Election 2007: Ruling Party Landslide Confirmed as Generals Re-Enter Turkish Presidential Debate

The Supreme Election Board (YSK) yesterday confirmed the victory of the Justice and Development (AK) party in 22 July elections, giving the returning victor 341 seats in the 550-seat house. The new parliament will convene for the first time on 4 August, with the former government in place until a new one has been confirmed. A new speaker should be elected by 14 August, with the first test to launch the election of a new president, which remains somewhat fraught with the difficulties of the former attempt to elect AK's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul earlier this year. This precipitated the early polls in July and AK still lacks a constitutional majority to bulldoze through its nomination. AK still has its vetoed constitutional reforms on the table, which would implement revised parliamentary and presidential terms, and institute a directly elected president. A public referendum has been planned for 21 October, but much remains to be done ahead of then.

Debates are ongoing in Turkey over what the election results mean for secularism, with the pro-secular opposition platform of the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Democratic Left Party (DSP)’s joint ticket failing to improve its vote share, compared to the significant increase in votes for the moderate Islamic AK, which made gains of some seven million votes. This followed million-strong protests against the AK government earlier this year during the presidential crisis. Amid the CHP obstruction to the previous attempts to elect an AK president, and thus an Islamist one, clearly signalled support for the opposition was given by the military complex, most memorably in a 27 April memo. This inflammatory statement caused market jitters, with the military vowing to step in to defend the secular system if necessary.

Yesterday, chief of staff General Yasar Buyukanit broke his post-election silence on the matter, reiterating the military position that the successor to President Ahmet Necdet Sezer should be a committed secularist. However, his comment "we are fully behind what we said on April 12" is significant; this referred to an insistence of secularist credentials for the next president. There was no defence of the stance taken on 27 April—perhaps a nod to the lack of support the military's threat generated at the time popularly, in the media, in business circles or abroad. Compounded by the failure of CHP to gain public backing, the tone needed to be moderated. It is not yet clear to what extent AK won over the voters simply through its record and how many others were driven into its arms by the actions of the secularists acting as a voter turn-off. However, the clear contradictions between the widespread demonstrations against the election of an overtly religious president and support for AK show that the electorate can differentiate the issues. Turkish Daily News reports today that AK is ignoring a proposal from a newly elected AK deputy to remove references to Kemalism from the constitution—the principles that the modern Turkish state has been built on. Zafer Uskul has been criticsed for his proposal, which could endanger a speculated more radical revision of the constitution by AK . Even though some aspects of Kemalism in the 1923 constitution might be considered somewhat rigid in today's climate, to attack the foundations of the state would alienate many and justify military concerns for the secular order spelled out, and so Uskul's proposal will be swept under the carpet with just the present proposals for direct presidential elections left on the table.

This leaves the secularist organs of state in some disarray as the parties regroup to consider a new president. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already said parliament should elect a consensus candidate from its own ranks. In addition, there appears to be a chance that the impasse created in the previous attempts to elect a successor to Sezer in April might be overcome. This is because the second opposition party that has now joined parliament—MHP—has said it will participate in the parliamentary vote even if Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is re-selected by AK. The main opposition CHP has promised to boycott the vote again in this instance, but with only 112 seats, it will not prevent the two-thirds quorum required to allow the vote to stand. It could also lose out on the opportunity to influence the chosen candidate. Clearly, it does not favour any AK candidate, but a less overtly religious one would be more to their taste.

Outlook and Implications

As expected, YSK has confirmed the AK landslide. There are still some lingering complaints about the polling; as had been warned by some in June, voting in the south-eastern regions appears to have been marred by accusations of forcible blocking of entry to polling stations, and ballots being cast by persons not on the electoral roll—for example, deceased people. An independent deputy running for the Kurdish votes has complained that a vote re-count redistributing votes at the Hakkari border gate has deprived him of a parliamentary seat, in a case that could go to the European Court of Human Rights, but has been dismissed by YSK thus far, giving AK an additional seat to the expected 340. Mostly though, the ballots were accepted as free and fair. The concerns lie with the maintenance of the 10% national threshold to enter parliament—the reason Kurdish representatives ran as independents before submitting a request to form a parliamentary group under the Democratic Society Party (DTP) banner this week—their first chance at real parliamentary representation having been lost in the 2002 ballots by the electoral system. The argument has been that the high threshold guarantees more stable governments, ending a plethora of parties entering parliament in a fray and resulting in unstable and short-lived governments as seen in the past. However, had the threshold been lowered to 5% or even 7%, the number of parties would not have been radically different. Alternatively, the national threshold could be altered, so that candidates with regional strongholds could enter parliament without having to run as independents; parties that do not make the threshold see their votes redistributed within the parties that do.