While the AK Party is expected to lose some percentage points, its continuing control appears unstoppable. Throwing the neutrality expected from a President of the Republic to the winds, Mr. Erdogan is running as his Party’s top candidate, with the consequence that increasingly the state institutions and the party are becoming one. While it is unlikely that the AK Party will garner enough seats in the Assembly to push for a constitutional amendment to make Turkey a presidential rather than a parliamentary republic, a new era of unchecked presidentialism threatens Turkey.
On May 30th, in a demonstration orchestrated by the AK Party, tens of thousands of people gathered in Istanbul to celebrate the 562nd anniversary of the conquest of the city by Fatih Sultan Mehmet in 1453. Some of Mr. Erdogan’s election posters present him as a virtual legatee of the Sultan, boasting of the national revival carried out under his leadership. The Muslim prayer of Namaz ended with the Grand Imam of Mecca pleading to Islamicize “Hagia Sophia.”
In case one had missed Erdogan’s bid not only to be the legatee of Fatih the Conqueror of Istanbul but may be the new Caliph of all Muslims as well, during the opening ceremonies of an airport in the southeast city of Hakkȃri, at the far reaches of the Turkish border with Syria and Iran, Erdogan promised to continue the task of “Selahattin the conqueror,” who had freed Jerusalem from the Christian Crusaders and vowed that Jerusalem would become a Muslim city again.
So determined is the AK Party to reorient Turkey toward Islamic law and against women’s equal rights staunchly defended by Ataturk’s republic, that recently a majority of the Turkish Constitutional Court (many of them appointed by ex-President Abdullah Gul and Mr. Erdogan) recognized as legal marriages performed by religious authorities, reversing the Republic’s law that marriages would first need to be performed by a civil authority. The murkiness of this new ruling generates concerns that polygamy and under-age marriages under Islamic law may increase. It is also unclear what would happen in cases of divorce, alimony, and inheritance for religiously performed marriages. Would Islamic Shari’a law apply to these cases and thus enter Turkish law through the back door?
All eyes are on the HDP, Halklarin Democratic Partisi — “Peoples’ Democratic Party” — and its charismatic leader Selahattin Demirtaș. Emerging out of the formerly separatist Kurdish movement, HDP is now advocating reconciliation between Kurdish and Turkish peoples. Intellectuals and policy analysts are discussing proposals ranging from the establishment of autonomous democratic regions in Kurdish provinces to forms of federalism and increased power-sharing. HDP, much like the Scottish National Party and Podemos in Spain, is transforming its formerly separatist aspirations into a critique of the status quo. Women’s issues, social justice, the civil rights of ethnic, linguistic and sexual minorities and youth employment are on the agenda.
Many fear that if HDP fails to pass the 10% threshold, the Kurdish regions of Turkey may explode in unrest. Others hope that by entering the National Assembly HDP may stop some of the momentum of the AK Party toward the constitutional change into a presidential system. Yet there is also concern that building on its partial recognition of Kurdish cultural rights in the last decade, the AK Party may strike some deal with those factions within HDP, still loyal to the imprisoned charismatic leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
There are two troublespots on the horizon for the AK Party. Despite the impressive rate of economic development, which catapulted Turkey into the top 20 economies in the world, with a per capita income of nearly $20,000 in 2013, the country is in a construction bubble not unlike that of Ireland and Spain in their boom and bust cycles in the last decades. The value of the Turkish lira to the dollar has dropped – which is good for Turkish tourism and exports but bad for the balance of payments and Turkish foreign debt. Just as the growth of the so-called Asian tigers, to which Turkey compares itself came to a standstill, Turkey’s economy may also slow down. And in a country with an official rate of 9% unemployment this will not bode well for labor markets.
Even among those bitterly divided about the Islamist turn of the country, there is shared alarm about AK Party’s foreign policy. The main highways and side streets of Istanbul are full of Syrian refugee women and children who accost drivers and passengers begging for money. On one such trip to the Beyoglu district, I asked the driver what was going on. His answer was, “They are Erdogan’s bastards !” I was taken aback by this until he clarified that they were Syrian refugees admitted by the government. While the majority of Turkish people support the governments’ impressive record in accommodating the Syrian refugees –currently 2 million are said to be in the country, many not registered with the UNHCR – many are also concerned about unemployment, overcrowding, petty theft and criminality potentially increasing. Social, educational, and health services for refugees outside the official camps are minimal.
Not only the condition of Syrian refugees, but the government’s meddling in Syrian affairs, its hostility to Assad, its continuing championing of ISIS or Daesh that is gaining increasingly more territory in the region, are making people nervous. Many Turks, whether secular or religious, have grown up with the history of the bitter end of the Ottoman Empire, the enmity of erstwhile subject peoples in the Balkans and the Middle East who turned against them, and the near disappearance of the mainland of the Turks through partition and occupation at the end of First World War. The cautious policy of not wanting to meddle in too many adventures abroad led Turkey during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq to deny the use of the Incirlik Airbase to its American allies. This caution has been thrown to the wind with the government’s new Middle East policy.
After 14 years of AK party rule, the Turkish voters far beyond Gezi Park have reason to be worried about AKP’s general drift. But will they be apprehensive enough to pull the emergency brake on the galloping ambitions of Mr. Erdogan and his entourage?