To the surprise of the country’s pollsters and pundits, Turkey’s status quo has been restored. The victory of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Sunday’s parliamentary election sets the country back on track, we have been told, both economically and in terms of national security. The biggest winner was not the party or the president, but rather the stability of the country. On the streets around Istanbul’s Taksim Square, supporters honked their horns into the early hours.
They might have thought twice. In fact, the election’s biggest winner was a cynical, fear-based, anti-democratic style of politics and campaigning in which media organisations and opposition figures are labeled enemies of the state, nationalists are worked into a lather and minorities equated with terrorists, and the electorate’s votes held hostage against the ever-present threat of an instability that, sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured, is always there to be stoked by the country’s leadership to its own ends. It is easy to claim that you are the single bulwark against instability when you stand over the on/off switch and flick it at will like a petulant child.
That the election was necessary in the first place is evidence of this anti-democratic tendency. It was the second vote on the parliament’s make-up since June, when the AKP failed to win an outright majority for the first time in nearly 15 years and then compounded that failure with its inability to form a coalition with another party. This was almost certainly a deliberate move. The main opposition Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP) expressed interest in forming a coalition, albeit with caveats, but that was never really what the AKP or Erdoğan were after anyway.
The reason for this is obvious enough. As I wrote at the time of Erdoğan’s election as president last year, the country’s strongman “now faces a battle far more important, in the long run, than this mere election campaign: his battle to change the country's political structure and consolidate executive power in the person of the president…” Erdoğan was rather quiet on this ambition in the lead-up to the weekend’s election—it was arguably the measure’s unpopularity that cause the AKP to lose its majority—but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still want to see it realised and wasn’t merely biding his time by his silence.
A Putinesque move of this order, of course, is better and more easily executed with a parliamentary majority than without one, hence the weekend’s vote. Hence, too, the storm of shit the president threatened the country with over the past four months—“It’s me or chaos,” he promised—and which, some would argue, began to deliver upon it.
Last year, the scuttling of the Kurdish peace process seemed, if not impossible, at least unlikely. Erdoğan’s ire was reserved for the Alevi minority back then, against Bashar al-Assad’s co-religionists rather than his own, the predominantly Sunni Kurds, whose more conservative elements he thought he might even be able to sway to his side.
But scuttled it was, at extraordinary speed and to an extraordinary degree. Turkey’s participation in the international effort to combat ISIS was used as an excuse for Ankara to renew its decades-long war against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the country’s south-east. The surprising popularity of the Kurdish-majority Democratic Union Party (HDP) inspired this move as well. The government consistently accused ISIS and the PKK of being in cahoots with one another, despite the fact that the Kurds have played a central role in the fight against ISIS, particularly in north-eastern Syria, and suggested throughout the campaign that a vote for the HDP was essentially a vote for “a party of terrorists”. This claim was made despite the fact that the worst terrorist attack in Turkey’s modern history—the Ankara bombings of October 10, which killed more than 100 people—was an attack on a pro-Kurdish peace rally. The HDP’s co-leader, Selahattin Demirtaş, told supporters on Sunday night that: “We could not campaign because we had to protect our people from a massacre." He wasn't wrong.
Until the count began on Sunday night, however, all this seemed unlikely to get the party and the president what they wanted. The numbers remained stubborn, stagnant, fixed. A repeat of June looked the most likely outcome, with many people I talked to, Turkish and Kurdish alike, believing a coalition, most likely with the CHP, inevitable. Refusing the AKP its majority and Erdoğan his mandate—for the second time, no less—looked less like a necessary but unlikely stop-gap than a real possibility. Erdoğan would still be president, of course, and Turkey’s war against the Kurds and pseudo-war against ISIS would still be there, waiting in the cages of the south and south-east, for the key that only he seems to hold. But the rejection, at least, may have given him pause before using it.
Those hopes—held not only by liberals and minorities, but by conservatives becoming increasingly disillusioned with the president, his party and their methods—have now been dashed upon the rocks of negative, intentionally divisive campaign tactics that at times had an air of extortion about them. It’s bad news for Turkish democracy that such a campaign proved so effective, with it likely to become the AKP’s in-house style as a result, and with Erdoğan’s plans for the constitution and the powers of the executive presumably back on the agenda. (If there is a silver lining to this cloud, it is that the AKP’s majority is still not great enough for it to change the constitution on its own. That battle remains to be had.)
As for the stability they have promised, well, the Kurdish genie might be harder to get back into the bottle now that it’s been loosed than Erdoğan and the AKP perhaps think. Violence erupted throughout the south-east on Sunday night, when the election’s result became increasingly clear, with clashes between police and activists in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir leading to the usual tear-gas-and-water-cannon double act, while an explosion in the town of Nusaybin left one man dead and 25 injured. Atlantic Council fellow Aaron Stein said on Sunday night that “the AKP must consider reaching back out to the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, to restart peace negotiations […] Both the PKK [and] its supporters, and the AKP and its base, would benefit from a return to the negotiating table.” But will the PKK be interested now that it knows how quickly and willingly Ankara will throw the peace process under the bus in the interest of political expediency?
Erdoğan’s Syria policy—arguably a key factor in the rise of ISIS, particularly to the extent that it enabled the passage of so many foreign jihadists into the war-torn country—has long been a mark against his talk of stability and his unique ability to provide it, but is unlikely to change any time soon. The attempts of the West to assist the YPG [Kurdish People’s Protection Units] in north-eastern Syria have been continuously hamstrung by Turkish distaste for any action that might ensure the establishment of a Kurdish state on its southern border, and that is unlikely to change, either.
But it’s the effect on Turkey itself, both in terms of its dealings with its Kurdish population and the continuing erosion of its democratic institutions, rule of law and press freedoms, that remain the most pressing concern for many who live here. For Erdoğan, it has often seemed, it’s simply a matter of caliph or bust. The result of Sunday’s election will do little to hamper or hinder his ambitions.
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