People waiting for the HDP leader to arrive,May, 2015. Wikicommons/Julia Buzaud. Some rights reserved..Turkey's
general elections on 7 June marked the downfall of Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. Encroaching on the
limitations of his role as stipulated in the Turkish Constitution, which denies
the president power to act on behalf of a political party, Erdoğan turned the
elections into a confidence vote on his desire to change the Turkish parliamentarian
system into a presidential one. This would have meant the extreme concentration
of the executive power in the hands of the president. To achieve it, the AKP
(Justice and Development Party) had to win an absolute majority of the vote, since
the major competing parties – the CHP (Republican People’s Party), MHP
(Nationalist Movement Party), and HDP (People’s Democratic Party) – strongly
opposed the suggested constitutional amendment.
The public
response to Erdoğan’s political egoism was a rally to democracy, voting to
allow the formation of a new representative 550-member provisional parliament, comprising
98 female MPs (a record), as well as 80 Kurds, three Armenians, one Yazidi, and
one Roma.
Most discussions
have focused on the factors that have led to the AKP and Erdoğan’s unpopularity.
This is largely seen as a direct response to Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian
ambitions, corruption scandals, the economic downturn, the mishandling of the
Gezi Park protests and Kobane incidents, and the withdrawal of support by
significant numbers of the Gülen movement, which led to a shift by many AKP
voters to the MHP or HDP.
These factors
have undeniably contributed to the decline in support for the AKP, but an often
overlooked aspect is the profound struggle over ideology. Turkish politics has
long been a site of antagonistic struggles between different republican
ideologies. Today, a new ideological competition has resurfaced which has its
roots in the past.
Ideological
struggle – origins
After the Turkish Revolution in 1923, a young
Republic became an ideological battleground divided between Islamic,
authoritarian, and liberal conceptions of the republic. It was caught between
conflicting demands – order versus change, innovation versus stability,
religious orthodoxy versus laicity, national unity versus ethnic diversity.
Islamic republicanism was posited by a group of ulema (clerics) and political
conservatives who believed that the most suitable type of regime for the new
Turkey was an Islamic Republic. Its earliest inspiration came
from the Islamic State in the period of the four Caliphates and from medieval
Islamic thought, which was revived in late-nineteenth-century intellectual debates.
Islamic republicans argued that because the indigenous Islamic State exhibited
elements of direct democracy and republic, the Ottoman monarchy was a deviation
from it. Absolute sovereignty belongs to God, and the people are to exercise it
on his behalf on earth. An Islamic republic must be led by a caliph and ruled
according to the Shari’a.
Liberal republicans
placed individual and political liberties at the core of their political
doctrine. In the
1920s, a group of intellectuals including Hüseyin Cahit, Velid Ebüzziya and Ahmed
Emin advocated a Montesquieuan model of
constitutionalism, outlining a separation of powers to restrict the scope of
governmental and presidential power, and secure liberties. The liberals valued
a representative democratic government, reflecting the will of the people
regardless of ethnic or religious backgrounds. Active citizenship, political
openness, and transparency would promote democracy, a peaceful society, and
progress. This republican model took its inspiration from French republican traditions
and developed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the
efforts of the Young Ottomans and Young Turks.
Authoritarian republicanism, on the
other hand, was defended by Mustafa Kemal and the ideological
founders of the Republic Ziya Gökalp, Ahmed Ağaoğlu, Celal Nuri, and Yunus Nadi
amongst them. Unlike the Islamic republicans, but like the liberals, they
believed that sovereignty belonged to the people and viewed social and ethical
order purely in secular terms. Born in
the context of the Balkan Wars and the First World War and shaped directly in
opposition to liberal republicanism, authoritarian republicanism took up
a blend of German militarism, Turkish nationalism, Durkheimian social theory,
and Le Bon’s elitism. In contrast to the liberals, Kemal’s proponents reaffirmed
a Jacobin commitment to a unitary conception of governmental powers to maintain
social unity and political stability.
At
the end of the ideological struggle, during the formative years of the Republic,
authoritarian republicanism defeated Islamic republicanism with the abolition
of the caliphate in 1924 and implementation of a set of secular laws, while silencing
liberal republicanism by force and repression.
But
these other traditions did not completely disappear from the history of Turkish
political thought although neglected and forgotten. The victorious
authoritarian vision of republicanism was
preserved by a particular formation of military, political, and intellectual
elites, and named “Kemalism,” characterised by its principles – Turkish
nationalism, secularism, populism, statism, revolutionism and westernisation. With
the incorporation of these principles into the CHP’s programme as “six arrows,”
Kemalism became the dominant state ideology, as well as a partisan engagement,
but failed to permeate the wider society.
Throughout its history, Kemalist republicanism was
held as antithetical to Islamism and has remained an exclusive and inelastic
ideology. This inflexibility prevented the recognition of different minority
groups and the development of a genuinely representative democracy. Political opposition has been
suppressed through the dissolution of political parties, military interventions
in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997, and police violence, particularly against
leftists and right-wing Turkish nationalists of the MHP in the 1970s.
Political Islam, which emerged in Turkish politics in the 1980s, challenged Kemalism’s inability to reform
its ideology to accommodate the demands of more religious and conservative
groups. The AKP’s third electoral victory in 2011 marked a clear defeat of
Kemalism and the CHP. Having eliminated major opposition powers, the government
and its leader began to exert their arbitrary power and strongly
manifested their own view of democracy and republicanism.
They
saw democracy merely as an electoral and procedural process, a competition between
parties granting its victors absolute authority to govern by all means. The AKP
actively used religion to serve political goals and the principle of the separation
of powers was ignored. The
sovereignty of the nation was supplanted by a governmental system run by
self-serving elites. To consolidate power, the AKP protected the interests of its voters and of the media and businesses,
which backed them.
It used its leverage over the media to
limit public debate about government actions, arrested journalists and media
owners who disputed government claims, whilst curtailing individual liberties
and exerting tight control over economic policy and the police. These authoritarian measures generated a deeply
polarised society and political sphere, producing sharply opposed
political parties: Kurdish nationalists (arguably now the liberals), Turkish
nationalists, and Kemalists.
This divided political sphere has inevitably triggered a renewed battle
of ideologies, competing with one another for dominance. Most significantly, it
saw the revival of a liberal democratic republican language challenging increasing
injustice and authoritarianism. The CHP’s original Kemalist authoritarian language
has become more tolerant of religious and ethnical factions, and democratic.
The HDP, too, has deployed a more inclusive and non-elitist democratic
language, calling for peace, unity and transparency. In contrast with the MHP,
which continued to deploy a static and extreme Turkish nationalist and
exclusive vision, it has shifted the focus from merely the Kurdish people to appeal
to wider segments of society, environmentalists, intellectuals, LGBT rights
activists, feminists, and secularists. This played a decisive role in the HDP’s
electoral success, granting it a right of representation in Parliament for the
first time.
The AKP, on the other hand, failed to form a single-party government,
despite obtaining the largest share (41%) of the total vote. It seems to have accepted its defeat and is
trying to find solutions to restore its prestige and place in government. Prime
Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is attempting to start a new chapter, announcing plans
to fight nepotism and promote transparency. This could imply a softening of the
AKP’s authoritarian policies: but this remains to be seen.
In a closed meeting on 26 June with prominent Turkish academics,
politicians, and journalists, Davutoğlu discussed the lessons learned from the
electoral defeat and its future. These elections show that justice,
development, and progress can be better secured by groups or parties which
demand transparency, representative democracy, liberty and equality, and a new
coalition government must respond to these needs of the public.
What is next?
Reportedly, negotiations are due to begin with the
representatives of the MHP, HDP, and CHP this week to form a coalition
government. However, sharp ideological differences will inevitably complicate
coalition negotiations. Despite the uncertainty of its outcome, there are some likely
and less likely scenarios:
- A minority government under the AKP
This option is not viable
because of the lack of support from the three other parties.
- A CHP–MHP–HDP
coalition
This would be the most ideal
but is unrealistic because proponents of the MHP would refuse an alliance with the
Kurdish nationalists. The representatives of the MHP have repeatedly stressed their
refusal to recognise the HDP as a legitimate party, seeing them as the
representatives of a “terrorist” organisation, the PKK. Their conservatism
clashes with the CHP’s and HDP’s liberal and secular ideas. In the unlikely case
of an alliance, the ideological divide would create an unstable government.
- An AKP–HDP
coalition
This option also seems
unlikely given the ideological differences between the two. Davutoğlu stressed
that the AKP will begin negotiations with the HDP but that “a coalition with
HDP is inconceivable.” Similarly, the AKP’s Deputy Chairman Hüseyin Çelik has
branded the HDP “liars and conspirators,” an indication that an alliance is
far-fetched. In the event of a coalition, the HDP, as a stakeholder in power, would
be moving towards the resolution of the Kurdish issue.
- An AKP–CHP
coalition
Amongst public debates, this
coalition is seen as the most viable, since the MHP’s chairman Devlet Bahçeli has
asserted that his party will “remain in opposition.” An AKP-CHP coalition would
be beneficial as the CHP could act as a check on the AKP’s more authoritarian
policies, preventing the constitutional changes. Additionally, Turkish
relations with the EU would most likely improve, more peaceful efforts to
contain the Syrian crisis would be undertaken and Kurdish and other minority
rights be strengthened. However, for the CHP a coalition with their ideological
enemy would entail ceding laicity, a pillar of Kemalism. Also, it is likely
that an AKP-CHP government could yield extensive disagreements especially on
matters of education and foreign policy. Again, the ideological divide between
traditional enemies could create struggle and instability and their alliance
would be not durable.
- An AKP–MHP
coalition
The MHP’s
full support for the AKP’s candidate during elections for the Speaker of the Grand
National Assembly signals the possibility of a coalition. The AKP has since commissioned
a minister to start coalition negotiations with the MHP. Both parties are
right-wing, Turkish nationalists and conservatives and a distribution of
ministries between them would be less complicated. (In 1991 the RP (the Welfare
Party), a predecessor of the AKP, had allied with the MHP.) In the case of a
new alliance, Bahçeli has listed his party’s preconditions, the so-called red
lines, such as the abandonment of Erdoğan’s controversial palace, the reopening
of the corruption files concerning former ministers and Erdoğan’s son and a halt
to the peace process with the Kurds. Although this coalition might be tenable in
the short-run and would restore the AKP’s waning power, it would lead to further
marginalisation of the Kurds, the ultimate defeat of Kemalism, and a provocation
of the PKK. The victory of Islamism and nationalism would put an end to the EU membership
negotiation process and weaken Turkey’s regional power, all of which would be
bad for Turkey.
Future crisis
If a coalition
government is not formed within 45 days, an interim government will be created
until early elections can be held. Yet surveys by the Metropoll Strategic and
Social Research Center (which produced the most accurate forecasts during the 7
June elections) and others suggest that the likely outcome in November would
not differ dramatically from that of recent elections. Turkey
is entering a period of uncertainty in which economic and political crises are
likely to follow. External pressures are contributing to an atmosphere of
political instability, intellectual tension and ideological confusion with two
million Syrian refugees living in camps in the country, the possibility of a
Turkish invasion of Syria, ISIS fighters on its southern border and crises in
the Black Sea region. If the ideological struggle remains unsolved, Turkey may
become inward-looking and isolated, ending its dream of being a regional leader
in the Middle East.
All
alliance scenarios seem to result in crisis and instability but we should remember
Professor John Dunn’s words that, “It is in the nature of politics that new
political challenges should arise all the time.” It may be difficult to predict
the consequences of the upcoming coalition discussions but it is evident Turkish
politics will be reshaped, leading the country into a new and exciting yet
uncertain socio-political and economic phase. It is the time for the party
leaders to put their political egoism aside and begin to compromise for the
common good of society. Only then will the possibility of political progress be
opened for Turkey.