Page 9 - TURKRptJul19

Party (AKP), and by extension Erdogan himself (for in his tub-thumping campaigning he seemed only too willing to make the polls a referendum on his rule), could conceivably lose in Ankara despite election manipulation but that the strongman would not allow Istanbul to remove itself from his control. But there were two things that we had not properly reckoned with. One, the tidal wave of opposition to Erdogan had grown so strong that those dedicated to achieving sufficient ‘goings-on’ after votes were cast were perhaps rather overwhelmed and, two, the opposition candidate in Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, and the Republican People’s Party (CHP’s) Istanbul head, Canan Kaftancioglu, achieved the astonishing feat (and, yes, where Turkish elections are concerned, this truly was astonishing) of collecting all signed-off documents on the votes made in the city. Never before had the CHP achieved such a thing.
The announcement that didn’t come. Cynics listened out for the traditional early hours AKP announcement that their man had won. And they pricked their ears expecting the CHP to meekly accept its latest defeat. But not this time. Imamoglu emerged victorious and Turkey watchers stood agog. Alas, the sweet victory was short-lived as a riled Erdogan and his party gradually, and ironically, stepped up their protests that the narrow triumph was intolerably marred by alleged polling station “irregularities” and the YSK election watchdog (despite warnings from big voices such as Berlin that its move was essentially preposterous) with a split decision annulled the result and demanded that Istanbul run its election all over again on June 23. Prior to the first contest, we were sceptical that the CHP—which, like its junior election coalition partner, the Iyi Party, includes more than a few nationalist-minded politicians who have little time for Turkey’s sizeable Kurdish minority—could overcome the divisive and pervasive effects of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in its attempts to consolidate the opposition vote.
Letter from Demirtas. In an effort at giving the attempt at defeating Erdogan and his henchmen a decisive boost, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) opted to not put up local election candidates across the west of Turkey and, in Istanbul, recommended that Kurds vote for Imamoglu. Given the age-old tensions there was a big question mark over whether the strategy would work, but a letter from jailed Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas seemed to largely convince Kurdish voters to turn out for the CHP candidates. Erdogan’s descending popularity across Western provinces and municipalities thus accelerated, though his stronger popularity in mainly rural other parts of Turkey meant that, factoring in the ‘goings-on’, countrywide support for the People’s Alliance election coalition of the AKP and the Nationalist Movement Party (the MHP, which represents the ‘ultras’ of nationalism in Turkey) held up above 50%. Howard Eissenstat, associate professor of Middle East history at St. Lawrence University, New York State, is one observer who remarked before the local elections that Erdogan, who rose to prominence in politics as mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s, would never allow the business and cultural capital out of his grasp. Well, hats off to Imamoglu and Kaftancioglu, it did indeed slip from his grasp. The question now is will the populist authoritarian—back spouting angry rhetoric in recent days after a strategy of playing aloof from the Istanbul re-run apparently failed with voters—find it back in his palm following the revote?
“Erdogan is weakened AND fully dominant”. “Whatever happens in Istanbul on Sunday, here are two things I can say for sure: 1. Erdogan is weakened AND fully dominant over the political structures in Turkey. 2. Precisely because of point #1, Turkey will be less stable in the short and medium term,” Eissenstat said in a June 18 tweet. Turning to some deeper currents that may define what’s ahead, Omer Taspinar wrote on May 26 in a Syndication Bureau op-ed entitled “In the Istanbul Elections, Erdogan’s Alliance with the Deep State Defines Turkey’s Future”: “Most observers of Turkish politics understandably are obsessed with the political power that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accumulated over the past 16 years. They focus exclusively on him and his autocratic tendencies. But this fixation creates a false idea that overstates Erdogan’s reach at the expense of the real driver behind Turkish politics: the anti-Kurdish coalition that exists between the
9 TURKEY Country Report July 2019 www.intellinews.com