DEFEAT is an unfamiliar concept for Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Yet his Justice and Development (AK) Party felt it for the first time in local elections on March 29th, when voters gave it only 39% of the vote. That was more than any rival but still a sharp drop from the 47% AK took in the 2007 general election. Mr Erdogan, who treated the local elections as a referendum on himself, was visibly shaken as he declared his unhappiness with the result. AK lost 12 cities, among them Siirt in the south-east, the home town of Mr Erdogan’s wife, Emine. It lost the mainly Kurdish city of Van to the Democratic Society Party (DTP), whose strident Kurdish nationalist message trumped Mr Erdogan’s talk of the common bond of Islam.
The elections were a triumph for Turkey’s shaky democracy. In 2007 the fiercely secular generals led a crude campaign to unseat the government. They threatened a coup when Mr Erdogan nominated Abdullah Gul, his foreign minister, as president, because his wife’s Islamic-style headscarf threatened Ataturk’s secular principles. Their campaign backfired: AK swept back for a second term and Mr Gul became president. The generals then egged on the chief prosecutor to bring a case before the Constitutional Court to ban AK on charges of seeking to impose sharia law. The party narrowly escaped closure when the court delivered its verdict last July.
Chastened, the army kept quiet in the latest elections. The secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) made modest gains, taking 23% of the vote. It put up a tough if losing battle against AK in Ankara and Istanbul. In the largely Kurdish south-east the DTP took a thumping 75% in the provincial capital, Diyarbakir. Elsewhere, the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and the overtly Islamist Felicity Party did well. The message from the voters, one Western diplomat suggested, was that “they want a check on AK hegemony.”
As Mr Erdogan’s people lick their wounds, two lessons stand out. One concerns the economy. Mr Erdogan’s claims that the global meltdown had not affected Turkey angered voters, who face rising unemployment (13.6% in December), shrinking GDP and a tumbling lira. The second stems from Mr Erdogan’s waning appetite for the reforms that led the European Union to open membership talks with Turkey in 2005. Liberals, hitherto among AK’s staunchest defenders, are defecting.
Attempts by more radical AK types to emphasise the role of Islam in public life spooked others. The AK incumbent lost in Antalya, even though Mr Erdogan is said to have visited the resort 26 times. Mr Erdogan’s authoritarian bent and his quarrels with the secular press did not help. On the other side, Mr Erdogan’s failure to deliver on issues dear to his pious constituents, such as easing the ban on the headscarf, allowed Felicity to snatch some voters away. AK no longer unites the different strands of Turks, be they sectarian, ethnic or ideological, as it once did. The conundrum for Mr Erdogan is how to please one constituency without antagonising another.
One way forward might be to re-embrace the reformist zeal that first propelled AK to power in 2002. In the south-east, AK’s efforts to strike a deal with Iraqi Kurdish leaders to disarm rebels from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) holed up on the Iran-Iraq border are encouraging. But they will not succeed if AK keeps snubbing the biggest Kurdish party, the DTP.
The MHP’s success will make both dealing with the PKK and rewriting the Turkish constitution, drawn up by the generals after their coup in 1980, trickier. Meeting the EU’s year-end deadline to open Turkey’s ports to Greek-Cypriot ships and planes will also be a challenge. And Mr Erdogan must be ready to strike a fresh standby arrangement with the IMF to reassure jittery foreign investors.
Such an agenda suggests that Mr Erdogan should reach out to the mainstream opposition CHP, which he has been reluctant to do in the past. Yet if he wants to remain Turkey’s most popular politician, he may have to set aside his pride.
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