“Turkey, which produced totally opposite election results within ten months, is diagnosed as ‘borderline democracy’..”
These ironic remarks came from the X (formerly twitter) account of Zaytung, Turkish equivalent of The Onion.
Joke aside, the results of municipal elections on March 31 certainly caught everyone by great surprise. Despite the immense assymetry in the political showdown between Erdoğan’s tightly knit rule, and fragmented, disarrayed opposition, it was the electorate which managed to throw this curve ball, making Turkey’s future course a continued hot topic.
It is also extremely symbolic that the two consecutive elections — parliamentary and presidential polls in May — and the one on last Sunday take place as the republic was celebrating a centennial, about to enter its next century in October this year.
Results are stunning. Despite the widespread apathy — “fatigue of politics” — with a much lower turnout than the elections before (78 %), the electorate paradoxically managed to raise the main-opposition party, the Secular-Kemalist CHP, to a level above the seemingly invincible AKP — by two percentage points margin. This is undoubtedly a striking backlash for Erdoğan, and his rule for over 20 years.
To even its own amazement, CHP, “breaking its egg”, has emerged as the first party in the political map after 47 years. This can be explained by the rejuvenation of its leadership, and the “magnetic field” of mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, as a soft spoken politician.
The results also make clear the “beginning of the end” for the minor parties in the nationalist and conservative flank of the opposition, which last May had been part of a now-defunkt alliance. I had pointed out in a previous article of mine that, by each of them joining the local election race with their own candidates, they were committing suicide.
The electorate nearly decimated IYIP, led by Ms Meral Akşener; kept a lock on xenophobic ZP and nullified the party led by the former PM, Ahmet Davutoğlu — ending tragically with only 34 thousand votes nationwide.
The Kurdish voters of the DEM Party seem to have cast their ballots — maybe tactically, maybe out of alienation for their party— for the CHP, marking a lower figure for DEM, which stagnated on around 5.6 %, a steady fall from two-digit figures in the pastr decade.
The figures for Erdoğan are shattering. Compared to the local elections five years ago, the AKP lost eight million voters nationwide, meaning its city municipalities declined from 39 to 24. CHP’s gains were significant: From 21 to 36. (Another blow for the AKP was the solid stance of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party in the mainly Kurdish southeast: the party increased its city municipalities from 8 to 10.)
Considering that the next general elections are due in four years, this is a brand new tectonic shift in the political map, and in power relations, marking a greater gap than ever between the local administrations and the ultra-centralist “super-presidential system”, introduced by Erdoğan after a dubiously conducted referendum in 2017.
If this was a political earthquake, what were the reasons that triggered it? We are back, it seems, to the famous saying: “It’s the economy, stupid!”: the electorate during the ten months since May elections experienced a much more intense pressure due to the free fall of economy.The impact of sharp impoverishment, and broken purchase power, was reflected, despite a shackled media, throughout the nation.
"The most important factor in these results was the inflation and especially the cost of living, which the AKP's wrong economic policy had driven out of control. The income distribution turned upside down as a result of these factors and led the majority of wage earners, especially pensioners and minimum wage earners, to vote against the AKP,” commented Mahfi Eğilmez, a prominent economist in his blog.
As a consequence, those who were hardest hit by Erdoğan’s relentless economic policies either stayed at home on March 31 (up to 80 % of those abstaining from the vote belonged to the traditional AKP segment) or “migrated” temporarily to the minor Islamist party, YRP. Erdoğan’s open refusal to improve the conditions for those social groups, it seems, backfired with a bang.
"If the AKP had given another wage increase to pensioners, minimum wage earners and wage earners in general before the elections, the result might have been different,” added Eğilmez. "However, then there would have been no budget to last the rest of the year."
There were secondary reasons as well. Arguably emboldened by the result last May, and feeling secure that the local elections after all will not effect the political balances in Ankara, Erdoğan neglected his party more than ever, and nominated candidates who did not appeal to the electorate. He has underestimated also the diversions from his Islamist movement and took for granted that smaller parties like YRP would cooperate with his party for the “cause” under the banner of Islamism.
So, he was a victim of his increasingly erratic pattern this time. Thus, arguments such as “Erdoğan did not win last year’s election, the opposition lost it” applies even this time around: More than the opposition having won the local elections, it was Erdoğan who lost it.
Perhaps the course of recent history is also helpful. As Ibrahim Uslu, a political scientist and a former pollster, argued in social media, “The electorate has been reacting to the AKP for a long time. Let's remember that in 2015 June elections, the AKP's share in the electorate dropped from 50 per cent to 40 per cent and it could not govern alone any longer. Since then, the AKP has managed the process with political engineering instead of recognising the structural reasons for the decline in the electorate to regain the consent of the electorate again.”
This has a point. Earlier, Erdoğan had the external support of Gülenists and reformers, but Gezi protests and corruption probes in 2013 changed his mindset to seek alliance with the old establishment of Turkey, nationalists and “etatists”. The ten years that have passed — with the “state of crisis” remaining critical — seems to have left him out of further options on alliance building now; thus, more vulnerable than ever.
He is now stuck with sharp choices. As Prof Özer Sencar, the head of the pollster MetroPoll (which predicted the result exactly) told me, Erdoğan stand before a watershed:
“He will either have to toughen his stance to survive through oppression until 2028 elections, or, as the challenges of economy are very tough, seek cooperation with the conservative parties and even CHP for crisis management. He may even tactically soften in his intentions for a new constitution and be more inclusive.”
Is an early election to be expected? All odds are against it. Erdoğan knows that Turkey’s crisis-ridden eceonomy can not bear any longer the burden of another “election economy” with populistic measures, and take further risks. His aim, therefore, will be to seek a way to refresh his power one way or another, and, in the long run, await the result of the American elections, hoping that it ends with a Trump victory.
Nevertheless, the election results show a changed balances on local levels in disfavour of the AKP and perhaps indicate that Erdoğan despite all his attempts may have reached the limits of his abilities to transform Turkey into an Islamist republic. “But he will stand firm” Sencar said. “It should be kept in mind that no Islamist movement has left power willingly.”
Now, the eyes are on the winner, the CHP. As Bekir Ağırdır, the former director of pollster KONDA, wrote in social media, underlining the “new alignment” in Turkish politics:
“Conservatives, Islamists, Turkish nationalists voted for the CHP. CHP has now become the only centre party in Turkey. This victory is also a result of the CHP's transformation. If a leader who can read this transformation well and the CHP can carry this process, it can be said that a new era has opened before Turkey. But it is too early to say this. Whether it will be a short-term victory or whether it will lead the transformation in Turkey will entirely depend on the CHP's behaviour.”
The current euphoria enveloping the CHP and its devoted analysts may lead to errors, as Sencar pointed out to me. Gaining only about 1.6 million more votes compared to 2019 elections, CHP’s victory was thanks to the large chunks of votes of the Kurds, and others abandoning their parties such as IYIP.
“It may look misleading, CHP leadership should not fall into illusion that the victory was all about them and permanently so,” Sencar said.
“I hope they analyse the data more deeply and intelligently than they tend to do.”