• English Site
• >World
• >

  Crunch Elections in Turkey: Erdogan Fights for the Center

Crunch Elections in Turkey Erdogan Fights for the Center

By Annette Grossbongardt in Istanbul

Part 3: The Threat from the Right

Simsek's role in the AKP’s strategy is also well planned out. Finance people like him are meant to gain the trust of the business community. The party has already managed to get prominent supporters from the elite. “If they do a good job, then it doesn’t bother me if their wives wear headscarves,” is how prominent businessman and former UN ambassador Cem Duna judges leading AKP politicians. “And they’ve done a good job.”

Given the lack of alternatives, even the AKP's failures have faded into the background -- such as the lack of reforms in the area of free speech and inadequate property rights for religious minorities.

Despite that, even many Christian Armenians are planning on voting for the AKP this time around. “They are simply the most reform-oriented party at the moment and they are also trying to promote religious tolerance for Christians,” says Etyien Machupian, editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos.

Support from such surprising quarters tends to distract attention from just how explosive the situation after the election could be. If the AKP actually wins a landslide victory which will allow it to name the president, the military may be tempted to make good on its threat and intervene once again in Turkey’s politics. If the party, however, only gets a weak mandate, it will not be able to govern effectively.

The biggest danger lurks on the right: rising nationalism could help give the extreme right Nationalist Movement (MHP) seats in parliament again. If they get more than the required 10 percent of votes -- as opinion polls predict --, they could seriously weaken the AKP.

More than anything, increasingly frequent attacks by the banned Kurdish separatist group the PKK are pushing voters into the arms of the nationalists. Almost every day soldiers die in skirmishes with the rebels in southeast Turkey -- and the funerals of the dead soldiers, who are celebrated as "martyrs," always attract lots of MHP supporters.

The question why people are still dying because of the PKK is apparently the biggest burden Erdogan’s party is carrying into the election. “People don't ask about the headscarf, but instead about why we can’t manage to stop the terror,” says AKP executive board member Saban Disli.

Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the nationalists, may have tempered his party's line somewhat, but his speeches are mostly hate-filled diatribes -- in one recent speech, he threw a rope into the audience and shouted "Hang (PKK leader Abdullah) Öcalan if you can!" At the start of the election campaign he ranted against “collaborators” working for foreign powers who want “to destroy the Turkish nation from within,” and called upon his supporters to help “the Turks put their mark on this century.”

Bahçeli's MHP could cause Erdogan to fall short of the two-thirds majority necessary for the constitutional reforms that the AKP wants. But the row over electing a new president from within AKP is still not resolved and could prolong Turkey's crisis for quite some time.

On Thurday, the Turkish Constitutional Court unexpectedly cleared the way for direct presidential elections, as the AKP wants. A referendum on the necessary constitutional reforms that would allow voters to directly elect the president will be held in autumn.

Hence it will still be possible for the new parliament to elect a president. But if no agreement is reached with the opposition, this could trigger -- as Erdogan has already emphatically warned -- new elections, once again.

For reasons of data protection and privacy, your IP address will only be stored if you are a registered user of Facebook and you are currently logged in to the service. For more detailed information, please click on the "i" symbol.

Post to other social networks:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•