TURKEY’S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: A HISTORIC VOTE
Daily Sabah, Turkey
May 29 2014
Mahmut Ovur
Published : 29.05.2014 01:14:44
On Aug. 10, Turkey will hold the second of three crucial elections
as millions of voters will go to polls to pick the country’s next
president. The local elections on March 30 represented the first
round of this prolonged struggle and the parliamentary elections,
scheduled to take place on June 7, 2015, will mark the final encounter.
Ahead of the 2014 local elections in Turkey, not only various
opposition parties and local players, but also a number of Western
governments and observers believed that the vote would mark the
demise of the ruling AK Party government. Having failed to defeat
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government earlier this year,
the opposition front turned to future aspirations to undermining his
power. This approach has effectively generated an air of chaos in the
country since the Gezi Park protests last year and it would appear
that the tensions will continue until the presidential election.
During last year’s urban revolts, violent mobs had attempted to seize
control of the prime minister’s offices in Dolmabahce, Istanbul
in order to strongarm the government to resign. When Erdogan left
the country for a series of official visits in North Africa, which
had been organized months in advance, widespread rumors that he would
never come back from Tunisia gave rise to rampant political pipedreams
in the opposition’s ranks.
Just as the country slowly patched the wounds of street violence,
the Gulen Movement orchestrated an attempt to overthrow the
Erdogan government on Dec. 17, 2013 under the guise of a corruption
investigation. As a political move, the corruption charges sought
to discredit the AK Party government, which was now the target of an
opposition front consisting of Istanbul-based big business interests,
various political parties and the Gulenists, a so-called religious
community. Never in the country’s history had an elected government
faced such a serious challenge. The campaign, admittedly seeking to
remove Erdogan from power while keeping the AK Party intact, went to
great lengths in order to make the case against the prime minister,
including, of course, that he would escape the country before the
local elections.
The government, however, managed to survive yet another challenge to
its rule as Erdogan ran an ambitious election campaign throughout
the country and, to the surprise of many pro-opposition figures,
won another landslide victory on March 30. As such, Erdogan won
the first round against the opposition. Despite the local election
victory’s importance to the ruling AK Party, there is no doubt that
the genuinely historic vote will take place in August 2014.
Across the world, presidential elections take place according to the
particular arrangements of each country, typically a direct vote by
the people or an indirect election through the legislative assembly.
In Turkey, however, the presidential vote has a long history of
creating problems which date back to the 1960 military coup that
rearranged government institutions and positioned the presidency as
a safety valve in case elected governments sought to move away from
the policies of the secularist establishment. It was therefore that
the office of the president has long been reserved for either former
members of the military or senior-level bureaucrats, people who could
fulfill the function of keeping civilians under control. It was not
until three decades after the 1960 military coup that a civilian,
Turgut Ozal, held the office.
The Era of Civilian Presidents
In 1989, the Turkish Parliament broke a seemingly incontrovertible
rule about the presidency when Turgut Ozal, who had served as prime
minister since 1983, made a successful bid for the presidential office,
where he would die just four years into his seven-year term.
His successors, Suleyman Demirel and Ahmet Necdet Sezer, largely
served at the pleasure of a handful of military commanders and senior
bureaucrats even though both presidents notably lacked military
background. During the lead-up to the 2007 presidential election,
the first after the AK Party’s rise to power in the early 2000s, a
number of controversial events shook the nation. In February 2006, an
armed teenager assassinated Italian national Andrea Santoro, a Roman
Catholic priest, claiming he had killed the missionary in the name
of Allah. Three months later, a gunman attacked the Council of State
headquarters to kill a judge and injure four others. The seemingly
religiously-motivated attacks continued with the assassination of
Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007. Finally,
later in the year, five men tortured and murdered three employees of
Zirve Publishing House in Malatya. The Ergenekon trials, which gained
momentum in the late 2000s, partly concentrated on these assaults.
As the targeting of non-Muslim communities by supposedly religious
Muslim assailants failed to deter the AK Party government, Ret. Gen.
YaÅ~_ar Buyukanıt, who served as Chief of the General Staff of the
Turkish Armed Forces at the time, issued a memorandum on April 27,
2007 to highlight the military’s constitutional mandate to protect
the Republic. In response, the government took a strong stance against
the military’s direct involvement in the controversy.
The military’s inability to force the AK Party government into
submission gave rise to another challenge from the establishment. The
old guard within the judiciary ruled, following an appeal from the
main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), that two-thirds of
the parliamentarians, namely 367 lawmakers, had to be present in order
for the legislative assembly to have a quorum to hold a presidential
vote. Unsurprisingly, the courts had not required a qualified majority
when presidents Ozal, Demirel and Sezer ran for president. When the
courts forced the Parliament and, by extension, the presidential
election into a deadlock, the AK Party government called for early
elections on June 12, 2007 and won an impressive 47 percent of the
vote. Following the parliamentary elections, the ruling AK Party
joined forces with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) to elect
then-Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as the country’s 11th president.
Several months later, a referendum introduced several amendments
to the 1982 Constitution including a new rule stipulating that the
people would elect the president through a direct vote.
The 2014 Presidential Election
The upcoming presidential vote thus marks an unprecedented event in
the Republic’s 91-year history as millions of voters will go to polls
to elect the country’s next president, marking the second round in the
struggle between the ruling AK Party and the opposition front. While
the former campaign will pledge to eliminate all impediments on the
“popular will,” opposition parties will seek to seize this final
opportunity to keep the Kemalist order intact. Since the people have
the ultimate choice between the two roadmaps, Turkey is entering
perhaps the most crucial election season in its modern history. With
the presidential vote just months away, the ruling AK Party enjoys
a comfortable advantage over the opposition.
With the official announcement still pending, Erdogan seems to be the
front-runner for the job. Even if Erdogan decides not to run the party
has a wide variety of potential contenders in its ranks including
President Abdullah Gul. Furthermore, the AK Party presents the
electorate, 45.5 percent of whom recently voted for the party, with a
political agenda willing to tackle pressing issues such as the Kurdish
question and rapprochement with Armenian authorities. Considering
the party’s track record in economic development, social policies
and democratization, the AK Party candidate will no doubt get a head
start in the race.
The Opposition: Is a Unity Candidate possible?
The opposition ranks, in contrast, fester with trouble. Keeping in
mind that the most recent local elections marked yet another defeat
for the main opposition CHP, the ruling AK Party’s main competition
seems largely isolated to a handful of secularist strongholds and
unable to reach out to new voter blocs. Although the party revisited
some of its outdated positions on a variety of issues including the
social status of religious Muslims and the Kurds, the local election
results clearly established that the outreach attempts proved futile.
Unable to appeal to these key constituencies, the CHP campaign barely
has a fighting chance in the race. With its prolonged search for a
viable presidential increasingly resembling a wild goose chase, the
CHP leadership conveys the message that it has not given any serious
thought to the issue over the past seven years.
The situation also looks bleak for the MHP, whose lack of
preparation, coupled with an extremely nationalist platform which
stands in stark contrast with the party’s professed ideal to find an
all-encompassing candidate, has motivated the organization to run
a joint presidential campaign with the CHP leadership. Currently,
MHP chairman Devlet Bahceli appears to be leading efforts with CHP
leader Kemal Kılıcdaroglu pledging his support as both parties meet
with pro-opposition NGOs and fringe parties to pitch the idea.
According to Bahceli, the ideal presidential candidate should be “a
nationalist, a conservative with spiritual values, a secularist with
democratic values, an individual at peace with the Republic’s core
values.” Luckily, Kılıcdaroglu’s list of preferred traits describes
roughly the same type of candidate. The million dollar question now
is whether such a candidate even exists, and more important, whether
there would be any need for political parties if the opposition’s
ideal candidate embodied such a perfect combination of different
political creeds. To be perfectly honest, it is hard to believe
that such seasoned politicians like Bahceli and Kılıcdaroglu are
unaware of this fundamental problem. The only reasonable way out
of this conundrum is for each political party to participate in the
presidential race individually.
How about the Kurdish vote?
At this point, the Kurdish political movement and its popular base
holds the key to the upcoming presidential vote. Recently, the Peace
and Democracy Party merged with the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)
as part of a broader agenda to improve the movement’s electoral
performance among Turkish voters. The HDP leadership has already
announced that they will opt to participate in the presidential contest
individually. It remains unclear how this bold move might influence
AK Party Kurdish voters. In the 2010 constitutional referendum,
the Kurdish political movement had called for a boycott to reduce
turnout but inevitably failed to influence the outcome. While the
movement received about 7 percent of the vote in past elections, the
Kurdish peace process as well as the widely-acknowledged fact that
the HDP campaign is doomed to fail might limit the party’s popular
appeal. The Kurdish political movement will also have to consider
that a large portion of the Kurdish population travels to various
parts of the country as seasonal laborers.
In light of that, Turkey appears to be entering a particularly
interesting election to vote in what AK Party supporters hope is a
head of state with considerable political power. Given how much is
at stake, certain groups within the opposition will understandably
seek to influence the outcome by calling for street protests and mass
demonstrations. Meanwhile, the AK Party government is rekindling ties
with big business interests at home and joining forces with foreign
partners as Kurdish oil begins to flow, negotiations in Cyprus
promise reconciliation and bilateral relations with Israel and the
U.S. go back to normal. The political arena not infrequently throws
curveballs to its occupants, but the situation at hand promises to
spoil the opposition’s game plan.
http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/05/29/turkeys-presidential-election-a-historic-vote