpetual election season will restore some stability to Turkey’s foreign policy and its relations with its once and future allies. There is certainly an argument to be made that if Turkey has some space to strategically reorient itself with regard to the U.S. and to the Middle East, it will undo some of the damage that has been done. Unfortunately, while Turkish domestic politics and the over-the-top rhetoric that has served the government’s domestic political needs have contributed to its foreign policy disarray, I don’t think that the end of Erdoğan and the AKP’s permanent campaign mode is going to be enough. Jon Schanzer and Merve Tahiroğlu take a quick glance around the region and convincingly argue that Ankara’s isolation is a permanent feature rather than a bug of its quest for regional dominance given the constraints under which it operates. I myself argued in World Politics Review earlier this week that Turkey’s relationship with Israel is doomed to the status quo for the indefinite future, and despite the nascent cooperation between the U.S. and Turkey on training and arming a subset of Syrian rebels, there is too much dividing the two countries for the relationship to be as robust as it appeared during President Obama’s first term. As much as Turkey is trying to create a new normal for itself in its neighborhood, its efforts can only go so far.
In sum, whatever happens on Sunday, Turkey is not about to enter a newly stable period. Turkish politics are in flux in ways that haven’t been seen in decades, Turkish society is reaching a boiling point, alarm bells are going off all over the economy, and Turkey is involving itself in proxy wars all over the Middle East. While it would be nice to chalk up the last couple of years to the constant electioneering, the fact is that Turkey is in a bad place, and nobody can confidently predict that it will get better with the advent of a new government.
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?
Checking In On The Turkish PM Race
June 3, 2014 § 9 Comments
Despite my instincts that Prime Minister Erdoğan was going to decide that it is better to be a super-empowered prime minister than the Turkish president under the current constitutional configuration, it seems pretty clear at this point that he has his sights trained on the Çankaya Palace. The AKP has officially announced that it is not going to change its internal party regulations to allow MPs who have served three terms to run for a fourth, which means that Erdoğan will be term limited out and will thus seek the presidency. There is no doubt that Erdoğan will win and become the first directly elected Turkish president, and there is also little doubt that he will transform the presidency as he sees fit from a traditionally apolitical office with few real powers into something far different. The more interesting question that remains is who will replace Erdoğan as prime minister, and the answer to that is a lot murkier.
Due to the AKP’s three-terms-and-out rule, 73 AKP parliamentarians are unable to stand for election again and the list is a rundown of nearly all of the party heavyweights. Bülent Arınç, Bekir Bozdağ, Ali Babacan, Ömer Çelik, etc. The A team, that founded the party and shepherded it through three consecutive electoral victories, is out, and that leaves precious few suitable candidates to replace Erdoğan. It will have to be someone who has some modicum of name recognition and influence, but also someone whom Erdoğan can control. To the best of my calculations, there are two people who fit the bill and who are not subject to the term limit conundrum.
The first, and most obvious one, is Ahmet Davutoğlu. There is no question that he has a burning ambition to move on to bigger and better things, and his standing as a candidate for election in 2011 – after being appointed foreign minister despite not being a member of the Grand National Assembly – was a signal that he knew he would need to be more involved politically if he hoped to replace his patron. In many ways, Davutoğlu is the ego (in more ways than one) to Erdoğan’s id, tamping down some of the prime minister’s more rash instincts and never failing to parrot what Erdoğan is saying but putting it in a more favorable light. Whatever the level of outrageousness that Erdoğan is spouting, Davutoğlu always has a ready explanation for what the prime minister actually meant, and he has also shown a willingness to play the attack dog and go on the offensive. Like the prime minister, he always has a scolding lecture handy for those who challenge him. Because he is more reserved and far less willing to reveal whatever he happens to be thinking at any given moment though, Davutoğlu is in some ways more predictable that Erdoğan but in other ways less so, and he is similar to Abdullah Gül in that he plays better with foreign audiences. I once sat through a Davutoğlu lecture at Georgetown where he was at his most charming and dissembling best, and by the end the dean of the School of Foreign Service had literally offered him a position as a professor whenever he was ready to leave the Foreign Ministry. The downside to Erdoğan handing the reins to Davutoğlu is that he might be too ambitious; while he has never publicly displayed any willingness to challenge Erdoğan in any way and has been nothing but the loyal servant, he might very well act differently once prime minister and be less willing to defer to Erdoğan on any and all subjects.
The other plausible candidate is Numan Kurtulmuş, who is far less known to those outside of Turkey. Kurtulmuş and Erdoğan rose up together through the ranks of the Fazilet Party, but split after Fazilet was banned by the Constitutional Court and dissolved, with Kurtulmuş joining with the hardliners to found Saadet and Erdoğan going on to found the AKP. After he was ousted from Saadet, Kurtulmuş formed the HSP – known colloquially as HAS, meaning pure – and then merged HAS with the AKP in July 2012. Unlike Davutoğlu, Kurtulmuş has the street cred that comes from having been part of the crowd around Necmettin Erbakan and the old Islamist parties, and he has a devoted following among Turkish religious conservatives. When the AKP absorbed HAS two years ago, I wrote the following:
There is speculation that the reason Erdoğan has now invited HAS into the fold has to do more with Kurtulmuş than with HAS itself. As he announced yesterday,Erdoğan is only going to run as AKP leader one more time, which means that he needs a way to remain as the dominant figure within his party. While everyone anticipates that the new constitution spearheaded by the AKP will transform Turkey into a presidential system and that Erdoğan will run to be Turkey’s first newly powerful president, that does not mean that his path forward is completely clear. Should Turkey’s current president, Abdullah Gül, make a bid to be PM, then Erdoğan will have a serious and credible rival standing opposite him within his own party. Gül is a popular politician, a serious thinker, and less divisive than Erdoğan, and it is unclear that a President Erdoğan would be able to dominate a Prime Minister Gül. Kurtulmuş, on the other hand, is another story. He is exactly the type of PM that a President Erdoğan would want, since he is pliable and less likely to seek to carve out an independent power base from which to challenge Erdoğan. In fact, when the HAS Party was formed, some of its members were concerned that Kurtulmuş was not tough enough and that his lack of an “authoritarian mentality” would be a weakness compared to the leaders of other parties. Should HAS merge with the AKP, and all signs so far point to this happening, look for Kurtulmuş to slowly emerge as Erdoğan’s favored candidate to replace him as PM.
I don’t think that Gül is going to try and become prime minister, but the rest of the analysis still holds true. Kurtulmuş seems like precisely the type of PM that Erdoğan could manipulate as president, and who would not protest once Erdoğan begins to expand the powers of his new office and infringe upon the prerogatives that belong to his old office. The question is whether Erdoğan actually trusts Kurtulmuş after their years apart, and to that I have no answer. With the presidential race not in doubt though, how the prime ministry shapes up is what all of those interested in the inside baseball of Turkish politics will be watching as the summer progresses.
If You Ban Twitter And Everyone Ignores It, Does It Have An Effect?
March 21, 2014 § 5 Comments
Governments that ban social media platforms under the flimsy justification of them being national security threats are not democracies. Prime ministers who say things like, “I don’t care what the international community says, everyone will witness the power of the Republic of Turkey” sound more like Emperor Palpatine or Bond villains and not like democratic leaders. Cabinet officials who received Fulbright scholarships to study in the U.S. and have MBAs from schools like Northwestern and call shutting off access to Twitter the better of a series of bad options are nothing but toadies of an autocratic prime minister who has ceased functioning in a rational manner.
When you shut down Twitter and yet the president of your country, your deputy prime minister, and other elected officials in your party nevertheless circumvent your attempted ban, it not only shows how out of touch you are with reality, but what a laughingstock you are becoming. It also shows you to be sadly incompetent. When you shut down Twitter ten days before elections in a transparent effort to control the flow of information, you are a menace to your own citizens and the principles of free speech, liberalism, and democracy.
The worst part of all of this is that it will likely have zero measurable effect on the upcoming local elections, as AKP supporters at this point have gone into hear no evil, see no evil mode, and have genuinely convinced themselves that everything Tayyip Erdoğan and his government are doing is in the service of fighting for Turkish democracy. Even if the Twitter shutdown did convince people to cast their votes elsewhere, a government that does this sort of thing is unlikely to be reluctant to take other more insidious measures when it comes to ensuring that the vote goes their way.
The best part of all of this is that Turks are not taking this lying down, and are tweeting, mocking their dear leader, and defacing AKP elections posters with Erdoğan’s visage by painting on them the numbers for the DNS server that allows Turkish Twitters users to bypass the ban. Many Turks are not willing to let Erdoğan dictate to them what they can or cannot do, and that is a very heartening thing to see. If there is another silver lining to this, it is that any remaining reticence in Western capitals to see Erdoğan for what he has become should be gone for good. The prime minister’s decade-old comment about democracy being a train that you ride until you are ready to disembark has never seemed more salient.
The final point to note here is that Erdoğan, whose political instincts used to be top notch, appears to have badly miscalculated this time. The courts are denying that they issued any shutdown orders, other countries and NGOs are criticizing him left and right, and the economy has taken yet another dip in response to his latest move. Even if the local elections at the end of the month go the AKP’s way, Erdoğan’s own political viability has never been more in question. He may have some more tricks up his sleeve, but it is difficult to envision how Erdoğan ever recovers the colossal stature he had only a couple of short years ago.
This Is What A Panicked Erdoğan Looks Like
December 26, 2013 § 8 Comments
I said last week that I thought things were inevitably destined to get uglier, and it seems that uglier has arrived. The latest from the AKP-Gülen fallout is that over 500 Turkish police officials and officers have been sacked, investigations have been launched into Prime Minister Erdoğan’s sons Bilal and Bürak along with the newly government-appointed Istanbul police chief, the chief prosecutor in the corruption case has publicly claimed that the government is obstructing his case by ordering the police not to arrest suspects and not to implement judicial decrees, and, in the biggest sign of just how much things have gone off the rails, Erdoğan last night replaced ten cabinet members at once. There is now no question left that this is the biggest crisis by far of the AKP’s time in power and that it overshadows Gezi by orders of magnitude.
If anyone still harbors any doubts that this is an AKP-Gülen fight, those doubts can be put to rest. After the initial arrests and announcements of corruption probes, Erdoğan purposely went after one of the Gülenists’ strongholds in replacing high-ranking police officials wholesale. What is now happening is a showdown between prosecutors, who are still largely Gülenist, and newly appointed police who refuse to carry out the prosecutors’ orders. Any semblance of impartiality and rule of law on either side has been completely thrown out, and Turkish institutions are being harmed in ways that will take years to overcome. When the courts and the police are being used to further nakedly political agendas, it is the first and easiest sign that Turkish democracy is as hollow as it has been since the military was openly running things. How this is going to eventually be sorted out I have no idea, but at this point neither side appears willing to back down and each day brings a new escalation.
Were this the only element to this, I’d put my money on Erdoğan emerging from this bloodied but still standing. However, the earth shattering cabinet shuffle, how it was done, and how Erdoğan assembled his new cabinet lead me to believe that the prime minister is in very serious trouble. In fact, this is the first time it has ever crossed my mind that his tenure as PM is legitimately in danger. First there is the fact that in the span of just a couple of days, Erdoğan went from denouncing any and all allegations of wrongdoing as a foreign plot to accepting the resignations of the three ministers he had been defending so wholeheartedly. Of the three, his closest ally was Erdoğan Bayraktar, who on his way out revealed that he was not resigning of his own free will but had been fired, and – this one is the real shocker – threw Erdoğan under the bus by alleging that any corruption in construction deals had been signed off on by Erdoğan and called on him to resign. For those of you who do not follow Turkey as obsessively as others, high level AKP officials simply do not publicly challenge Erdoğan like that. To put this in context, deputy PM Bülent Arınç made front-page headlines last month when he criticized Erdoğan’s stance on mixed-sex university housing and said that there was a contradiction between his own statements on the issue as the official government spokesman and the PM’s position. That was about the harshest public disagreement I can ever recall seeing between Erdoğan and one of his cabinet members or inner circle. Now, one of his closest cabinet allies has called on him to resign and implicitly accused him of wrongdoing. In addition, the previous interior minister, Idris Şahin, resigned from the party over the police purge and after accusing Erdoğan of allowing a small oligarchy to run the party. While this might be sour grapes due to his being replaced in the last cabinet shuffle earlier this year, it is still another crack in what up until now has been an impenetrable dam. Bayraktar made his comments during a live interview on NTV, which tried to cut him off and then later edited the interview clip on its website and during subsequent airings on television so that Bayraktar’s comments about Erdoğan were absent. That Turkish cabinet ministers now have to be censored because of comments they have made about the prime minister, and particularly when it is a minister known to be close to him, is one sign that the AKP is right now floundering around without much of an idea how to right itself.
Another sign is that it wasn’t just the three ministers whose sons have been implication in corruption who were shown the door. Egemen Bağış, who was EU Affairs minister and who is one of Erdoğan’s closest confidantes and attack dogs, and who often provides a window through his comments into what the prime minister is actually thinking, was removed as well, which to me is the most illuminating part of this entire episode. There have been rumors floating around about Bağış’s role in the scandal and about videotapes of him accepting seven figure bribes, but jettisoning him under pressure is still a remarkable move given his proximity to the prime minister. Furthermore, the new cabinet ministers are only going to make the AKP’s political problem worse, because instead of appointing people who might be more conciliatory, Erdoğan appears to have doubled down in appointing close allies with not much political experience and who are known hardliners. As a representative example, new Interior Minister Efkan Ala is not a member of parliament but is rather one of Erdoğan’s political aides, and reportedly urged Erdoğan to crack down harder on Gezi protestors this summer, calling the Istanbul chief of police to cajole him to use greater force. This is the guy who is now going to be in charge of Turkish domestic security and dealing with unrest, which signals to me that Erdoğan is in full panic mode and not thinking clearly. Once the public becomes more involved in this ongoing saga, things are going to get even worse, and I fear that what we have seen so far is just the warmup act to much more unpleasantness ahead.
All the while, Erdoğan’s comments and the comments of those around him increasingly beggar belief. Whether it is veiled threats to expel the U.S. ambassador, the by now rote accusations of U.S. and Israeli perfidy, the denunciation of foreign plots, Erdoğan’s claiming that photos of ministers accepting bags from businessmen implicated in the corruption scandal could be bags of books or chocolate rather than money (yes, he really said both of those things), Ahmet Davutoğlu’s tired refrain that this is all resulting from the jealousy of unnamed foreign countries determined to keep the new Turkey down…does any of this sound like it is coming from a government that has things under control? Let’s also keep in mind that this is all going down before large-scale or widespread public protests have broken out, and if Erdoğan already felt so much pressure that he was backed into turning over his cabinet in the middle of the night, just think about what will happen once real mass public pressure begins to bubble up. The AKP is shockingly off-message and has gone into full-blown populism mode, but with everything that has gone on and the implicit acknowledgement with the cabinet shuffle that all is not right, I think that Erdoğan might actually have suffered a fatal political wound. If the AKP does worse than expected in the local elections in March, which is a very likely possibility, it seems to me that Erdoğan’s aura of invincibility and stranglehold on his party will be permanently broken. Once that happens the long knives are bound to come out, and with the perfectly acceptable alternative of Abdullah Gül waiting in the wings, Erdoğan’s tenure as the sun around which Turkish politics revolves (to quote my friend Steven Cook) may be done. While I have learned enough to know that Erdoğan should never, ever be counted out or underestimated, we may have finally arrived at the exception to this longstanding rule of Turkish politics.
Graft, Gülen, and the Future of the AKP
December 17, 2013 § 10 Comments
For months now there has been open war between the AKP and its erstwhile allies in the Gülen movement. The feuding can be traced back to an overzealous Gülenist prosecutor’s attempt to interrogate Turkish intelligence chief Hakan Fidan, and things have spiraled downward from there, with Gülenist media outlets such as Zaman now routinely slamming the prime minister and government officials making shadowy threats about the Gülen movement having to be put down. When the government announced a couple of months ago that it was going to shut down the largely Gülen-run prep schools called dershanes, things began to get really nasty, and despite Tayyip Erdoğan’s eventual partial walk back, in which he announced that nothing would be done about the dershanes until September 2015, this was an effort to strike directly at the Gülenists’ livelihood, which they could not simply ignore. The aftermath of the dershane fight saw all sorts of uncomfortable leaks about the government, including the revelation – that the government did not deny – that back in 2004, the Turkish National Security Council had issued a directive (signed by Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül) that plans should be made to counter and block the Gülen movement. While deputy PM Bülen Arınç and others immediately claimed that the directive was only advisory and was never implemented, the damage was done and the fighting between the top layers of the AKP and the Gülenists was fated to keep on escalating.
That brings us to today, when Turkish police arrested nearly 50 people at Halkbank, including the sons of two cabinet ministers, over corruption allegations in the government tender process. Halkbank has long been reputed to be actively involved in evading U.S. sanction on Iran, and indeed is the bank that processes Turkish payments for Iranian oil and gas, so it is highly likely that this probe is not based on fictitious charges. Nevertheless, it does not escape notice that the Turkish police and judiciary are dominated by Gülenists, and that the Istanbul prosecutor’s office has now arrested a number of people who are prominently connected to the government. Given the timing involved, this does not seem like a mere coincidence. I’ll also note that this fight has been taking place on the margins for awhile (in June 2012 I speculated that a split was coming, and I think that my hunch about who had tapped the PM’s office was likely correct in light of recent events).
Parsing what exactly is going on here is difficult, but I’ll take a stab at it nonetheless. The first big mystery is why Erdoğan decided to take a conflict that had been going along at a barely perceptible simmer and turn it into a huge conflagration with his aborted move against the dershanes. My hunch is that after three national elections in which each subsequent margin of victory was larger than the previous one, Erdoğan decided it was time to flex his muscles and show the Gülenists – who are in many ways natural rivals given their own Islamic, conservative backgrounds and tendencies – who was boss. In doing so, Erdoğan made a mistaken political calculation to rival the mistake he made in his approach to Gezi. If you need proof of this, think about how the conversation a few months ago was about who Erdoğan was going to install as a puppet PM after he assumes the presidency, and now it’s about whether he will be able to control his own party. Because Erdoğan never admits wrongdoing and loathes backing down, this feud was destined to get worse, and my bet is that it will get even worse still. Erdoğan is not going to crawl into a corner and lick his wounds, and I’d bet my last Turkish lira that the fallout from this will get uglier yet. As of this writing, Erdoğan is putting together a board that will have the power to fire prosecutors, which is a direct shot across the bow at the Gülenists.
The second big mystery is what the Gülenists hope to get out of this. There are some who think that the electoral alliance between the AKP and the Gülen movement is now over, but I’m not so quick to declare this marriage completely spent. I don’t see that the Gülenists have anywhere else to go; are socially conservative, religiously pious, pro-growth voters suddenly going to abandon the socially conservative, religiously pious, pro-growth party and vote for CHP? The same CHP that in public and in private denigrates religious voters, or that is so closely associated with the institution – the military – that is the Gülen movement’s biggest foe? I find it very difficult to see a situation in which that is a long term or even sustainable short term political solution for Gülen adherents. I think what is going on here is a struggle to take over the AKP rather than cast it aside now that the Gülenists are feeling personally threatened by past and present government decisions. Based on what I observe, the calculation seems to be to weaken the party ahead of municipal elections in March to the point where some important posts, such as the Istanbul mayoralty, are lost, and make the AKP higher ups realize that they risk losing a great deal if they so blithely cast the Gülenists aside. At the same time, the Gülenists seem to want to do whatever they can to destroy AKP officials or keep them under their thumb, which explains the rumors flying around now about AKP ministers on tape accepting 7 figure bribes and the Halkbank prosecutions. I don’t think the intention here is to break away from the AKP, but to more thoroughly control the AKP.
The great danger in all of this, of course, is that once things get too far out of hand, there is no going back. The Gülen movement may want to show how valuable/powerful they are in an effort to control the party, but the law of unintended consequences always rears its head and may end up blowing up the party instead. Similarly, Erdoğan may want to put the Gülen movement in what he views as its proper place while keeping them in the fold, and instead could prompt his own downfall. There is just no telling where all of this will lead, and neither party seems to want to back down or deescalate in any way. Both the AKP and the Cemaat may have a final aim in mind and think they know how to get there, but the environment right now is amazingly combustible and volatile. Each side is playing a very dangerous game of chicken, and anyone who claims to know precisely how this will end is much wiser than I. But stay tuned, because this is a battle of epic proportions whose chaos has the potential to overwhelm everything else taking place in Turkey.
When It Comes To Freedom Of Speech, Turkey Is Still All Talk
December 17, 2012 § 1 Comment
It looks like the attention being paid to Turkey’s abysmal record on speech issues has finally created enough noise to get the government to sit up and take notice. Deputy PM Bülent Arınç said on Saturday that there is a draft law in the works that will change the Anti-Terror Law, which criminalizes making “propaganda” on behalf of a terrorist organization, to have “propaganda” be interpreted more loosely. According to Arınç, he does not want to see any journalists in jail, and he claimed that this issue has been discussed in cabinet meetings and should be resolved soon, although he did not hesitate to add that no parties save the BDP want to see the Anti-Terrorism Law scrapped entirely.
The good news here is that it appears that the efforts of NGOs to highlight the detestable state of press freedom in Turkey are having an effect. Arınç cited the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Press Institute, both of whom recently have called out Ankara for jailing journalists. When the CPJ issued its report in October, I was critical of the organization for not calling attention to this issue sooner and for actually providing cover to Turkey in the past by downplaying the scope of the problem. Thankfully Ankara is sufficiently worried about the CPJ report to feel the need to address it publicly, which is why Arınç was trotted out there to talk about how terrible it is for even one journalist to be wrongly imprisoned. If the Turkish government didn’t feel some heat over this issue, it would still be doing what it did when the report was released in October, which is try to sweep the whole thing under the table.
Nevertheless, I am highly skeptical that Arınç’s public relations offensive represents a genuine move to ameliorate Turkey’s draconian treatment of the press. It is difficult to imagine that Prime Minister Erdoğan and his cabinet are seriously considering amending the Anti-Terrorism Law to make it easier for journalists to report on Kurdish issues and to criticize the government at the same time that Erdoğan is calling for the creators of a soap opera to be prosecuted because he doesn’t like the way they are portraying Ottomans sultans, or when members of his government are introducing bills to not only ban the show but to educate Turkish filmmakers on proper Turkish values and morals. On the one hand, the AKP wants to shut down any speech that it finds objectionable in any way at all, and the on the other hand it wants you to believe that it is going to loosen restrictions on speech that it has long claimed to be a security threat that is equivalent to terrorism. It also beggars belief that Erdoğan is considering any real amendments to Articles 6 and 7 of the terrorism law at the same time that dozens of Kurdish politicians are being arrested under these very same provisions and the prime minister is trying to strip BDP deputies of their parliamentary immunity. That Arınç can even say with a straight face that he has a draft of a revised law on his desk and that he hopes it can be passed soon when the campaign to sweep up even more people under these very same articles he claims to want to revise is being prosecuted with even greater ferocity is outrageous. It’s as if the government thinks people have no capacity to independently judge what is taking place, and that everyone should just trust that they will do the right thing despite having no track record worthy of garnering trust.
Furthermore, Arınç’s claim that the law is going to be reinterpreted is a specious one even if you set aside the government’s recent actions. As noted above, after saying that the government was going to relax the law, he made it very clear that the law is here to stay, that all parties other than the Kurdish BDP support it, and that propaganda is going to remain a crime if it lauds terrorism or violence. So, based on Arınç’s interpretation of things, right now Turkey has a law on the books which it uses to throw journalists in prison by claiming that their reporting has supported terrorism, and after these alleged revisions that the government is debating, Turkey will still have a law on the books that will allow it throw journalists in prison by claiming that their reporting has supported terrorism. I fail to see what Arınç claims is going to be tangibly changed aside from a loose promise to reinterpret the word propaganda, which is a meaningless and empty promise if the law as it is currently written is not significantly altered or done away with. In short, given the government’s continuing assault on free speech of all varieties and arrests of Kurdish journalists and politicians, there is little reason for anyone to trust that Arınç means what he says. Until the Erdoğan government takes some actual steps toward relaxing its restrictions on speech, its rhetoric and promises on this issue will remain hollow and meaningless.
