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In a stunning contradiction to every poll preceding the election, President Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) scored a stunning electoral comeback on November 1st. Most polls had predicted a repeat of the June 7 election in terms of results. Only the A&G polling firm, shortly before November 1st, predicted a majority government for the AKP. Even then, they predicted 288 AKP seats rather than the 317 the AKP actually garnered.
In short, Mr. Erdogan’s gambit after June 7 paid off, and his party went from some 41% of the vote five months ago to 49% this month. Enough voters in Turkey appear to have bought into the notion that only an AKP majority government, such as reigned over the country from 2002 until June 7th of this year, could provide stability and prosperity. Others responded well to the AKP’s attacks against PKK-aligned Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Syria: the biggest loser in the election was the far-right National Movement Party (MHP), which hemorrhaged votes to the AKP and fell from 80 seats to 40. Many MHP voters apparently thought the AKP leaders were doing a better job vilifying Kurds than their own party. Although the Republican People’s Party gained a negligible amount of support (going from 24.95% of the popular vote to 25.31%), it still failed to emerge as a credible alternative to govern the country.
Meanwhile the Kurdish issue-oriented People’s Democracy Party (HDP) declined a bit, from 13.12% of the vote to 11.90%. Most columnists in Turkey explained this with the notion that Turkish HDP voters reacted badly to perceived HDP support for PKK attacks, while some Kurdish HDP voters changed their minds in favor of the pre-June 7 stability they yearned for. With such a small decline, however, it seems equally possible that a party completely prevented from campaigning due to bomb attacks, threats and the burning of their party offices, and whose main constituency was subject to curfews, military sieges and heavy doses of violence in the run-up to the election, nonetheless did pretty well.
According to Radio and Television Supreme Council board member Ersin Öngel, all the opposition parties in Turkey also faced grossly unequal media coverage: “The TRT [Turkey’s main state broadcaster] gave 30 hours of airtime to the AK Party over the past 25 days and 29 hours to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) was given five hours of airtime over the same period, while the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) had only one hour and 10 minutes in total.” The HDP, meanwhile, was given a laughable 18 minutes of air time. As for private media, most of them are even worse, controlled by AKP stalwarts – including the two pro-Gulen newspaper and media outlets seized by the government last week.
As a result of the AKP’s return to majority government, Turkey during the next few years will likely see the AKP continue many of its past policies. The “executive presidency” fetish will remain front and center, for one. Attacks on freedom of the press and harassment of the few remaining independent media outlets will continue. The Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) will still be presented as a greater threat than the Islamic State, lest the AKP lose its newfound MHP voters. As the Rojava Kurds try to find their way out of the Syrian maelstrom, Turkey will therefore keep threatening to attack them if they push the Islamic State away from places like Jarablus West of the Euphrates river (and on Turkey’s border, right where the Jihadis have been for a long time).
Also to keep their nationalist voters happy, the war against the PKK will probably go on. In a signal of such, Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioglu stated this week that the “PKK is in the business of terror, and terrorist groups like PKK should not be part of the peace process.” Rather, it seems Ankara will go on negotiating peace with groups that are not fighting it, which should be easy enough.
Things could be worse of course. With a majority government, the AKP does not need to again put everyone through the charade of looking for a coalition partner and then calling another election. They also do not need a coalition partner such as the MHP. The HDP also still passed the electoral threshold, denying Mr. Erdogan a large enough AKP majority to unilaterally make himself Putin Bey, or to ask credulous voters to do so via referendum.
Most pleasingly of all, columnists such as myself will likely have no shortage of things to write about as the “symbolic” Presidential Palace continues to direct Turkish government policy.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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