Live
Audio Only
Four days before the elections in Turkey, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu proudly stated at a rally in Malatya that every country around the world is boiling, except Turkey.
“Despite everything happening in the world, Turkey has managed to be stable economically and politically – thanks to the AKP,” he said.
This would not be as surprising if Davutoglu was not the prime minister of a country where the nation is deeply divided and polarized and political violence has become part of daily life – if he was not the prime minister of a country that is on the brink of a civil war.
A similar scenario surfaced before the last general elections, when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, despite being obliged to political neutrality, campaigned for the AKP and promised that stability would come to the country, when “the party in his heart” would get 400 seats in the 550-seat parliament. He intentionally demanded 400 seats, since a simple majority of 276 would not suffice to change the constitution from a parliamentary system into a presidential one in order to establish a system in which the power lies in the hands of the president.
Supporters light flares and celebrate election results outside the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) headquarters in Diyarbakir, Turkey, June 7, 2015. HDP backers are hoping for a similar performance in Sunday's election. | Photo. Reuters
Unexpectedly for the established parties (CHP, MHP, AKP), it was the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), an alliance of underdogs of Turkish politics, including Kurds, leftists, women and LGBTQ rights activists, that prevented the AKP from installing an authoritarian single-party regime in the June 7 elections. HDP won 13.1 percent of the votes and 80 seats in Parliament by overcoming the highly anti-democratic electoral 10 percent threshold – a legacy from the military constitution of 1982.
While the AKP’s success was long based on the continuing support by a significant conservative and religious Kurdish population, this time around the AKP was almost completely voted out from Kurdish cities. The government’s anti-Kurdish stance during the almost five-month siege of Kobani in Rojava (Northern Syria) has caused a deep alienation with Erdogan and his AKP among a great majority of the Kurdish population. Kurds accused the government of ideologically and materially supporting the Islamic State group and felt validated in their sentiment when the Turkish government joined the coalition against the Islamist militant organizations, but only targeted PKK positions in Qandil, killing many villagers in Zergele. Nevermind that the most effective ones fighting against the Islamic State group having been the YPG/J forces, who ideologically follow the same principles as the PKK.
In the aftermath of the June 7 election, President Erdogan declared that the peace process had ended and a curfew was enforced in Kurdish cities such as Cizre, Lice and Silopi. Interestingly, those cities were where the HDP came out to be the strongest party. The curfew regulations bring to mind what is considered as the dark times in recent Turkish history during the 1990s, when Kurdish villages were scorched and razed, and thousands of civilians tortured and killed by special operations forces.
Photographer Refik Tekin, who took this photo, was one of the first to enter Cizre after the nine-day curfew.
Erdogan said that the peace process has now come to a freeze. This became clear when 13-year old Cemile was shot by special operations teams in Cizre. Her family was not able to take her to hospital due to the brutally enforced curfew, so her mother had to put Cemile’s dead body into a freezer until the curfew was lifted days later. Certainly, Erdogan could have not used more precise words.
After two years of a successful cease-fire, the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, with casualties on both sides, was reignited again and accompanied by two suicide bombings that tore at the heart of democracy: Suruç and Ankara. Thirty-two students were killed in Suruç, who were all part of a humanitarian delegation for the reconstruction of Kobani. In Ankara, 102 people were killed who gathered in the HDP block of a huge peace rally organized by trade unions and oppositional parties. Both attacks were carried out, allegedly, by the Islamic State group and targeted HDP and its supporters. In addition, there were the wide-scale coordinated attacks on Kurds, Kurdish-owned businesses, political opposition, as well as raids on HDP offices, newspaper buildings and broadcasting stations, which climaxed in the latest violent and unlawful clampdown on Bugün TV. This all resulted in a death-toll of higher than 700 and the silencing of an opposition press in the aftermath of the last parliamentary elections.
Newsletter
Turkey's election to happen under the shadow of coffins in Diyarbakir https://t.co/mPzJPwaAEU #TwitterKurds #HDP
— Nancy Kricorian (@nancykric)
octubre 28, 2015
After months of shocking state violence against the Kurdish population across the southeast and political intimidation across the whole country, Turkey will go to the polls on Sunday for the second time this year. President Erdogan’s name is not going to be on the ballot paper, however if his party wins a two-thirds majority, his executive power will be extended even further, which will lead to the establishment of a single-man authoritarian regime.
After being denied a majority for the first time since 2002 – symbolically seen in the HDP’s election campaign “We won’t make you President” – it is as Erdogan is almost applying to some sort of “collective punishment.” Since there is no realistic chance of a vote raise in the Kurdish Southeast, the AKP has been addressing nationalist sentiments throughout the whole pre-election period. While Erdogan was demanding 400 seats in the last general elections, this time he is asking for 550 local and national MPs. If this happens, he promises, stability would be ensured in Turkey.The AKP, and especially Erdogan, demonstrates an increasingly centralized and hegemonic stance in a country where society more and more discovers its heterogeneity and demands lasting peace more than ever before. This is most symbolically represented by the electoral success of the pro-peace party HDP, who played the most important role in preventing the establishment of an authoritarian presidential system, hence a corrupt understanding of stability.
Turkey has a long history of failed coalitions, forced resignations and military coups. The idea of stability was always associated with the military that brutally took over every time when the founding principles of the Turkish republic were supposedly attacked by either Islamist, leftist or Kurdish trends. Above all was the fear of instability that would surrender if the centrist nation-state based on the idea of Turkishness was challenged.
General Election in Turkey - Progressive movements should offer maximum support to the Kurdish & Ind Progressive #HDP pic.twitter.com/wn5tEYM9ue
— Rural Labour (@rurallabouruk)
octubre 10, 2015
The first electoral success of the AKP was mainly due to its promise to oppose the military regime, to find democratic solutions to the Kurdish issue and to reject authoritarian single-party rules, hence to demonstrate itself as an anti-establishment party with neoliberal Islamist values and a pro-European agenda at the beginning. Today, after 13 years of AKP rule, the idea of “enforced stability” remains the same, regardless of it being put forward by someone new: President Erdogan and his AKP. It is not the military anymore that intervenes, but the government that tries its first “palace coup” in Turkish history. While stability is understood as the fulfilment of democracy in many countries, in Turkey it is associated with forced intervention – either by the military or a regime that becomes more and more authoritarian every day.
Although the latest opinion polls show that the election result will not significantly change, it is already undeniable that the upcoming elections are going to be a turning point in Turkish history. Either an authoritarian state is going to be established with all its unfree features or some space for democratic politics will be opened. Again, the HDP will play the role of a guaranteer for democracy, especially when it comes to find a peaceful solution to the Kurdish conflict in the long run.
Sunday’s vote may be the country’s last chance to escape a non-returnable path toward a dictatorial, authoritarian state. Or as a Turkish saying states: It is the last exit before the bridge.Rosa Burc, 25, is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Department of Comparative Government, University of Bonn. Her research is on Nation-States and Theories of (Post-) Nationalism.
