ANKARA
WHEN THE VOTE TALLIES started trickling in from Yozgat, my Turkish colleagues knew that an electoral rout was under way. A mid-sized Anatolian city, Yozgat is Turkey’s version of Peoria; whoever does well there usually does well throughout the country. It’s ordinarily an ultra-nationalist stronghold, but this year, the Justice and Development party (AKP) was wowing Yozgat with its anti-corruption, reformist brand of Islamic politics. Almost half of Yozgat’s ballots were marked for the Islamic party in a multiparty race. The closest challengers barely made double digits.
And so went the November 3 elections in officially secular Turkey–America’s closest friend among majority-Muslim countries and a NATO ally since 1952, whose bases and assistance will be critically important to any substantial military operation in Iraq. The Turkish vote was nothing short of a political rebellion–and could be seen as a challenge to the anti-religious tenets of Kemal Ataturk’s republic, founded on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire nearly 80 years ago. Should this be cause for alarm in Washington? That would probably be an overreaction.
What surprised pundits and pollsters wasn’t the AKP victory but the extent of it. The AKP was expected to win 20 to 25 percent of the vote (the high-water mark for earlier Islamic parties), and then form a coalition with one or more of the secular parties. Instead, with more than a third of the popular vote, it won nearly two-thirds of the seats in Turkey’s parliament. Only one other group, the Republican People’s party (which Ataturk himself founded), attained any legislative presence.
What everyone underestimated was the level of popular discontent with a tanking economy and malgovernance. Arguably, the message voters delivered was more populist outrage than fundamentalist yearning. “These results amount to a civilian coup,” wrote Mehmet Ali Birand, a well-regarded Turkish columnist. “This is the response given by millions who are saying ‘You have failed to listen to me. You have failed to govern me well. You have impoverished me. You have treated me in a condescending manner.'”
Three factors help explain AKP’s overwhelming victory.
The collapse of the political center. Turkish voters are a moderately conservative bunch. Approximately 50 to 60 percent usually opt for center-right parties, while the center-left habitually attracts 25 to 30 percent. Throughout the past decade, the former group has been represented by the Motherland party (ANAP) and the True Path party (DYP).
The essential difference between these two bodies was more personal than political. In other words, ANAP’s Mesut Yilmaz and DYP’s Tansu Ciller can’t stand each other. While a merger might have made sense politically, cooperation between the two leaders was unthinkable. Throughout the 1990s, Yilmaz and Ciller accused each other of being corrupt, leading to tit for tat investigations. After several years of such wrangling, a compromise was reached in 1999, in which the two parties granted each other immunity from prosecution. The arrogance of this agreement led to a widespread belief that the whole political system was guided by cronyism.
Yilmaz and Ciller should have figured out the consequences of their Punch and Judy show. Over the last decade, ANAP and DYP’s combined vote in general elections decreased from 51 percent in the 1991 campaign to just under 14 percent in the recently concluded race. Neither party reached the 10 percent threshold for parliamentary representation. “It used to be that the center right safeguarded political stability within Turkey by accommodating Islamic and nationalist surges either by merger or coalition,” observed Sedat Ergin, Ankara bureau chief for Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s leading newspapers. “The loss of faith in center-right secularism made AKP the only option. If Yilmaz and Ciller had stepped down prior to this election, the political picture would have been different since ANAP and DYP would have restored confidence with new leaders.”
The sick man of Europe revisited. Thanks to the worst economic crisis since World War II, this infamous 19th-century description of Ottoman stagnation is suddenly apt again. The economy shrank 6.5 percent last year, with 70 percent inflation and unemployment officially listed at 11 percent but estimated to be twice that amount. According to a survey conducted by Ankara’s Middle East Technical University, approximately 10 percent of Turkey’s population don’t have a regular income. The study also notes that another 25 percent of Turkish society, although drawing a regular paycheck, still live at the poverty level.
In neighboring Greece, the average personal income is $12,000. Turkey’s is $1,500. Such figures underscore why–besides atavistic hostility to their majority-Muslim neighbor–the European Union is reluctant to offer Turkey the full membership in the E.U. that it’s desperately seeking.
The “varoslar.” Throughout a recent stay in Turkey, I constantly heard the word varos, which means suburb, and which has taken on a special meaning in Turkey these days. Unlike the American version, which calls to mind Scarsdale and Silver Spring, varos signifies a shantytown that has grown up in recent decades on the outskirts of Ankara, Istanbul, or one of Turkey’s other metropolitan areas.
A decade ago, these settlements could be interpreted hopefully, as a jumping-off point for the ambitious poor, full of the promise of upward mobility. The economic collapse of the 1990s doomed such hopes. The individuals who migrated from the countryside to the varos during this period found a very different environment than their predecessors. “Back in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, many varoslar would receive government amnesties for building on illegal property,” Hurriyet’s Ergin noted. “Some of these folks even became landlords, cutting deals with contractors for new structures. This outlook has vanished.”
Now the varos mentality is bleak. The typical resident is underemployed, deprived of basic services, dependent on others, and certain his life won’t get better. He lives surrounded by non-descript, concrete sprawl. In Istanbul’s far reaches there are reputedly varos that the authorities don’t even know about, that don’t even appear on a map.
The AKP, however, knows these neighborhoods well. Formed just a year ago, it’s essentially a grass-roots movement for the disgruntled. The Islamic flavor of the AKP (its officials quote the Koran and pray at mosques) makes the party seem morally upright, in striking contrast to the ANAP, DYP, and the other “establishment” parties, who are derided for not being candan (“honest”).
The AKP’s well-orchestrated campaign doesn’t mean that it’s an orderly structure, though. Getting the vote out is one thing, managing disparate groups another. The party is presently an amorphous mass of factions united under the banner of throwing the bums out. Even its leadership is up in the air.
AKP leader Tayyip Erdogan, who would be the next logical prime minister, is currently banned from political office for expressing pro-Islamic sentiments as mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s. Erdogan’s status is under review by Turkey’s Supreme Court. And while there are other party officials who are capable of taking the governmental helm, they lack their chief’s stature.
In the meantime, Turkey is the promised land for people who dislike American-style incumbent-protection politics. An estimated 80 percent of the deputies in the incoming parliament will be newcomers. Considering the dynamics behind the AKP’s rise, it’s probably fair to say that this is a reformist work in progress, rather than a blueprint for the imposition of sharia on secular Turkey.
Such at least is the postelection sentiment in Ankara. “If we start wearing out AKP from day one, we would be making a big mistake,” notes Birand. “We must give it time, wait and see what they want to do, what kind of rhetoric they use, and then we must decide accordingly. We must not set out on a headhunting trip from day one.”
Gerald Robbins is a writer living in New York City.
