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Turkey's
Forthcoming Elections
A briefing by Burak Bekdil
March 7, 2014
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Mr. Bekdil, a Turkish columnist for the Ankara-based Hurriyet Daily
News and critic of Prime Minister Erdoğan's authoritarian rule,
served a suspended prison sentence in 2001 for satirizing corruption in
the judiciary. His articles have appeared in The Economist, National
Review Online, The Jerusalem Post, Al-Arabiya, Le Figaro, BBC, and The
Washington Times. Mr. Bekdil briefed the Middle East Forum in a
conference call on March 7, 2014.
Having consolidated his power base, tamed the military, suppressed the
media, and placated the restive Kurdish minority, Prime Minister Erdoğan
moved to advance his Islamist agenda and raise a generation of devout
Muslims at the expense of Turkey's constitutional freedoms. In doing so,
however, he underestimated the extent of public resentment of his
increasingly autocratic rule. Last spring's Gezi Park anti-government
protests and the current, ongoing probe of his administration have
confronted Erdoğan with the most formidable challenge since 2002 and
forced him to rethink his grand political design.
According to this design, the ruling AK party's victory in the March
30, 2014 mayoral elections would force President Gül to step down in a
"Putin-Medvedev drop-swap" and be replaced by Erdoğan. A
subsequent win in the 2015 parliamentary elections would then enable the
party to amend the constitution so as to concentrate absolute power in
the hands of the new president.
Erdoğan underestimated an additional challenge posed by Fethullah
Gülen, a U.S.-based Muslim cleric and former ally. According to Gülen's
Hizmet movement, Erdoğan's confrontational policy toward other nations
and faiths undermined the movement's global interfaith approach. The
Gülenists have pledged their support to Erdoğan's AK party rivals and are
certain to keep up the corruption probe's pressure on the beleaguered
prime minister. Against this backdrop, the looming mayoral elections will
be a referendum on the popularity of Erdoğan and his allies.
Depending on the outcome of the mayoral elections, one can discern three
possible scenarios in the run up to the 2015 parliamentary elections:
- AK party wins
45-50% of the mayoral elections vote, encouraging Erdoğan to seek a
constitutional majority to pave the way for his presidential
ambitions.
- AK party wins
40-45% of the vote, driving Erdoğan to scrap his party's recently
self-imposed three-term limit rule. President Gül would then be
reelected this summer and Erdoğan would continue as prime minister,
hoping for a 50% win in 2015.
- AK vote drops to
35-40%, resulting in political opportunists abandoning a failing
party. A new moderate, center-right, pluralistic and liberal
conservative party could then emerge to challenge Erdoğan.
The third scenario would yield two options for presidential elections:
(1) President Gül is re-elected because the AK party is still the most
popular; or (2) the opposition, including the new center-right party,
reaches a compromise to find a single presidential candidate to defeat
Gül.
The public opinion poll in early 2013 showed the AK party had 50-56%
support and the opposition party, CHP, with 24-25% of the national vote.
As a result of the political upheaval, the AK party's popularity has
dropped to 35%, a trend that could be the beginning of the end for
Erdoğan. The 2015 election could result in the CHP emerging as the first
party with 30% of the vote while the AK party falls to 28-29%. The new
center-right party could win 20% of the vote while the nationalistic MHP
vote remains flat at its present level of 15%.
In Mr. Bekdil's view, the best outcome of the 2015 national elections
would be a grand coalition between Turkish neo-conservatives and social
democrats - a scenario that looks more realistic today than a year ago
and which could end the ideological polarization that is making Turkey
unmanageable and economically vulnerable.
Summary account by Marilyn Stern, Associate Fellow with the Middle
East Forum.
Related
Topics: Turkey and Turks
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