Turkey's general elections - no choice, no change

16 Parties – No Choice, No Change

Turkey’s general elections promise a continuation of today’s schisms

If democracy is about choice, have sympathy for the Turks. On July 22, their ballot slips will be up to 210 centimetres wide, the width required to include all 16 parties and independent candidates for the electoral district in question. But the real options are limited, both because of the rules of the game and because of the unsavoury characteristics of those involved.

First, the rules. These mean that there are only two ways your vote results in your being represented in Turkey:

• If the party you support gets over 10% of the national vote, or
• If the independent candidate you back gets the share of the local vote required – this share being calculated according to the number of candidates in the electoral district

The 10% baraj was introduced in the 1980s to prevent the party representing the Kurds being represented in Turkey – not that it kept them out as they formed an electoral alliance with the then social democrats. In 2002, its application meant that only two parties qualified for the Grand National Assembly, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party, whose 34.3% of the vote translated into 66% of the seats in the Assembly and Deniz Baykal’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) whose 19.4% of the vote won them 32.4% of the seats. The 41.4% of voters who voted for the eight other parties in the elections went unrepresented.

* Formerly DYP, True Path Party ** Ran as DEHAP in previous election *** Merged with CHP

Erdogan promised to change this situation, as well as a party law which allows the head of a party to rule like a petty dictator, an art in which Baykal excels. Maybe he planned to do so after installing his candidate in the Presidential election due in May. But that election was undermined by the Constitutional Court’s ruling that the Assembly could only start the choice for a President if two-thirds of its members were present. The result is that elections were brought forward from November to July 22 – and are being held under the system which meant that two Turks in five are not represented in the present Assembly.

As for the characteristics of the players, it is hard not to share the despair of almost all those on the left of centre. Ranged against them are parties characterised either by Islamic or ultra-nationalist tendencies.

Erdogan’s AK Party has a good record for legislative reform and economic management, but, tucked away in its many acts, are a series of moves advancing their version of Sunni Islam. National children’s holidays have seen Koran competitions. Children of the Alevis - Turkey’s followers of the Caliph Ali who differ from Iraq’s Shiites in their tolerance and modernity – have been obliged to follow Sunni religious teaching. Sales of alcohol have been hit. One hospital started keeping separate blood banks for men and for women, and several municipalities opened beaches or parks only for women.. Erdogan has tried to make adultery a crime. The head scarf has spread, and, if Abdullah Gul had become President, would have entered the Presidential palace.

As for the main parties of the right, several have their roots in crime. The Nationalist Action Party spread its umbrella over the Grey Wolves, responsible for bombing and shootings in the 1970s. Members of the Buyuk Birlik Party were close to those accused of the murder of Hrant Dink, the Armenian editor, in June 2006. Cem Uzan’s brother and father are on the run for looting a bank. Mehmet Agar used to be a police chief known for his links to the deep state whose record was particularly murky in the 1990s. All follow an extreme nationalist line, using a rhetoric of the 1930s. And almost all support an increased role for Turkey’s armed forces in the operation of democracy in Turkey.

Sadly for the left, Baykal’s CHP shares both these characteristics, a chauvinist nationalism and militarism. It combines them with a dirigiste approach to the economy and society which is more akin to left-wing thinking of Europe in the decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall than to modern socialist theory.

All this means that many of those who plan to vote for the CHP do so with extreme reluctance. These expected voters include the great majority of the country’s Alevis,. They account for an important 15-20% of the population. But many others on the left simply refuse to condone the dictatorial militarism of Baykal. And for these the only alternative is to vote for one of the independent candidates who are standing in many districts – and stretching the ballot paper to 210 centimetres wide in the Kurdish centre of Diyarbakir.

For the Kurds, running as independents is the only way to overcome the 10% baraj, a tactic which could see the Kurds well represented in the next Assembly. And other independents are standing to give the modern left a voice.