AKP projected to win majority in 2nd Turkey election of 2015

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After an election campaign filled with violence and crackdowns on opposition media, it looks like we have a different result from the June election…

BBC – “Turkey election: Ruling AKP ‘heads for majority'”:

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) looks likely to claim a majority in a critical parliamentary election, results indicate.

With 95% of all votes counted, state-run Anadolu Agency said the party was on 49.5%, with the main opposition CHP on 25.3%.

The pro-Kurdish HDP and nationalist MHP appear likely to cross the 10% threshold needed to claim seats.
[…]
Current projections indicate the ruling party will gain substantially more than the 276 seats needed to gain a majority.

However, projections show it will fall just short of the amount of seats needed to call a referendum on changing the constitution and increasing the powers of the president, AKP founder Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

 

Turkey will remain without elected government into October

Turkey will remain without an elected government until at least some time in October, now that a new round of elections have been called, following a failure to form a coalition after the June elections.

“Turkey PM formally gives up on coalition as polls loom” | AFP:

Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Tuesday informed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan he had failed to form a coalition government, paving the way for new general elections just months after June polls.
[…]
According to the constitution, the AKP will be able to continue as a minority government until elections if a majority in parliament votes in favour of holding the early polls.

If however Erdogan uses his right to call the election himself, a so-called “election government” will be formed until the polls, consisting of members from all four parties represented in parliament.

 
Will fresh elections make much of a difference in the parliamentary outcome?

“Turkey’s Erdogan gambles on new election bid” | Al Jazeera America:

Despite the carnage, however, a resumption of fighting with the Kurds could prove electorally useful for Erdogan. Tol called the bombing campaign against the PKK in aftermath of the June election defeat as “very related to Erdogan’s political ambitions.” A number of Turkish polls have shown the AKP gaining ground since then.

To regain a majority in parliament, Erdogan has tried to appeal to nationalists who were previously wary of his outreach to the Kurds, and weaken the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) […]

But while Erdogan’s political fortunes seem to have shifted since the surprising June defeat, his new strategy is nonetheless risky.
[…]
“To go the polls at a time when people are being killed every single day can have a downside,” Sinan Ulgen, chairman of EDAM, an Istanbul-based think tank, told the Associated Press. “The arithmetic in Parliament won’t necessarily change.”

 
On that last note, see my June 10, 2015 estimates “New Turkey elections might be AKP’s worst option”. While I came in at the time for some fairly thoughtful but strong pushback on that rough assessment, via Twitter, I still think the math isn’t really going to shift all that dramatically in a way that favors the AKP, if it moves at all on balance.

True, little changes could tip the balance by getting 18 more seats (and thus a majority) to the AKP or by pushing the Kurdish-dominated HDP back under the 10% national threshold to qualify. But at the moment I still have my doubts.

June 10, 2015 – Arsenal For Democracy 130

Posted by Bill on behalf of the team.

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Topics: Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 2015 Turkey elections. People: Bill, Nate, Persephone. Produced: June 8th, 2015.

Discussion Points:

– What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and why isn’t it getting more coverage?
– Do the recent elections in Turkey signal another turning point for the country’s democracy?

Episode 130 (52 min):
AFD 130

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New Turkey elections might be AKP’s worst option

I suspect the AKP will regret it sorely if they call another election immediately, which is an option that has already been floated by some of the AK membership’s sorer losers (or sore 18-seats-short plurality-winners).

Here’s my back-of-the-envelope assessment on why new elections would return an even worse result for the AK Party than most other longer-term options, including a weak minority government or an unpleasant coalition arrangement. First, I bet there aren’t a lot of people who cast a vote for a non-AK option on Sunday and then wished they hadn’t. The only exception would perhaps be some small share of the 942,000 cranky voters for the Felicity Party — the minor Islamist party that shares roots with AKP…but it is generally antagonistic because of the shared background. The trendline is very much against the AKP, and buyer’s remorse from the first round is more likely to hurt them than to hurt the other major parties. The AKP in 2015 lost 2.3 million votes since the 2014 presidential election less than a year ago, despite 6 million higher turnout. To be honest, I wonder how the AKP didn’t see this month’s result coming after the lower-turnout presidential election saw the HDP get 9.76%, just shy of the 10% cutoff that applies in a parliamentary race. That meant they were credibly within reach and needed to be taken more seriously (especially to be a potential partner), rather than marginalized, literally attacked, and otherwise mishandled.

Second, there was a fairly large number of people who cast votes either for AKP or for a minor party (they collectively got about ~2.5 million votes I think) that I believe would vote for a different Big 3 opposition party now, knowing how everyone else ended up voting in the first round. In particular, I bet HDP would get an even bigger result in a fresh election now that it’s clear they can pass the 10% threshold so it’s not a “waste” to vote for them. Kurds, other minority voters, and Turkish allies in the electorate are likely to be even more enthusiastic about the party’s message and viability alike in an immediate second election, riding the successful momentum of the first one. The party specifically picked up a huge chunk of Kurdish ex-AKP supporters — and that’s likely to go up, if it goes any direction.

Third, even if AK holds fairly steadily onto its own voters but some 2 million minor-party voters shifted across to the Big 3 opposition parties in a second election, a CHP/MHP/HDP tripartite arrangement would emerge with the support of 27 million votes, not just 25 million. A narrower CHP/HDP liberal coalition would reach perhaps 18 million votes…which is just shy of what AKP got this time. That’s not enough for a liberal majority either, but it probably would land only 18-20 seats away. Between possible confidence-vote options from MHP (in theory anyway) and the more realistic scenario of HDP shaving off a fair number of additional MPs from AKP in Kurdish constituencies in a second round, I’d bet they could make it work some way or another. Which is not to say that such a coalition would be stable.

But it is to suggest (along with the other factors above) that AKP is probably looking at a far rosier scenario under their current performance than after a 2nd election.

Now to make lemonade out of lemons and demonstrate the rosier world than new elections, let’s acknowledge that there are some pretty acceptable coalition/cooperation scenarios if the AKP wants to seize the opportunity under the hand it was just dealt. Preliminary AKP/CHP talks have begun. One particularly exciting scenario for Turkey and the AK Party alike would be if Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu reached a deal that stripped significance powers away and platform out from under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, sidelining him (and silencing him to the extent humanly possible) — rather than elevating him further — and finally allowing Davutoğlu to fly on his own. He’s been really squashed trying to escape Erdoğan’s shadow, but he always seemed pretty decent and very competent, with far less personal baggage than his benefactor. He could break the link between the party and its increasingly authoritarian / rogue party founder, Mr. Erdoğan. The party could move past him (and get on with the good work it had been doing under his leadership before he began to go around the bend in 2013), voters would be less alarmed by returning an AK majority to power in the near future, and Turkey’s democracy would be stronger.

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Turkey Elections: Down to the wire

In January, I published my article “The Questions Posed by the World’s 2015 Elections,” in which I identified the 15 national elections around the world that I thought presented the most intriguing or important questions this year. Chronologically, Turkey’s parliamentary election held today will come as number five for the year (tied with Mexico, which is holding its midterm legislative elections today too).

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Here are the questions I identified in January for Turkey’s election today:

Can PM-turned-President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party continue to consolidate its electoral mandate in the assembly (and consolidate power to the presidency instead of the prime minister’s office) in the face of mounting questions about the government’s Syria policy, Kurdish policy, family policies, and general authoritarian trends? Mathematically, even without any authoritarianism, the answer is probably yes. Should they? That’s a trickier question.

 
The mathematical question is shaping up to be a potentially much more gripping one than expected then. The dramatic and complex Kurdish political gamble (see my explanation from March) actually looks like it has a shot of paying off in the form of the Kurdish HD Party clearing its entry threshold to join parliament — though it is still very much on the margin of success and failure. If they win just over 10% of the vote, Erdogan’s aspirations for constitutional reform will likely collapse because the HD Party will taken some 50 seats that the AKP could otherwise use to reach a supermajority. If the HDP win slightly less than 10%, they’ll be wiped out completely and amendments will happen. They are hovering on the brink according to polling analyzed at the Al-Monitor link above. There have also been violent bomb attacks against Kurdish political supporters in recent days; the reaction from Erdogan — whose dreams are threatened by the HDP’s surging support — was not overly sympathetic.
Read more

Turkey Elections 2015: The Kurdish Gambit

In a complex and probably ill-conceived gambit that I barely can follow, the leading national Kurdish political party in Turkey (the HDP, founded in 2012) will attempt to contest the June parliamentary elections as a single slate. They will pursue the slate option over Kurdish groups’ usual choice of running all parliamentary candidates as independents to qualify for seats reserved for non-party candidates.

The latter move was the course of action the party’s antecedents previously used in most national elections to skirt the country’s 10% national vote representation threshold for parties, which they have generally been (and continue to be) unlikely to achieve. So what prompted the decision to take the riskier move of running as a party and what might happen if it fails?

If the party manages to scrape past 10%, Kurds will have many more seats in Turkey’s parliament than at present, under a unified banner, and would be somewhat more influential. If they fail to reach 10%, even just barely, Kurdish representation in the national parliament will collapse — possibly to zero members — while handing as many as 50 extra seats to the ruling AK Party. This will have the double-whammy effect of giving the AKP enough seats to amend the constitution into an authoritarian executive system without needing multi-party support to do so. It will also conclusively demonstrate that Kurds have no voice in Turkish democracy.

At first glance, that would appear to be a devastating blow. But the plan comes with a silver lining that unfolds if the HDP implodes through a failed effort to reach 10% as a unit this year. The hardliner wing of Kurdish politics (i.e. the PKK militants instead of the pro-diplomacy HDP politicians) will see both ensuing results (no Kurdish representation and an authoritarian constitution) as openly validating the need for violent resistance (in an already heated pre-election environment). Ordinary Kurdish civilians will bear the brunt of the ensuing damage.

However, by wiping out the HDP in the national elections, their sister party DBP — which only contests local and regional elections — will suddenly become the leading political face of democratic Kurdish politics. DBP is currently the Kurdish equivalent in Turkey of Scotland’s SNP pre-2014 in the United Kingdom: A leftist party mostly focusing on regional-level politics but pro-separatist, which the nationwide left-leaning parties can’t endorse. That means the DBP’s rise to the face of Kurdish politics in Turkey in the aftermath of the HDP’s expected fall will also fuel political dysfunction to the benefit of the PKK hardliners. But, at the same time, the DBP will also remain a potential legal negotiating partner at the sub-national level, possibly for independence or substantial autonomy, if the Turkish government decides to come around on that.

And the only way that such a complex and Machiavellian scheme with “victory” scenarios from all outcomes (including crushing defeat) is possible is that all of these groups (the HD Party, the DB Party, and the PKK) are controlled by and following the orders of one man: Abdullah Ocalan. Now it remains to be seen which moves unfold in his elaborate chess game.

In the end of course, it might just be a plain old disaster rather than a clever scheme.

This post was transferred from G+ and edited for clarity.