Erdogan won the presidency with an unsustainable majority
By MICHA’EL TANCHUM
08/16/2014 22:40
president-elect Erdogan’s election strategy offers no solution for
structural contradiction between meeting rising Kurdish expectations,
maintaining Turkish right-wing nationalist support.
Presidential candidate SELAHATTIN DEMIRTAS speaks during an election
rally in Diyarbakir, days before he lost the Turkish electionPhoto:
REUTERS
President-elect Recep Tayyip Erdogan secured his margin of victory
with a last-minute appeal to Turkish nationalist voters, having failed
to expand his support among Kurds despite significant overtures on
Kurdish issues.
President-elect Erdogan faces an ineluctable choice between expanding
his `Kurdish Opening,’ moving Turkey closer to becoming a binational
state, and assuaging right-wing Turkish nationalism.
Neither choice bodes well for a Justice and Development Party (AKP)
majority in Turkey’s 2015 parliamentary elections. The AKP will be
hard put to manage rising expectations among Turkey’s Kurds while
retaining Turkish nationalist support.
Seeking a first-round victory in the presidential elections to claim a
popular mandate for transforming the presidency into an administrative
position with strong executive powers, Prime Minister Erdogan actively
sought to expand his voter base among Turkey’s Kurds, who are believed
to account for around 20 percent of the population. Erdogan became an
advocate of teaching Kurdish in schools as an elective language. Most
significantly, Erdogan’s government is conducting a dialogue with
Abdullah Ã-calan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed militant
organization, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The Kurdish Opening
of the AKP government has put a halt to a 30-year insurgency that has
cost over 40,000 lives. The peace talks enjoy broad public support,
but the expectations of the Kurdish political movement ` chief among
them the release of Ã-calan from prison ` causes consternation among
Turkey’s nationalist camp.
The talks with Ã-calan have been conducted through the auspices of
Turkey’s intelligence chief Hakan Fidan. Civilian politicians were
legally prohibited from contacts with the banned PKK.
To demonstrate the AKP government’s earnestness about the
negotiations, one month before the August 10 elections, the Turkish
Parliament approved legislation creating the legal framework for
Turkish politicians to engage in the peace talks.
Although the Kurdish political movement focuses on state recognition
of Kurdish identity and of the Kurdish language, the Kurdish
population in Turkey is not monolithic. While the dominant political
orientation prioritizes a secularist discourse of human rights, the
more conservative elements among the Kurds prioritize Muslim
solidarity. Erdogan’s Islamic conservatism attracts votes from the
latter but alienates the former. Erdogan’s Kurdish Opening nonetheless
created the potential for him to collect a much larger share of the
Kurdish vote. At the outset of the presidential campaign, this seemed
likely as the main opposition candidate Ekmeleddin Ä°hsanoglu, who was
nominated by the two major opposition parties, the Republican Peoples’
Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and held very
little appeal for Kurdish voters. Ä°hsanoglu came across as a
traditional Turkish nationalist.
However, the entry into the presidential race of Selahattin Demirtas,
the dynamic Kurdish human rights lawyer and co-chair of the People’s
Democratic Party (HDP) created a new complication for Erdogan. Being
the first Kurdish candidate for major national office, Demirtas could
credibly appeal to the AKP’s core base of Kurdish support. Less than
three weeks before the election, Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, a Kurd and a
former deputy chairman of the AKP ` announced his support for
Demirtas.
Prior to Firat’s announcement, Sertaç Bucak, the leader of the
Kurdistan Democratic Party `Turkey (KDP-T) had declared his support
for Erdogan and his opposition to Demirtas on a Kurdish television
program broadcast from Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. Yet the successful
campaign that Demirtas ran made clear that Erdogan would not be
expanding his vote base among the Kurds; at best Erdogan could expect
to receive roughly the same number of Kurdish votes as the AKP
traditionally had garnered in previous elections.
It was against this background that Erdogan toward the end of the
presidential campaign made an eleventh-hour appeal to the Turkish
nationalist base of the MHP. Dissatisfaction with his handling of the
Syria and Iraq conflicts in addition to the Kurdish issue has been
brewing among this base. In mid-July, discontent over Turkey’s large
Syrian refugee population developed into protests and violent attacks
against the refugees.
The advance of the jihadist organization ISIS (the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria, now simply the Islamic State or IS) into Iraq’s Mosul
region also has potential internal political implications. While
Turkey has allowed over one million Syrian refugees to cross its
borders since the civil war began, it refused to allow Turkmen
refugees from the IS captured city of Sinjar to enter Turkey, which is
incomprehensible to Turkish nationalists.
It can also be assumed that right-wing Turkish nationalist voters are
provoked by the cooperation of the Turkish government with the Kurdish
Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. Comments made to Financial Times on
June 28 by the AKP’s deputy chairman Hüseyin Çelik seemed to offer
tacit support for a future KRG declaration of independence.
However, with the commencement of hostilities between Hamas and Israel
in the beginning of July, Erdogan was able divert public attention by
stoking popular discontent against Israel’s military operations in
Gaza. Amid the prime minister’s ratcheting up of anti-Semitic and
anti-Israel rhetoric, little attention in Turkey was paid to the July
11 seizure of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk by the Peshmerga forces of
the KRG. The jewel in the crown of Kurdish territorial ambitions,
Kirkuk is home to a sizable Turkmen population and Kurdish control of
Kirkuk had been an important red line for Turkish foreign policy. Much
to shock of the Turkish nationalist camp, Ankara quietly acceded to
KRG control of Kirkuk.
On August 4, prominent MHP deputy Sinan Ogan was physically beaten by
AKP deputies during a parliamentary session after Ogan questioned the
AKP government’s lack of assistance to Iraqi Turkmen facing IS
attacks. AKP supporters attacked Ogan on social media and the MHP
deputy received death threats.
Ogan subsequently accused Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of
whitewashing Turkey’s policies in Iraq. Appalled by the fact that
PKK-affiliated fighters were enlisted to protect Turkmen refugees in
the Shinjar mountains, Ogan declared `This is a well-orchestrated
effort by Davutoglu, who is legitimizing [past] PKK terror [against
Turks] by portraying the PKK as heroes safeguarding Turkmens.
…This is a policy that contains nothing right from the beginning.’
Facing such right-wing nationalist discontent, Erdogan engaged in the
politics of sectarian and ethnic polarization to peel away voters from
the MHP. At an August 2 rally, Erdogan baited the CHP leader Kemal
Kiliçdaroglu, appealing to anti-Alevi antipathies among the MHP’s
Sunni voter base. During his speech, Erdogan exhorted, `Kiliçdaroglu,
you may be an Alevi. I respect you. Don’t be afraid of it. Say it
openly. I am Sunni and I say it comfortably. No need to hesitate.
There is no need to try to mislead the people.’ Because the Sunni
bonafides of the joint CHP-MHP candidate Ekmeleddin Ä°hsanoglu were
unassailable, Erdogan’s focus on Kilicdaroglu’s Alevi background was a
savvy sectarian attempt to make MHP voters identify Ihsanoglu as the
candidate of the Alevis.
When asked about his comments during an August 5 live television
broadcast, Erdogan further appealed to ethnic prejudices within the
Turkish nationalist camp by responding with anti-Armenian remarks: `In
Turkey, anyone who is a Turk should say he is a Turk, a Kurd should
say he is a Kurd.
What is wrong with that? They said so many things about me. They said
I am Georgian. Excuse me, but they said something even uglier. They
said I am an Armenian. But I am a Turk.’
Such remarks may very well have helped to attract MHP voters; indeed,
the votes cast for Erdogan on August 10 in the strongholds of MHP
across central Anatolia were noticeably higher than the percentage of
votes that the AKP received in the March 30, municipal elections.
Although ethnic and sectarian appeals helped him gain the Çankaya
Presidential Mansion, president-elect Erdogan’s election strategy
offers no sustainable solution for the structural contradiction
between meeting rising Kurdish expectations and maintaining Turkish
right-wing nationalist support.
Turkey’s security and economic interests are impelling Ankara to
deepen its cooperation with the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq
that plans to hold a referendum on independence in the near future.
Turkey needs strong relations with Erbil as a buffer against IS as
well as Iran. Once the planned Transanatolian pipeline (TANAP) is
completed, the KRG could supply 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas
to Turkey to meet its skyrocketing demand and ease its dependence on
Russian imports.
Ankara’s close cooperation with the Kurdish government in Erbil will
increase the already heightened expectations among Turkey’s Kurds for
full language and cultural rights and some form of local autonomy.
President-elect Erdogan thus faces an ineluctable choice between
expanding his Kurdish Opening, which will move Turkey closer to
becoming a binational state, and continuing to assuage right-wing
Turkish nationalism. Neither choice bodes well for an AKP majority in
Turkey’s 2015 parliamentary elections. The AKP will be hard put to
manage rising expectations among Turkey’s Kurds while retaining
Turkish nationalist support.
The author is a Fellow at the Shalem College, Jerusalem, and at the
Middle East and Asia Units of the Hebrew University’s Truman Research
Institute for the Advancement of Peace. He also teaches in the
Department of Middle Eastern History and the Faculty of Law at Tel
Aviv University.
This article was first published in the Turkey Analyst
(), a biweekly publication of the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center.