Istanbul mayoral election ripples reverberate far beyond Turkey's borders

This is the second and last of a two-part series on the potential impact of Turkish local-election results on the geopolitics of the region.

More than three weeks after the March 31 municipal elections in Turkey, the country's already dented democratic reputation continues to take a battering. The ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) attempt to hold a new vote for Istanbul mayor suffered a setback on April 23 when Turkey's highest electoral body rejected its argument that about 15,000 people dismissed from government jobs after the July 2016 coup attempt should not have been eligible to cast their ballots. But Turkey's election board is duty-bound to investigate AKP’s allegation that more than 41,000 ineligible voters and election officials participated in the vote.

There is little doubt that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his inner circle would ideally like to see the local elections repeated countrywide and all the governing alliance's defeats turned into victories by some legerdemain of statecraft. That the AKP’s refusal to accept the people's verdict, especially in the country's most populous city and economic capital, is rattling Turkey's democratic foundations and compounding its currency woes, evidently counts for little.

It would be churlish to criticize Erdogan too much since the local elections have proved that democracy and rule of law are alive in Turkey despite his authoritarian presidency. However, given the opposition's strong showing in the elections against all odds, the outcome amounts to not just the urban hubs' rejection of the government's neo-Ottoman ideology and addiction to power, it hints — more importantly — "at a future beyond populist and divisive politics," to quote Carnegie Europe visiting scholar Sinan Ulgen.

The erosion of popular support for the Islamist AKP in Turkey reflects a broad trend across the Middle East and North Africa. In Iran, the Shiite theocracy is beset by problems of which the crisis of legitimacy is just one.

The arrival of a tough new administration in Washington in January 2017 marked the start of a long nightmare for Tehran. In contrast to the friendly approach of the previous Democratic administration and like-minded European governments, the nature of Iran's relations with the Republican administration has been adversarial from the outset.

President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the P5+1 nuclear accord of 2015 and re-impose the sanctions withdrawn by his predecessor has piled on the pressure from all sides. Now, after his announcement ending waivers on May 2 on Iranian oil sales to its biggest customers, including China and India, Tehran is hard pressed to foil the White House's stated plan "to bring Iran's oil experts to zero."

For Iran's "deep state" and the conservative establishment, the prospects are even more daunting. As Mohammed al-Yahya says in an op-ed in Al Arabiya, "Iran's extensive regional proxy network — comprised of several dozen militias in Iraq and Syria, two in Bahrain, one in Yemen, and its flagship proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah — relies on Iranian funding to sustain operations and buy loyalty. The regime cannot fund these groups with its own currency. It needs US dollars, and because of sanctions, it does not have enough."

Although certain foreign-policy interests of Iran overlap with those of Turkey, Qatar and Russia, none of the three countries is in a position to relieve the pressure on Tehran resulting from the re-imposition of US sanctions. An added worry for Iran is the low-intensity military campaign being conducted by Israel against Iranian and Hezbollah military positions in Syria, which is steadily raising the cost of Tehran's foreign entanglements and curbing its ability to assert authority as a regional hegemon.

Conditions in North Africa are no more conducive to a rebound in the fortunes of political Islam than they are in the Middle East at present. The ideology was undeniably in the ascendant during the Arab Spring revolts in at least three countries: Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. But the reversal of fortune could not have been sharper. On April 23 Egyptian election authorities announced that a number of major changes to the country's constitution had passed in a controversial referendum, including an extension of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's term to six years.

Sisi, who was defense minister when he ousted Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohammed Morsi in 2013 amid mass protests and political unrest, has also gained the right to run for a third term, overcoming the limit of two, four-year terms under the Egyptian constitution. Meanwhile, Morsi is in jail, charged with various crimes and waiting for his retrial, and the Islamist political parties are struggling to adapt to the painful aftermath of the counterrevolution.

In Tunisia, which is due to hold both presidential and parliamentary elections this year, the Islamist Ennahda has a clear advantage over its rivals, including the secularist Nidaa Tounes, which have failed to build strong party institutions and identities. But no member of the so-called Islamist-secularist rapprochement seems to have lived up to the promises of the 2011 Arab Spring revolution.

According to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, "Not only has the Ennahda-Nidaa alliance failed to achieve its intended goals in the name of consensus, it has also threatened the democratic process by adopting regressive laws that reverse progress on revolutionaries' aims." Unsurprisingly, as the Carnegie report notes, Tunisians' support for democracy fell from 70 percent in 2013 to 46 percent in 2018, while military rule and one-party rule garnered the support of 47 percent and 41 percent respectively.

In neighboring Libya, where the Arab Spring rebellion against longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi's rule led to state collapse, General Khalifa Haftar, whose Libyan National Army controls much of the east and south, has rallied support by presenting himself as the nemesis of Islamists, violent extremists and jihadists.

While his latest effort to take the capital Tripoli by force from a rival UN-recognized faction seems to have stalled, a recent White House statement praising Haftar's "significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya's oil resources" appears to echo the reasoning of his principal supporters, including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Russia and France.

None of this is to say that Islamists are demoralized everywhere or reconciled to waiting out inimical regimes. In fact, their currently weakened morale may very well belie their popularity among the religious conservative publics of the Middle East and North Africa.

Any assessment of the salutary lessons they have learned from the failures of Islamist governments in Egypt, Iran, Sudan and the Gaza Strip will be largely based on guesswork. But if the AKP's push to redo the Istanbul election is anything to go by, the omens are not very good for the long term. The party's reluctance to concede defeat with grace even in a local election will have implications far beyond Turkey's borders.

Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.