Turkey's election A battle for the future

Jul 19th 2007 | ANKARA, DIYARBAKIR AND ISTANBUL
From The Economist print edition
The importance of this weekend's election goes well beyond Turkey itself

ON JULY 22nd Turkey, still an adolescent democracy, goes to the polls. The event is being followed carefully far from its own borders. For one thing, the country is of huge strategic importance. It borders the European Union to the west and the Caucasus, Iran, Iraq and Syria to the east and south. Iraq is especially crucial, as Turkey's army is threatening to invade its northern region to root out Kurdish terrorists there. Outsiders are also monitoring Turkey as one of the Muslim world's rare examples of a working democracy.

The election contest has been joyless if feverish, marked by huge rallies and demonstrations that suggest there will be a big voter turnout. Only this week an independent candidate was shot dead as he was being driven away from a TV studio in Istanbul. But underlying the tensions is a battle over which way Turkey's democracy will go.

The first fusillade in this battle was fired on April 27th when the army, claiming to detect a dangerous slide towards Islamic radicalism, threatened to intervene against the government. In a late-night statement posted on the general staff's website, it spoke ominously of risks to Ataturk's secular republic. In a country with a history of military coups, the so-called “e-coup” promptly sparked a political crisis that led to the early election. Since then, it has cast a pall over the entire campaign.

The proximate trigger for the army's threat was the decision by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister and leader of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, to nominate his foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, to replace President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a former judge who was due to step down on May 16th. Like Mr Erdogan, Mr Gul once dabbled in political Islam. More to the point, both men's wives wear the Muslim headscarf, which in accordance with Ataturk's secular tradition is banned in all public buildings.

The army, always suspicious of the AK Party because of its Islamist roots, deemed the prospect of such a president a threat to the secular republic. Despite the government's big parliamentary majority, Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), managed to stop Mr Gul's election by dubiously claiming in the constitutional court that parliament lacked a quorum of 367 deputies in its first round of balloting. Egged on by the generals, the court came down on Mr Baykal's side. Meanwhile, millions of secular Turks took to the streets to protest against the government. Many were urban middle-class women, plainly fearing that their carefree lifestyles were at stake.

The combined pressure proved too strong: Mr Erdogan withdrew Mr Gul's candidacy and called a general election before the scheduled date of November 4th. But in a burst of defiance, he also rammed through a constitutional change to let the people elect the next president themselves. Mr Sezer, who has continued in office as a caretaker, vetoed this. Mr Baykal, who has built a career on trashing rivals without producing ideas of his own, lodged a fresh complaint with the constitutional court. Unexpectedly, however—or perhaps because it wished to salvage its reputation—the court this time backed the government.

The new parliament must now decide whether to go for a direct election of the president or to stick with the present rules. Under these, if parliament fails to agree on a president within 45 days, it will have to dissolve itself and call yet another election. Thanks to Mr Baykal, a quorum is now needed, a complication that may allow opposition parties to paralyse the whole process. Mr Gul has hinted that he will re-present himself as a presidential candidate, but Mr Erdogan has also talked of putting together a possible list of nominees in consultation with the opposition.
Checking the record

To most Turkish voters, however, the election is about much more than the presidency and secularism. It is, in effect, a referendum on the AK Party's record in office, which is strikingly good (see chart 1). Never previously in power at national level, Mr Erdogan and his fellow Islamists have done more to transform and modernise Turkey than any of their secular predecessors except Ataturk and perhaps Turgut Ozal, a visionary prime minister in the 1980s. From the hardscrabble Kurdish provinces to the shiny new suburbs of Istanbul, the effects of AK's “silent revolution” are evident everywhere.

In the Kurds' unofficial capital, Diyarbakir, Kurdish women were recently ululating appreciatively as Mehdi Eker, the farm minister, reeled off the government's achievements and goals: average annual growth of 7.3% (nearly four times the EU figure), a record $20 billion in foreign direct investment, $40 billion in tourism earnings by 2013. “We gave your children free textbooks, brought the internet to their schools, and water to all your villages,” said Mr Eker. He was speaking the most common Kurdish dialect, Kurmanji. Until the AK Party passed a raft of constitutional and judicial changes, he might have been jailed on separatism charges for doing so.

It was largely thanks to these constitutional changes, as well as to an improving economy, that the EU agreed to open membership talks with Turkey in 2005, a goal that most previous Turkish governments aspired to but none came close to achieving. Many European and American diplomats agree that Mr Erdogan is the man most fit to lead Turkey. Their views are plainly shared by millions of Turkish voters, who recall the protracted squabbles, economic mismanagement and massive corruption of the string of secular coalitions that crippled Turkey before AK.

Indeed, opinion polls suggest that the voters may give AK quite a bit more than the 34% that catapulted it to single-party rule in the November 2002 election (when only one other party, the CHP, got above the 10% threshold for parliamentary representation). The polls suggest that at least one other party, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), will enter parliament this time, along with some 30 candidates from the Kurdish Democratic Turkey Party (DTP), who are running as independents to get round the 10% threshold.

Thus, even if AK gets a bigger share of the vote than in 2002, it will probably have a smaller majority and it might even be unable to rule alone. On the other hand, if it were to win a sufficiently big majority (two-thirds of the 550 parliamentary seats) to change the constitution and force through its own choice of president, the army might well step in. “This [election] is a stick with shit at both ends,” says one AK bigwig. “The choice is between a weak government or a military coup.”

That may be an exaggeration. Yet, looking back, some AK officials concede that they could have handled the row over the presidency better. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president has considerable power. He can approve the expulsion of overtly pious officers, and he appoints judges and university rectors. He can also veto legislation deemed to violate the secular constitution. To the generals, as to the millions of secular demonstrators, no AK man can be trusted in this role. They argue that Mr Erdogan (who originally wanted the job for himself) should have reached out to the opposition and agreed on a candidate outside his own party.

Secular suspicions of the AK government had already been fanned, not least by the controversial education minister, Huseyin Celik. Mr Celik, who is said to have close links to the powerful Islamic Nur fraternity, has been accused of injecting Islam by stealth. He has overseen a revision of textbooks to promote creationism and the recruitment, as teachers, of hundreds of graduates of imam hatip, Islamic clerical-training schools. There has also been “an explosion in enrolment at Koran lessons, especially among girls,” says Alattin Dincer, president of Turkey's largest teachers' union. No wonder Mr Celik had to explain himself in a meeting with the chief of the general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, shortly after the army's e-coup.

Attempts by a few AK mayors to create booze-free zones, as well as Mr Erdogan's own failed effort in 2005 to outlaw adultery, have not helped the party's image with secularists. Yet none of this amounts to a tilt towards sharia law. Indeed, even the AK's fiercest critics are hard-pressed to point to a single act that violates secularism. If anything, most pundits reckon that the army's salvoes may have boosted Mr Erdogan's support. Banking on continued stability under a second term of AK government, foreign investors have been propelling the Istanbul stock exchange to record highs.

In truth, many AK reforms have upset the party's own conservative constituents—especially the scrapping of a law that put husbands in charge of their households. Plenty are disgruntled by the government's failure to loosen restrictions on the headscarf. All 62 female candidates fielded by AK are bareheaded. “We can't put our democracy at risk just for the headscarf, so we've frozen the issue for now,” explains Ayse Bohurler, an Erdogan party chief who sports a tightly wound scarf.

What is more, Mr Erdogan has dropped some 150 deputies, many of them Islamist firebrands who in March 2003 voted against letting American troops invade Iraq through Turkey. He has replaced them with an array of new faces, among them a high-flying Kurdish investment banker, a writer from the liberal Muslim Alevi faith and a famous cartoonist's wife. Ever the pragmatist, “Erdogan drew the right lesson from those [pro-secular] rallies,” asserts a senior Bush administration official.
Unimpressed in Istanbul

Behind the walled privacy of Istanbul's oldest social club, the scions of Turkey's moneyed class are unimpressed. They cling to the spectre of a battle between Islamic radicals and Ataturk's disciples. “This election is about the survival of the republic. I will vote for Ataturk's party [the CHP],” squawks a septuagenarian socialite. Like fellow members of the Cercle d'Orient, her aversion to the Islamists is profoundly snobbish. The real worry is the shift of wealth from an old industrial elite towards a new bourgeoisie made up of pious Anatolian entrepreneurs, who have thrived since AK came to power.

The generals have different concerns. Among the reforms that earned Turkey its prized date to open membership talks with the EU were provisions to trim the influence of the army. The National Security Council, where the generals used to bark orders to the politicians, has been reduced to an advisory role. Civilians can no longer be tried in military courts. The generals' powers would be shorn further if Turkey ever joined the EU.

Yet that prospect seems to be receding. The election of Nicolas Sarkozy as France's president is a blow, because he is strongly against Turkey's EU membership. The French recently blocked the opening of a chapter in Turkey's negotiations with the EU on the ground that it was relevant only to full membership, not some form of looser association. French doubts are widely shared in Europe: only Britain and Sweden are now forthright in pressing the case for admitting Turkey. The impasse in Cyprus, to which Turkey refuses to extend its customs union with the EU so long as Turkish northern Cyprus is ostracised by the rest of the world, has become an excuse for all who want to slow down or stop Turkey's membership talks.

Not surprisingly, popular support in Turkey for the EU has fallen back from the highs of two years ago. Yet although the EU is one of Turkey's two big foreign-policy problems, it has hardly been mentioned during the election campaign. “The EU doesn't sell in Anatolia,” comments Murat Mercan, an AK deputy.

The EU's focus on issues such as free speech and minority rights has also helped to feed a dangerous nationalism. This was most chillingly demonstrated in January when a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink, was shot dead by a 17-year-old because he had “insulted the Turks”. Three months later a group of youths in the eastern city of Malatya slit the throats of three Protestant missionaries after torturing them. This week the Istanbul-based Armenian patriarch, Mesrob Mutafyan II, said he had received threats to blow up his headquarters.

“Testosterone-driven nationalism is the biggest problem in Turkey,” says one foreign banker in Istanbul. Ali Babacan, the economy minister, agrees. “Our biggest failure has been to create jobs for around 700,000 Turks who enter the labour market every year,” he adds. Mr Babacan is also Turkey's top EU negotiator, and he still aims to be ready for membership by 2013. “Sarkozy will change,” he says. “The EU cannot violate its obligations.”
The Iraq conundrum

Renewed nationalism is also affecting Turkey's other big foreign-policy issue: northern Iraq. Sitting in his offices in Washington, DC, Qubad Talabani, the youthful representative of the Kurds' quasi-independent state in northern Iraq, says that he and his kin are “bracing for a storm”. Mr Talabani, who happens to be the son of the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, is talking about what may follow Turkey's election. For the new political landscape is likely to determine whether the army makes good on its repeated threats to attack separatist guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) who are based in northern Iraq.

An invasion by NATO's second-biggest army would not only destabilise the only fairly calm bit of Iraq. It would also wreck Turkey's relations with America and the EU. Worse, it might not succeed: the Turks, too, could easily end up bogged down and unable to defeat an insurgency.

An upsurge in PKK attacks has killed over 200 Turkish soldiers since the start of the year. Each new Turkish casualty is bringing votes to the MHP, which is led by an enigmatic former economics professor, Devlet Bahceli. Even his most avid supporters were unnerved when Mr Bahceli flung a hangman's noose at his audience during a rally in the eastern city of Erzurum. The MHP leader has vowed, if he becomes prime minister, to reintroduce the death penalty and execute the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

Like the generals, Mr Bahceli is also keen to clobber some 3,500 PKK militants who are sheltering in northern Iraq. America's failure to do the job is the biggest cause of rampant anti-American feelings in Turkey. Support for America is now down to 9%, lower even than in the occupied Palestinian territories, according to a Pew Global Attitudes Survey (see chart 2).

Many Turks reckon that America is reluctant to attack the PKK because it secretly wants to establish an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, which would encompass the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and, possibly, chunks of south-eastern Turkey. Mr Gul has complained that PKK fighters are carrying American-made weapons. America has denied responsibility. Meanwhile, Turkish troops continue to mass along the Iraqi border. Iraqi Kurdish leaders say their fledgling entity, not the PKK, is Turkey's real target.

Turkish sensitivities are perhaps best explained by their imperial past. Between 1878 and 1918 the Ottoman empire lost 85% of its territory and 75% of its population. “The fear of obliteration was a constant presence throughout the empire's long demise,” notes an Ottoman historian, Taner Akcam. The belief that Western powers are bent on dismembering Turkey remains strong. Gunduz Aktan, a former ambassador who is running on the MHP ticket in Istanbul, argues that Turkey's very survival as a nation-state hinges on preventing a Kurdish one emerging. “If the Americans don't stop this, we will have to go in [to northern Iraq] ourselves,” he says.

Mr Erdogan, who has resisted the army's calls for a cross-border incursion, has a different view. Over the past two years he has been quietly testing the ground for what Henri Barkey, a Turkey follower at America's Lehigh University, calls a “grand bargain”. Turkey would recognise the Iraqi Kurds' semi-independent status; the Iraqi Kurds would coax PKK fighters to give up their guns and pledge to respect Turkey's borders. Relieved of the pressure of having to choose between its Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish allies, America would be delighted, as would Turkey's own Kurds.

But the generals refuse to play along. They still hope that, after the election, they will get the nod to stomp into northern Iraq. It is not only the future of Turkish democracy that is at stake this weekend; it may be the future of the whole region.