Eye on Turkey 

Eye on Turkey

The buzz is that the association of travel and hotel operators is preparing a petition. They want it to be constitutionally mandated that all elections in Turkey be held between November and March, tourism's dead season. Because of the unprecedented attention the elections received from the world media, international financial circles and others, all international flights into Turkey are full and hotels hardly ever have any vacancy. Yet to make all coming elections as lucrative for the tourism industry, you would also have to have a pending war against Iraq, the finale of the Cyprus problem and a decision by the EU about where it situates Turkey in its vision for the future. This may prove to be a tall order.

In less than two days Turkey is going to the polls. These elections which will do away with an entire class of political actors may well be considered the primary for the next election that Turkey will likely hold before the full parliamentary term is over. In all likelihood the next elections will be held under a new electoral law as well. By all indications the pro-Islamic AK Party, led by the former mayor of Istanbul Tayyip Erdogan who is banned from being a member of Parliament and consequently cannot become Prime Minister, will come ahead by a large margin. The latest polls put the party well above the critical mark of 30 percent. Depending on how many parties make it over the electoral threshold of 10 percent and the percentage of the votes it receives the AK Party may even have a two-thirds majority that would enable it to change the constitution. How the Party and particularly its leadership will handle a sweeping victory and how the establishment will respond to this will be the critical steps to watch come Monday morning.

The social-democratic CHP that received a great boost to its popularity when Mr. Kemal Dervis joined the party appears to be a distant second. The party and its leader Mr. Deniz Baykal arguably wasted a golden opportunity that circumstances brought to them and failed to appeal to the larger center of Turkish politics. The elitist, state-centered and bureaucratic genetic make-up of the party prevailed over the more society-oriented politics that times demanded and Mr. Dervis' accession briefly, and erroneously, promised.

The biggest surprise of the campaign was the success of the Young Party, the political machine that the media tycoon Cem Uzan bought right before the electoral season began. Working closely with one of Turkey's most talented, if primordialist, advertisers Ali Taran and luring the crowds with free food and a free concert to his rallies, Mr. Uzan proved himself to be an unreconstructed populist. Drawing his support mostly from first-time voters, urban youth and women Mr. Uzan ran on a platform of undiluted nationalism, chauvinism, IMF-bashing and limitless promises that Turkey arguably does not have the resources to keep. Young Party may yet make it above the electoral threshold depending on the poll one reads.

The dark horse of the elections may very well be the pro-Kurdish Dehap that some polls claim can get over the electoral threshold. The other two contenders to make it over 10 percent are Mrs. Tansu Ciller's DYP and Mr. Devlet Bahceli's MHP. Mr. Mesut Yilmaz' ANAP, Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit's DSP, the traditional Islamist SP and former Foreign Minister Ismail Cem's YTP are nowhere on the electoral radar screen. In the case of Mr. Yilmaz an element of tragedy actually presents itself. Mr. Yilmaz worked hard to get the elections postponed and was identified as the eminence grise behind last summer's bizarre political footwork that sought to unseat PM Ecevit. Mr. Yilmaz also worked hard to push Turkey's reform agenda forward in order for the country to qualify to start negotiations for accession to the EU. On TV, he was the voice of reason, experience, knowledge and wisdom. Yet, like a battery th at can no longer be recharged, Mr. Yilmaz' past mistakes, the allegations of corruption concerning his party and his almost total lack of credibility made it impossible for him to be politically resuscitated.

These elections are not about Islam or whether or not Turkey will turn its back to a long history of westernized modernization and secularization. What these elections are about is the realignment of Turkey's politics. The political economy and the attendant political structures of the previous era of patronage-based politics are gone for good. The economic crisis of 2001 dried up all the resources that could have made the reproduction of such a system possible. Yet, the economic crisis has also weakened and partially eroded the urban middle classes that should have been the backbone of a new realignment. This weakness resulted in the collapse of the traditional center-right parties as well. From this perspective the AK Party represents on the one hand, the interests of the angry, downtrodden, impoverished, excluded masses that bore the burden of the economic crisis and Turkey's integration with global markets. On the other hand though, it also represents the interests of a new provincial middle class, conservative urban professionals and intellectuals. These two constituencies will have conflicting interests and in the best of time it would be hard to balance these. And these are not the best of times in terms of the availability of resources to make the transition to a more rational political economy smoother and easier. That is the great challenge that AK Party faces and so far the jury is out as to their credentials, wisdom, experience and temperament to succeed in this endeavor.

It is of great importance though that the AK Party ran on a platform of support for the integration of Turkey with the EU. Registering a radical break with its predecessors and the early generation of Islamists who always ran on an anti-West, anti-NATO, anti-EU platform AK positioned itself squarely in favor of the EU. It also went out of its way to assuage international financial markets by promising to follow through with the IMF-backed stabilization program. Since some party candidates spoke differently on the campaign trail and since the main constituency of the Party will exert enormous pressure on the leadership for immediate compensation, how that promise will be kept remains to be seen.

Whatever the results of this election, they are likely to be unfair in terms of representation. It can thus be surmised that questions of legitimacy and fairness will immediately be raised particularly if only two or three parties make it into the Parliament and between 40-50 percent of the electorate end up unrepresented. From one perspective the greatest calamity for AK party would be to come to power with a landslide. Therefore the greater interests of the country would call for an AK-CHP coalition government that the weakness of CHP may yet render impossible.

For many readers of these reports and for many outside observers of Turkey, CHP's failure to capitalize on the presence of Mr. Dervis among its candidates may be a mystery. It need not be. Mr. Dervis, the politician proved to be of a far lesser caliber than Mr. Dervis, the technocrat who pulled Turkey from the brink of a meltdown. In the process of choosing his political identity, Mr. Dervis appeared to have broken promises, betrayed his would-be companions and finally surrendered himself to the ossified perspectives and positions of CHP. In attempting to clarify what had happened before the public, he was unable to erase that impression even by those who believed that he made the right choice when he joined the CHP. The interview he gave to Mrs. Nese Düzel betrayed either an ignorance of the democratic struggles of many individuals or groups in Turkey or a misplaced conceit for the country's civil society. The last thing the liberal public expected from Mr. Dervis was a recitation of CHP's program from the 1930 s. Yet, he had done it.

For that Turkey and its politics are all the more impoverished.

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By Soli Ozel, Bilgi University, advisor to the Chairman of TUSIAD.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the positions or the opinions of TUSIAD, unless stated otherwise.

For more analysis from T·SIAD see the  TUSIAD-US website  .