For the fifth time in four years, the Republic of Turkey is going to the polls for a pivotal election.
In August 2014, Turkey went to the polls to directly elect their president. In previous years, a parliamentary vote elected the Turkish President, a mostly ceremonial position which was far less powerful than that of the Prime Minister's office. That rule was changed, however, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was popularly elected with 51.7% of the vote, decisively beating out cross-party candidate Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu's 38.4% and Kurdish representative Selahattin Demirtaş' 9.7%.
Two elections were held in 2015. The first, in June, pushed Erdoğan's right-wing Islamist Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, down to 40.87% of the vote, enough for a plurality but short of a majority in the Grand National Assembly. The center-left Kemalist Republican People's Party (CHP) placed second with 25.98% of the vote, while the smaller far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and left-wing Kurdish-interest People's Democratic Party (HDP) picked up 16.29% and 13.12% of the vote.
Coalition negotiations were vigorous but ultimately fruitless, highlighting the polarization between Turkey's four major parties. The AKP refused to govern in a minority government. Negotiations for a unity government between the AKP and CHP broke down. The HDP and MHP both refused to enter into coalition with the AKP. A CHP-MHP minority coalition with "outside support" from the HDP was rejected by the MHP.
A second election was called for November, and the results were a return to the status quo. Despite the predictions pointing towards little change in the result from June and another hung parliament, the AKP rebounded from its weak showing in June as it managed to push some MHP and HDP voters back into its camp while the CHP very, very slightly improved its vote total.
In 2017, Turkey voted on a national referendum that aimed to change the parliamentary democracy system to a presidential system similar to that of the United States, France and Brazil. It was widely considered among President Erdoğan's critics to be a consolidation of power and another move towards authoritarianism in the already-fragile Turkish democracy. The referendum very narrowly passed 51.4% to 48.6% and seemed to unite many of the anti-Erdoğan factions: secular social democrats, far-right nationalists, and Kurds. Despite the MHP's support for the changes proposed in the referendum, many MHP voters spurned their party's official campaign and voted against the referendum.
Turkey's next election was originally scheduled for November 3rd, 2019. On April 18th, however, President Erdoğan, echoing his recently-turned allies in the MHP headed by Devlet Bahçeli, called for an earlier election. Yet Erdoğan took it one step further than Bahçeli and decided to move the elections up from November 2019 to June of 2018, two months earlier than Bahçeli's proposal for August 2018.
The direct election of the Turkish President in these upcoming elections has brought a new face and a new party into the forefront. Meral Akşener, a former member of Parliament from the MHP, founded the Good (İyi) Party in October 2017. The İyi Party in practice seems to be a more moderate nationalist party, a center-right counterpart to the center-left Republican People's Party, and an alternative for disillusioned MHP members who dislike their party's alliance with the AKP. Indeed, soon after its creation, four MHP MPs and a CHP MP defected from their parties and became members of the Good Party.
Meral Akşener is a fascinating, seasoned and charismatic figure. She is a practicing Muslim, but does not wear a headscarf and her party praises the secular governmental framework championed by Turkey's venerated founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. According to The Economist, she frequently is heard "peppering her speeches with wisecracks and jokes." In direct presidential polls, she trails Erdoğan, but not by much. Her campaign is also somewhat of a crusade against the bloated, corrupt and ineffective establishment in Turkey which has frustrated many who are sick of Erdoğan, in power since 2002. While Akşener's political career is not young, she has experienced a political revival with her vigorous campaigning against the constitutional referendum in 2017 and her break from the MHP.
Now that the President of Turkey is a position set to take on more power than it had before, the campaign has become one of considerable interest. Erdoğan has not formally declared his candidacy, but likely will do so soon under the People's Alliance, a coalition between the AKP and MHP. In a way, this may be a admittance of weakness as the MHP's alliance with AKP and the rise of Meral Akşener has split MHP voters. Parliamentary representation for political parties in Turkey relies on surpassing a threshold of 10%, which the MHP would have trouble attaining without allying with Erdoğan. Members of Parliament are also not going to be able to run for both a seat in the Grand National Assembly and the Presidency.
Meral Akşener herself looked like she may have had to run as an independent due to a technicality regarding the Iyi Party's being too young to stand in the Parliamentary election, but in a show of solidarity, fifteen MPs from the CHP changed over to the Iyi Party, securing her ability to run as a member of her new party and her party's ability to elect representatives. The center-left CHP has two candidates who have declared interest so far: Didem Engin and Öztürk Yılmaz. The party's leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, previously said he would not run for president, but that may change as the campaign jump-starts over the next month. Polls indicate that Erdoğan will likely win the first round, but unlike in 2014, he will probably have to head to a second-round runoff, most likely against Akşener.
Akşener has one difficult problem standing in her way, however: the Kurds. As a former member of the MHP, Turkey's Kurdish population is unlikely to rally to her cause, and some of the more conservative Muslim Kurds may support Erdoğan over her. Aksener was a supporter of the Turkish military operation in Afrin in northern Syria, a Kurdish enclave which offered little resistance. While Aksener is critical of Erdoğan, she is still nationalistic and may continue Turkey's involvement in Syria against the enclave that the Kurds in Syria have carved out for themselves. While the Syrian Democratic Forces are not exactly the same as the terrorist organization known as the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the two organizations do share an ideology and former PKK fighters likely work in the SDF's armed ranks. The main difference is that the SDF is a militant group that has mostly fought against Islamic State, whereas the PKK has been fighting a sort of guerrilla war against Ankara. Whatever your views on the conflict between Turkey and the PKK are, it is understandable why the Turkish government does not support this group.
While Akşener has campaigned in the southeastern part of Turkey, her being able to rally the Kurds to her cause is unlikely, and she may have to look elsewhere to secure victory in the Presidential election. The Iyi Party is a center-right party in practice, the AKP is right-wing, and the MHP is far-right. As stated previously, while Akşener believes in the principle of secular government, she is a practicing Muslim and sometimes described as devout. This may enable her to win over moderate AKP voters in Turkey's urban centers, people who are Muslim and who have conservative values but may not necessarily want religion in the government. In the national referendum last year regarding the transformation from parliamentary to presidential democracy, densely populated areas surrounding Istanbul and Ankara voted down Erdoğan's "Yes" campaign...but just barely. The AKP is still influential and powerful in these cities, though it is not dominant the way it is in the heartlands such as Konya. If the Iyi Party presents itself as an alternative in these areas and pushes the election to a runoff, this is where Aksener could make the pivotal difference, converting just enough votes from AKP to Iyi may push her ever so slightly over the top.
The latest polls have Erdoğan in a convincing lead for the first round of the Presidential Election, but not enough to avoid a runoff. Akşener looks like the primary challenger who will be going up against him in the second round. She trails him narrowly in the second round, 52.2%-47.8%. As the campaign develops and the elections draw closer, it will become more evident as to whether Akşener can tap into moderate AKP voters having doubts about Erdoğan. She seems to be pulling most of her votes from CHP and MHP voters at the moment, but her charisma, popularity and populist sentiment may be just enough for her to produce a monumental upset.
As of May 7th, 2018, Turkey's election showdown has become more defined.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will appear as a member not of the AKP, but of the Cumhur İttifakı (People's Alliance), a coalition of the AKP and MHP.
His opponents are numerous. On May 4th, the CHP nominated Muharrem İnce as their presidential candidate. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the CHP, stuck to his claims that he would not run for president, Selahattin Demirtaş was nominated from behind bars to be the HDP's candidate, Meral Akşener will carry the banner of the İyi Party, and Temel Karamollaoğlu will run with the Saadet (Felicity) Party, an Islamist anti-Erdoğan party. A handful of minor party and independent candidates will also run. Doğu Perinçek has expressed his interest in running with the left-wing nationalist Patriotic Party, Vecdet Öz with the center-right Justice Party, ex-MHP member Sinan Oğan, ex-AKP member and economist Tuna Bekleviç.
Despite the wealth of candidates running in the Presidential Election, only about three of these stand a chance at winning the Presidency: Erdoğan, İnce, and Akşener.
İnce and Akşener, though rivals in the Presidential Election, have shown an ability to cooperate due to their shared anti-Erdoğan stance. For the parliamentary election, CHP and İyi have teamed up with the far-right Saadet (Felicity) Party and the center-right Democrat Party. Together these four parties (CHP, IYI, DP and SP) make up the Nation Alliance, a direct rival to the AKP-MHP coalition. A poll conducted on the 1st of May puts the People's Alliance at 270 parliamentary seats, the Nation Alliance at 230, and the Kurdish HDP at 100, resulting in a hung parliament. This alliance building would bypass the 10% election threshold,
While İnce and Akşener seem to understand that they will need each others' support to defeat Erdoğan, their parties do differ on one important issue: the Kurds and the HDP. During coalition negotiations, the CHP expressed interest in bringing the HDP into the anti-Erdoğan coalition, but Akşener and the İyi Party did not support this. İnce has expressed interest in visiting Selahattin Demirtaş in prison as well as claiming that “The HDP are also children of this nation".
Erdoğan is almost guaranteed to win the first round of the Presidential Election as he heads the most politically united group in Turkey, but he is unlikely to win with over 50% of the vote, which will force him to a runoff. He will almost certainly face either İnce or Akşener in that runoff. İnce and Akşener both narrowly trail Erdoğan in runoff polling, and it looks like they will attempt to use different strategies in their hopes of unseating the current President. It seems as though İnce will try to rally the Kurds to his ticket in a second round by appealing to their frustration with Demirtaş still in prison, whereas Akşener will try to chip away at Erdoğan's base by appealing to her faith and her center-right political platform.
Both strategies are ambitious in Turkey's polarized political climate. No first-round presidential polls have been conducted since İnce was chosen as the CHP's candidate, so it remains unclear as to whether he or Akşener will command more support in the first round of voting. The most recent poll had Akşener edging out second place with 24% of the vote whereas a generic CHP candidate would receive about 20%, but İnce is a popular and charismatic candidate just like Akşener.
In August 2014, Turkey went to the polls to directly elect their president. In previous years, a parliamentary vote elected the Turkish President, a mostly ceremonial position which was far less powerful than that of the Prime Minister's office. That rule was changed, however, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was popularly elected with 51.7% of the vote, decisively beating out cross-party candidate Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu's 38.4% and Kurdish representative Selahattin Demirtaş' 9.7%.
Two elections were held in 2015. The first, in June, pushed Erdoğan's right-wing Islamist Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, down to 40.87% of the vote, enough for a plurality but short of a majority in the Grand National Assembly. The center-left Kemalist Republican People's Party (CHP) placed second with 25.98% of the vote, while the smaller far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and left-wing Kurdish-interest People's Democratic Party (HDP) picked up 16.29% and 13.12% of the vote.
Coalition negotiations were vigorous but ultimately fruitless, highlighting the polarization between Turkey's four major parties. The AKP refused to govern in a minority government. Negotiations for a unity government between the AKP and CHP broke down. The HDP and MHP both refused to enter into coalition with the AKP. A CHP-MHP minority coalition with "outside support" from the HDP was rejected by the MHP.
A second election was called for November, and the results were a return to the status quo. Despite the predictions pointing towards little change in the result from June and another hung parliament, the AKP rebounded from its weak showing in June as it managed to push some MHP and HDP voters back into its camp while the CHP very, very slightly improved its vote total.
In 2017, Turkey voted on a national referendum that aimed to change the parliamentary democracy system to a presidential system similar to that of the United States, France and Brazil. It was widely considered among President Erdoğan's critics to be a consolidation of power and another move towards authoritarianism in the already-fragile Turkish democracy. The referendum very narrowly passed 51.4% to 48.6% and seemed to unite many of the anti-Erdoğan factions: secular social democrats, far-right nationalists, and Kurds. Despite the MHP's support for the changes proposed in the referendum, many MHP voters spurned their party's official campaign and voted against the referendum.
Turkey's next election was originally scheduled for November 3rd, 2019. On April 18th, however, President Erdoğan, echoing his recently-turned allies in the MHP headed by Devlet Bahçeli, called for an earlier election. Yet Erdoğan took it one step further than Bahçeli and decided to move the elections up from November 2019 to June of 2018, two months earlier than Bahçeli's proposal for August 2018.
The direct election of the Turkish President in these upcoming elections has brought a new face and a new party into the forefront. Meral Akşener, a former member of Parliament from the MHP, founded the Good (İyi) Party in October 2017. The İyi Party in practice seems to be a more moderate nationalist party, a center-right counterpart to the center-left Republican People's Party, and an alternative for disillusioned MHP members who dislike their party's alliance with the AKP. Indeed, soon after its creation, four MHP MPs and a CHP MP defected from their parties and became members of the Good Party.
Meral Akşener is a fascinating, seasoned and charismatic figure. She is a practicing Muslim, but does not wear a headscarf and her party praises the secular governmental framework championed by Turkey's venerated founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. According to The Economist, she frequently is heard "peppering her speeches with wisecracks and jokes." In direct presidential polls, she trails Erdoğan, but not by much. Her campaign is also somewhat of a crusade against the bloated, corrupt and ineffective establishment in Turkey which has frustrated many who are sick of Erdoğan, in power since 2002. While Akşener's political career is not young, she has experienced a political revival with her vigorous campaigning against the constitutional referendum in 2017 and her break from the MHP.
Now that the President of Turkey is a position set to take on more power than it had before, the campaign has become one of considerable interest. Erdoğan has not formally declared his candidacy, but likely will do so soon under the People's Alliance, a coalition between the AKP and MHP. In a way, this may be a admittance of weakness as the MHP's alliance with AKP and the rise of Meral Akşener has split MHP voters. Parliamentary representation for political parties in Turkey relies on surpassing a threshold of 10%, which the MHP would have trouble attaining without allying with Erdoğan. Members of Parliament are also not going to be able to run for both a seat in the Grand National Assembly and the Presidency.
Meral Akşener herself looked like she may have had to run as an independent due to a technicality regarding the Iyi Party's being too young to stand in the Parliamentary election, but in a show of solidarity, fifteen MPs from the CHP changed over to the Iyi Party, securing her ability to run as a member of her new party and her party's ability to elect representatives. The center-left CHP has two candidates who have declared interest so far: Didem Engin and Öztürk Yılmaz. The party's leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, previously said he would not run for president, but that may change as the campaign jump-starts over the next month. Polls indicate that Erdoğan will likely win the first round, but unlike in 2014, he will probably have to head to a second-round runoff, most likely against Akşener.
Akşener has one difficult problem standing in her way, however: the Kurds. As a former member of the MHP, Turkey's Kurdish population is unlikely to rally to her cause, and some of the more conservative Muslim Kurds may support Erdoğan over her. Aksener was a supporter of the Turkish military operation in Afrin in northern Syria, a Kurdish enclave which offered little resistance. While Aksener is critical of Erdoğan, she is still nationalistic and may continue Turkey's involvement in Syria against the enclave that the Kurds in Syria have carved out for themselves. While the Syrian Democratic Forces are not exactly the same as the terrorist organization known as the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the two organizations do share an ideology and former PKK fighters likely work in the SDF's armed ranks. The main difference is that the SDF is a militant group that has mostly fought against Islamic State, whereas the PKK has been fighting a sort of guerrilla war against Ankara. Whatever your views on the conflict between Turkey and the PKK are, it is understandable why the Turkish government does not support this group.
While Akşener has campaigned in the southeastern part of Turkey, her being able to rally the Kurds to her cause is unlikely, and she may have to look elsewhere to secure victory in the Presidential election. The Iyi Party is a center-right party in practice, the AKP is right-wing, and the MHP is far-right. As stated previously, while Akşener believes in the principle of secular government, she is a practicing Muslim and sometimes described as devout. This may enable her to win over moderate AKP voters in Turkey's urban centers, people who are Muslim and who have conservative values but may not necessarily want religion in the government. In the national referendum last year regarding the transformation from parliamentary to presidential democracy, densely populated areas surrounding Istanbul and Ankara voted down Erdoğan's "Yes" campaign...but just barely. The AKP is still influential and powerful in these cities, though it is not dominant the way it is in the heartlands such as Konya. If the Iyi Party presents itself as an alternative in these areas and pushes the election to a runoff, this is where Aksener could make the pivotal difference, converting just enough votes from AKP to Iyi may push her ever so slightly over the top.
The latest polls have Erdoğan in a convincing lead for the first round of the Presidential Election, but not enough to avoid a runoff. Akşener looks like the primary challenger who will be going up against him in the second round. She trails him narrowly in the second round, 52.2%-47.8%. As the campaign develops and the elections draw closer, it will become more evident as to whether Akşener can tap into moderate AKP voters having doubts about Erdoğan. She seems to be pulling most of her votes from CHP and MHP voters at the moment, but her charisma, popularity and populist sentiment may be just enough for her to produce a monumental upset.
As of May 7th, 2018, Turkey's election showdown has become more defined.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will appear as a member not of the AKP, but of the Cumhur İttifakı (People's Alliance), a coalition of the AKP and MHP.
His opponents are numerous. On May 4th, the CHP nominated Muharrem İnce as their presidential candidate. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the CHP, stuck to his claims that he would not run for president, Selahattin Demirtaş was nominated from behind bars to be the HDP's candidate, Meral Akşener will carry the banner of the İyi Party, and Temel Karamollaoğlu will run with the Saadet (Felicity) Party, an Islamist anti-Erdoğan party. A handful of minor party and independent candidates will also run. Doğu Perinçek has expressed his interest in running with the left-wing nationalist Patriotic Party, Vecdet Öz with the center-right Justice Party, ex-MHP member Sinan Oğan, ex-AKP member and economist Tuna Bekleviç.
Despite the wealth of candidates running in the Presidential Election, only about three of these stand a chance at winning the Presidency: Erdoğan, İnce, and Akşener.
İnce and Akşener, though rivals in the Presidential Election, have shown an ability to cooperate due to their shared anti-Erdoğan stance. For the parliamentary election, CHP and İyi have teamed up with the far-right Saadet (Felicity) Party and the center-right Democrat Party. Together these four parties (CHP, IYI, DP and SP) make up the Nation Alliance, a direct rival to the AKP-MHP coalition. A poll conducted on the 1st of May puts the People's Alliance at 270 parliamentary seats, the Nation Alliance at 230, and the Kurdish HDP at 100, resulting in a hung parliament. This alliance building would bypass the 10% election threshold,
While İnce and Akşener seem to understand that they will need each others' support to defeat Erdoğan, their parties do differ on one important issue: the Kurds and the HDP. During coalition negotiations, the CHP expressed interest in bringing the HDP into the anti-Erdoğan coalition, but Akşener and the İyi Party did not support this. İnce has expressed interest in visiting Selahattin Demirtaş in prison as well as claiming that “The HDP are also children of this nation".
Erdoğan is almost guaranteed to win the first round of the Presidential Election as he heads the most politically united group in Turkey, but he is unlikely to win with over 50% of the vote, which will force him to a runoff. He will almost certainly face either İnce or Akşener in that runoff. İnce and Akşener both narrowly trail Erdoğan in runoff polling, and it looks like they will attempt to use different strategies in their hopes of unseating the current President. It seems as though İnce will try to rally the Kurds to his ticket in a second round by appealing to their frustration with Demirtaş still in prison, whereas Akşener will try to chip away at Erdoğan's base by appealing to her faith and her center-right political platform.
Both strategies are ambitious in Turkey's polarized political climate. No first-round presidential polls have been conducted since İnce was chosen as the CHP's candidate, so it remains unclear as to whether he or Akşener will command more support in the first round of voting. The most recent poll had Akşener edging out second place with 24% of the vote whereas a generic CHP candidate would receive about 20%, but İnce is a popular and charismatic candidate just like Akşener.
No comments:
Post a Comment