TURKISH VOTERS TIRE OF ERDOGAN
President’s party loses majority in parliament
ISTA NBUL • For many Turkish voters, including some long-standing supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, enough was enough.
Erdogan followed a familiar script throughout the election campaign, using the language of Islam to whip up support among his religious base and denouncing critical voices as enemies of the state. His most ardent supporters lauded him as a figure almost as consequential as the Prophet Muhammad himself, deepening many Turks’ sense that a personality cult had enveloped their president.
“He thought previous formulas he had used — painting the opposition as terrorists, traitors and infidels, and throwing in Israel and the interest lobby and the big bad West — would work,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkish columnist and analyst for CNN Turk. “But people had heard of this for a long time, and they were tired.”
Now Turkish voters have spoken. Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish initials, AKP) has lost its majority in parliament, and his iron grip on Turkish politics has loosened, even though he himself was not on the ballot. The defeat almost certainly stymied his ambition to push forward with a new constitution and consolidate power in an executive presidency.
Erdogan’s opponents celebrated their gains on Monday, but the result raised the prospect of instability in Turkey, as its political parties jockey to form coalitions.
Underscoring fears of political turmoil, the Turkish lira tumbled in value Monday, at one point reaching a record low of 2.81 to the U.S. dollar, and the country’s stock market slid.
Erdogan did not appear in public Monday, allowing the country to divert its eyes from its president for a day, even as it was left to wonder whether his dominance of Turkish public life was coming to an end.
In a short statement published by his office, Erdogan struck a conciliatory tone that, notably, expressed respect for the democratic process.
“Our nation’s opinion is above everything else,” he said. “I believe the results, which do not give the opportunity to any party to form a single-party government, will be assessed healthily and realistically by every party.”
For some, the election Sunday was an affirmation that Turkey still had a flourishing democratic culture, despite the troubles of recent years.
“This is a triumph for democracy,” said Kerem Oktem, a professor of southern European studies and modern Turkey at the University of Graz in Austria, and the author of Angry Nation: Turkey Since 1989. “Turks don’t do revolutions.”
Erdogan’s party was defeated largely because secular Turks, environmentalists, women and urban intellectuals — the crowd that dominated the antigovernment protests in 2013 — rallied to the side of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, a largely Kurdish bloc.
The party was once defined solely by its push for Kurdish rights, but in this election, it was able to expand its constituency enough to clear the legal threshold, 10 per cent of the vote, to qualify for representation in Parliament. By winning nearly 13 per cent, the party exceeded expectations, and was the main reason the AKP lost its legislative majority.
‘This is a triumph for democracy. Turks don’t do revolutions.’ — Professor Kerem Oktem