Turkey referendum hard to predict
OZER SENCAR is a quietly spoken director of a respected polling company, which makes money by detecting political trends and forecasting election results. But today he is making an unusual admission for his trade.
When it comes to predicting Turkey’s referendum on April 16, “we are going to be wrong because people are hiding their ideas”.
The referendum could bring fundamental change.
If voters approve the constitutional amendment that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has pushed through parliament, they will abandon their parliamentary democracy and replace it with a presidential system where the incumbent will have far more power than any US or French president.
Human Rights Watch reported that if the Yes vote wins, Turkey will undergo the biggest change since democracy was introduced in 1950.
The rights group accused Erdogan of making a bid for one-man rule by ending the separation of powers.
“The changes would abolish the post of prime minister and weaken parliamentary oversight of the executive, including by ending no confidence motions and not allowing members of parliament to question the president,” HRW said.
A Turkish think-tank, Denge ve Denetleme Agi (Checks and Balances Network), examined the amendment clause by clause and came to similar conclusions. It said the new president’s power to regulate by decree would be “contrary to the basic principles of checks and balances”.
“The president’s power to be able to renew elections (and at the same time his own election too) any time and without conditions,’’ the thinktank found, “makes it difficult for the grand national assembly to act against the tendencies of the president”.
Erdogan rejects that the change would abolish the separation of powers that is basic to democracy. “There’s a legislative organ, an executive one, and a judicial one as well,” he said last month.
But it is significant that in campaigning for the Yes vote, his supporters tend to avoid the specifics of the change and stress the desired consequences. Under the new system, “the people of Turkey will get rid of a life with terror,” Prime Minister Binali Yilidirim said when he launched the Yes campaign on February 25. He did not explain how the change would strengthen the security forces against Islamic State and Kurdish militants.
The campaign has brought out the worst and best in the political character of Turkey, which has been under a state of emergency since a coup-attempt in July.
The billboards of Ankara and Istanbul display lots of “Vote Yes” posters, but not “Vote No” posters. As both cities are ruled by AKP administrations, the No campaign is expected to have difficulty getting permission to hold public rallies.
“There is a huge amount of effort by the government to impose this choice on the people,” said Ersin Kalaycioglu, professor of politics at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
A further skewering of the debate stems from the fact “the media is pretty much controlled by the government. There are very few TV networks that are outside of its control,” Kalaycioglu said. “And therefore the No camp may not be able to get its message out effectively.”
There is only one large-scale, mainstream newspaper that backs the No camp, Cumhuriyet. Last year a dozen of its senior editors and managers were detained. Several have been released, but its editor, Murat Sabuncu, is still being held on charges of “acting on behalf of terrorist organisations”.
And people distributing pamphlets for the No campaign in the street have reported being harassed by the police or citizens claiming to be police.
The ruling party’s use of state resources in the campaign is “expectable, if not acceptable”, Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund of the US in Turkey, said, “but what we see is maybe unprecedented in this country in terms of the unfairness of the campaign”.
For all this, the No campaign marches on. It is a polyglot of political parties, interest groups and social media sites. They are aligned with, but not controlled by, the main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
The CHP, which receives about 25% of the vote in elections, has shrewdly decided to suppress its party colours and campaign under the Vote No banner. It argues the referendum is not an issue of party, but of a constitution that could last for many years.
Kalaycioglu said that in a nutshell the No camp is saying: “Do voters want to see this kind of power invested in only one man to the detriment of all other institutions and with no checks and balances?”
The Yes camp is saying the new constitution will make for “more efficient decision-making”. (And by curtailing the role of parliament, it certainly will.)
It claims the president’s greater powers will increase stability and combat terrorism. And it calls on Turks to “rally around the leader”, as Kalaycioglu puts it.
The two camps are as different in style as they are in policy.
The Yes camp has its leadership based in the AKP with little input from the National Movement Party (MHP) – an ultra-right wing party that supports the change.
The No camp has no single leadership body. Each No-voting group conducts its own campaign. And Kalaycioglu argues it would be unwise for the CHP to try to weld this plurality together, for that would make the contest look like a confrontation between the AKP and MHP on the one hand, and the CHP on the other.
There is cunning in the No camp’s eschewing of partisanship. Election arithmetic suggests that for the No vote to win, it must gain the votes of the many AKP and MHP voters, who are unhappy with the change. If the referendum becomes an inter-party battle, those voters will be less likely to defy their leadership.
The question everybody is asking is “which side will win”?
Most polls say the Yes and No votes are roughly 50-50, with a difference that is within the margin of error.
“This tells me that actually the No vote must be leading,” Unluhisarcikli of German Marshall Fund said. “Under the current circumstances in Turkey, it is really not very easy for a person to be transparent when a stranger knocks on his door and asks how he will vote.”
Kalaycioglu sees another significance. To him, if the No vote is hovering around 50%, it means there are “AKP and MHP voters who think this (amendment) is wrong”.
Ozer Sencar, the pollster who predicts his forecast will be wrong, said his firm Metropoll has found it is much more difficult to find people who will agree to be questioned, and many more people than usual are walking away from the survey during the questioning.
Even with those respondents who do complete the survey, there are some who, on critical questions, “lie because they’re afraid of the government”, Sencar said.
Metropoll, which forecast closer than anyone else the result of the June 2015 election, believes 80% of voters have made up their minds on the constitutional change. The remainder are either undecided or will-not-disclose where their support lies.
“My sense is that these people will decide the result of the referendum,” he said.
Do voters want to see this kind of power invested in only one man, to the detriment of all other institutions and with no checks and balances?