Turkish Forum

Author: Aylin D. Miller

  • The End of the Erdogan Era?

    The End of the Erdogan Era?

    By Dexter Filkins

    President Erdoğan’s plans to re-write the Turkish constitution are at a standstill after his Justice and Development Party failed to win a majority of seats in the general elections.

    President Erdoğan’s plans to re-write the Turkish constitution are at a standstill after his Justice and Development Party failed to win a majority of seats in the general elections. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY LEFTERIS PITARAKIS/AP

    Whether abroad or at home, it’s easy to get disheartened by democracy: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But every now and then a moment arrives that wipes away our doubts and reaffirms our hopes in the wisdom of the democratic idea. One such moment came yesterday in Turkey, where voters decisively turned back President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s march to authoritarian rule.

    For years, Erdoğan seemed unstoppable. First elected Prime Minister in 2003, Erdoğan came to power as a moderate Islamist reformer who overturned decades of rule by an unresponsive secular élite that, backed by the military, had dominated the Turkish Republic since its founding, in 1923. In his first years in office, Erdoğan did indeed act as the reformer he claimed to be. He liberalized the economy, granted new rights to Turkey’s long-suppressed Kurdish minority, and, most of all, gave voice to the majority: moderately religious Turks who wanted a greater say in the way the country was governed. During those years, Erdoğan was seen as the great hope of the Islamic world, the moderate Islamist who could bridge the divide with the West. Under Erdoğan, Turkey seemed to be a reasonable candidate to join the European Union.

    Erdoğan dashed those hopes—slowly at first, and then, increasingly, in bombastic and megalomaniacal fashion. Beginning in 2007, he launched an extraordinary campaign to crush the secular-liberal-military establishment that formed the opposition. Prosecutors targeted generals, police officers, politicians, university professors, newspaper editors—anyone who represented a threat to the new Islamist order. The campaign made use of make-believe conspiracies with names like “Ergenekon’’ and “Sledgehammer,’’ which Erdoğan and his cronies claimed were aimed at taking over the country. More than seven hundred people were charged in these conspiracies, and many went to prison, despite the fact that even a cursory examination of the evidence showed that it was largely fabricated.

    The most egregious illustration of Erdoğan’s authoritarianism was his government’s jailing of journalists. In 2012, ninety-four reporters and editors were in prison in Turkey, more than anywhere else in the world. (After widespread condemnation, the number has fallen to seven, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.)

    As he grew stronger, Erdoğan constructed a cult of personality about himself, which made him stronger still. He dominated the news, often appearing on television several times a day, commenting on or inserting himself into seemingly every question in public life. He denounced Israel, and often made surreal comments about Jews and Jewish conspiracies. His assertive foreign policy, aimed at supporting the Islamist parties that emerged in the early Arab Spring, seemed to revive, for many Turks, the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. He began to build a third bridge across the Bosporus, and started construction on a new airport, planned to be the world’s largest, which he named after himself.

    Despite the excesses, Erdoğan kept rising. After two terms as Prime Minister, he was, in 2014, elected President; and though on paper the new job had less power than his old one, it was widely understood that Erdoğan was in charge and that his Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, was a mere satrap.* He told Turkish women to have at least three children, declaring that their “delicate nature” rendered them unequal to men. He threatened to ban Facebook and briefly banned Twitter, the latter after people posted wiretaps of conversations that appeared to reference corrupt activities.

    The pièce de résistance was the new Presidential palace, which was completed last year and is now Erdoğan’s home. It’s fit for a monarch: it has a thousand rooms, cost $600 million, and employs five full-time food testers, who make sure Erdoğan’s food is not poisoned.

    The turn against Erdoğan began on a small plot of land in central Istanbul called Gezi Park. In 2013, Erdoğan announced plans to replace the park with a shopping mall and a monument to Turkey’s Ottoman past. People gathered in the park to protest the decision, but the demonstrations grew rapidly into a broad protest against Erdoğan’s autocratic style, with gatherings in ninety cities. Erdoğan dismissed the demonstrators, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, as a “few looters,’’ and then turned loose the police in Gezi Park. When the demonstrators were finally dispersed, eleven of them were dead and thousands had been injured or arrested. Among other things, the move dashed any hopes of getting Turkey into the European Union anytime soon.

    Then, in December 2013, three members of Erdoğan’s cabinet, whose sons were implicated in a corruption scandal, resigned, with one of them calling on Erdoğan himself to quit. When the lead prosecutor in the case began to target Erdogan’s son, the Prime Minister dismissed him, beginning a massive purge of police and prosecutors around the country who were believed to be disloyal.

    Obviously oblivious to the growing dissatisfaction around him, Erdoğan made clear, as this year’s elections approached, that he wanted to re-write the constitution in order to gain more power for the Presidency. The changes that Erdoğan was proposing were not just troubling in their own right but they seemed to signal his desire to stay in power for a long time. Increasingly, his role model appeared to be that elected autocrat to the north, Vladimir Putin.

    For now, Erdoğan appears stopped in his tracks. His party, Justice and Development, captured more seats in parliament than any other but fell short of a majority. That probably means Erdoğan’s party will be forced to form a coalition government. Most important, the momentum, and the votes, to remake the constitution are no longer there.

    The Turkish experience with coalition governments is not a happy one, and Turkey may be entering a period of instability, on which Erdoğan would be only too happy to capitalize. But for now, the voters of Turkey deserve a salute. Their election is gratifying enough to recall that famous maxim of democratic rule: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

    *Correction: This piece previously misidentified the year in which Erdoğan was elected President. It was 2014, not 2011, as originally stated.

  • Backed into corner, Turkey’s Erdogan shows hints of compromise

    Backed into corner, Turkey’s Erdogan shows hints of compromise

    Wed Jun 10, 2015 3:45pm EDT

    By Tulay Karadeniz and Tuvan Gumrukcu

    ANKARA (Reuters) – The choice of venue seemed to say it all.

    Straying from his vast new $500 million palace, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan hosted a senior opposition lawmaker at his more modest Ankara residence on Wednesday and appeared, so the lawmaker said, to be in a mood for compromise.

    The AK Party Erdogan founded more than a decade ago lost its parliamentary majority in weekend polls, ending more than a decade of single-party rule and dealing a blow to ambitions for a powerful U.S.-style presidency. For Turkey, a political uncertainty not seen since the 1990s beckoned.

    Any instability in Turkey is a worry for the European Union and NATO, since the country lies on the edge of the turbulent Middle East with Islamic State militants conducting operations just across its border.

    Forced to find a coalition partner for the first time in its history or risk an unstable minority government, the conservative, Islamist-rooted AKP’s top brass held a third day of meetings on Wednesday to consider their options.

    Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said all options would be exhausted before an early election was considered, and made clear that Erdogan, constitutionally barred from party politics, would not be involved.

    “If everybody carries out their duties and responsibilities within the constitutional limits, a culture of reconciliation

    will emerge,” he said in an interview with state broadcaster TRT, in an apparent shot across the president’s bows.

    Erdogan meanwhile, yet to appear in public since Sunday’s election, held a two-hour meeting with Deniz Baykal, parliament’s oldest deputy and the head, until 2010, of the secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

    As the elder of the house, Baykal will lead parliament’s first session following the election and he was officially meeting Erdogan to discuss the reopening. But coalition alternatives came onto the agenda.

    “I observed that Mr President has an understanding that a government should be formed as soon as possible and has a positive attitude on the issue,” Baykal told reporters in Ankara after the meeting.

    “I got the impression that he is open to all coalition solutions.”

    That would be quite a climb-down for a man who has in the past cast his political rivals as terrorists and traitors. Hopes of a more conciliatory stance from the Turkish strong man reassured nervous financial markets, with the stock market ticking up on Baykal’s comments.

    Erdogan’s office did not comment.

    Champion of the conservative, pious masses, Erdogan views Baykal’s CHP, the party of modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, as the bastion of secularists whose elitist mentality he blames for much that is wrong with the country.

    There is also little love lost with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), ideologically a more likely coalition partner, whose leader Devlet Bahceli has criticized Erdogan’s ambitions for an executive presidency and warned him to “remain within his constitutional limits”.

    But some of those around Erdogan say he has been chastened by the election outcome and forced to accept compromise.

    “He is the founding leader of the AKP and our president, but we have entered a new period with different dynamics,” a senior AKP official involved in coalition discussions told Reuters.

    “I think Erdogan is reflecting on the election results and taking some steps accordingly … Time will tell how permanent this will be.”

    BAD MEMORIES

    The prospect of a coalition has revived memories for some older Turks of the fractious, short-lived governments that battered the economy in the 1990s and triggered a string of army coups in the second half of the 20th century.

    “There is no trust. Not between people, and not between the parties,” said Halil Canikli, 55, a former plumber in the Ankara suburb of Sincan, a working-class AKP stronghold.

    “Working-class families here… will be drastically affected by these results and by the collapsing economy,” he said.

    An IPSOS poll, released on Wednesday and conducted shortly after the election results were announced, suggested the AKP would have had 4 percent more support if voters had known the outcome in advance, probably enough to have avoided a coalition.

    “A coalition will never work, it will be torture for the people,” said Yasar Karabulut, 50, a retired civil servant and Erdogan fan, who said a fresh election should be called.

    That remains an option. Should Turkey’s political parties be unable to agree a working coalition within 45 days, Erdogan has the right to call a snap election, but AKP officials say that is not their preferred option.

    “We believe a coalition with CHP or MHP will be formed. If so, there will be discussions about some of the critical ministries,” a second senior ruling party official said.

    “It is imperative that the foreign ministry remains with us. The economy is very important, but there are four ministries in the economy. We should definitely aim for a share, but nobody can request single-handed rule of the economy,” he said.

    According to Daily Sabah, a newspaper close to Erdogan loyalists, he has three red lines for any coalition: the continuation of a peace process with Kurdish militants, respect for his role as president, and the continuation of the fight against the “parallel state” – the network of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he accuses of plotting against him.

    It is the middle one which appears the most contentious.

    “If the president is not pulled back within his legal limitations, it is not possible to even discuss a coalition with AKP,” said a senior official from the MHP, stressing any more cabinet meetings in Erdogan’s 1,000-room palace would be out of the question.

    That the president eschewed the columned “White Palace”, a grand symbol of the “new Turkey” he wants to build, might, AKP officials said, be an initial sign of change.

    “We might see days where Erdogan is less intrusive,” said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.

    (Additional reporting by Orhan Coskun, Ercan Gurses and Jonny Hogg in Ankara, Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul; Writing by Nick Tattersall; editing by Ralph Boulton and Giles Elgood)

  • Turks Use Online Clock to Mock Erdogan’s Post-Election Silence

    Turks Use Online Clock to Mock Erdogan’s Post-Election Silence

    turkey-erdogan

    Turkish voters have taken to social media to mock President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s absence since his ruling party lost its parliamentary majority in elections on Sunday with a clock recording the length of time it has been since he appeared in public.

    His Justice and Development Party (AKP) is attempting to form a majority coalition government after only receiving 41% of the vote in the elections which saw an 86% turnout of those eligible to vote.

    However Erdoğan, who campaigned for the AKP party before the polls opened despite the country’s constitution ruling that those in such a position be neutral, has not made a public appearance since the result was announced. The powerful former prime minister frequently delivered speeches throughout the campaign, sometimes up to three a day, but has only mustered a short statement after the victory.

    Social media users in Turkey, who have frequently been blocked from using sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by Erdoğan, have started circulating a ticking clock which shows how long “President Erdoğan has been off-air for”. At the time of writing, the timer stands at over two days and three hours.

    The Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet led with the front page “Turkey is enjoying the silence” in reaction to his lack of public appearance. The paper’s editor, Can Dündar, is facing legal action from Erdogan for publishing evidenceof an arms transfer to Syrian territory by Turkish intelligence, the criminal complaint seeks a life sentence for Dundar.

    In Erdoğan’s statement, he said that all parties should “preserve the atmosphere of stability” in the country and asserted that no party could lead the country alone. “I believe the results, which do not give the opportunity to any party to form a single-party government, will be assessed healthily and realistically by every party,” the statement read.

    Ilhan Tanir, a Washington D.C.-based Turkey analyst, says that the Turkish leader’s decision not to appear publicly has offered opposition supporters the opportunity to laugh at his expense, bolstering their confidence after a result that “gives them new hope”.

    “People certainly find new courage to speak up in this mocking,” he says. “People have been mocking president Erdoğan one way or another, so it is another part of the fun story of the election for the opposition groups and people.”

    “He is president and he is supposedly impartial but he ran this campaign [for the AKP party],” Tanir adds. “Right after the election, he stopped going on TV, stopped giving interviews, so people are asking why he is not appearing anymore. The answer is he is disappointed.”

    The AKP party’s loss of its majority in the Turkish parliament was facilitated by the entry of the Kurdish-majority People’s Democratic Party (HDP) into mainstream Turkish politics after passing the 10% vote threshold required.

    Erdoğan was seeking a majority in order to further strengthen his presidential authority by rewriting the constitution, but decisions made by the AKP party will now have to pass through the parliament if the party decides to proceed as a minority government. This scenario is also likely if it forms a majority government with a coalition partner.

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  • Turkey becomes first domino for emerging market debtors as politics split country

    Turkey becomes first domino for emerging market debtors as politics split country

    Turkey’s currency plunges to all-time low after electorate vote for change in move that has exposed ‘existential’ threat to the country’s debt-laden economy

    By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor

    Turkey’s currency has plunged to an all-time low as the country slides into political turmoil and its foreign debts turn toxic, becoming the first big casualty of the gathering storm in emerging markets (EM).

    The lira slumped 5pc to 2.81 against the US dollar after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party lost its decade-long majority in parliament, leaving the country bitterly polarised and without a clear government. The currency has now fallen 60pc since 2008.

    Turkish companies were left heavily exposed as they grapple with record levels of hard currency debt left from an unchecked credit boom. Borsa Istanbul’s 100 index of Turkish equities fell 6pc.

    “This is shaping up to be the proverbial perfect storm,” said Neil Shearing from Capital Economics.

    “In emerging markets (EM) you can get away with bad macro-fundamentals if the politics are good, but once the politics turn ugly you can’t muddle through any more. We think Turkey is the most vulnerable of the EM countries,” he said.

    Data from the Bank for International Settlements show that Turkey’s foreign liabilities have reached a net $430bn.

    • Turkey election: What you need to know

    Turkish banks alone must roll over $95bn in external debt over the 12 months. They may have to refinance just as the US Federal Reserve starts to raise rates for the first time in eight years and transmits a tightening shock through the global financial system.

    “This is going to be existential for the Turks and I am afraid the crunch is coming soon,” said one hedge fund specialist.

    “They have been running massive current account deficits for years and now they have lost control. They can’t devalue their way out of this because that will make it even harder to pay off the dollar debt. Turkey is trapped,” he said.

    Ahmet Akerli from Goldman Sachs said the country’s gross external financing requirement has widened to 26pc of GDP this year – the second worst in the EM nexus after Malaysia – and the country risks a repeat of the two Fed-linked ‘taper tantrums” experienced in May 2013 and January 2014.

    Central bank reserves are just $35bn, leaving a wafer-thin safety margin of just two months’ import cover. The ratio of foreign liabilities to reserves has reached 12, double the level in Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa, which themselves are stretched.

    The central bank has tried to steady the lira with direct intervention but analysts say the efforts are doomed without a sharp rise in interest rate, triggering a recession.

    Fitch Ratings warned that political gridlock could lead to “erratic” policies, including fiscal slippage or political pressure on the central bank. “Further erosion of policy coherence and credibility would be negative for the sovereign credit profile,” it said.

    The election is a victory for Turkey’s liberal and secular forces, and for the Kurds. It has become much harder for Mr Erdogan to change the constitution and establish an authoritarian presidency.

    His AKP party is still dominant with 41pc of the vote and may have to form a coalition with right-wing nationalists, a combination that spells trouble for foreign creditors. It is still in power, but will rule a splintered country.

    Mr Erdogan’s showcase “Muslim democracy” lost its shine long ago. His regime came off the rails altogether in 2013 when police fired on demonstrators in Istanbul’s Taksim Square and cities across the country, reportedly with live bullets, killing six and injuring 8,000. Amnesty International flagged human rights violations on a “huge scale”.

    Mr Erdogan then purged prosecutors, judges and police, prompting warnings from EU officials that his government is in breach of the EU’s Copenhagen Criteria on democratic rights, and therefore that Turkey’s accession bid is in doubt.

    The leader of the industry lobby group Tusiad was accused of treason when he alleged publicly that companies are routinely pressured by Mr Erdogan’s operatives through abuse of the tax system, and warned that the rule of law had broken down.

    Turkey’s economic prospects have been deteriorating in parallel. The International Monetary Fund said in its latest Article IV report that the country could face a “sudden stop” in capital flows if global conditions tightened.

    The net international investment position has worsened by 25 percentage points to 54pc of GDP since 2008 because of trade deficits and a chronically low savings rate, a textbook case of a country living beyond its means.

    The IMF said the exchange rate is 10pc to 20pc overvalued. The banks’ reliance on external funding has jumped from 5.5pc to 18pc of GDP in five years. “These trends are not sustainable, and if they are not redressed, Turkey could sooner or later suffer a sharp adjustment,” it said.

    Goldman’s Mr Akerli said the great spurt of catch-up growth in the early years of the last decade has sputtered out as total factor productivity growth turns negative and the country drifts into the “middle income trap”.

    This is by now a common story in Latin America, Asia and the near East, where populist regimes have relied on credit growth to mask the lack of reform and obsolete development models.

    The spillover effects from zero interest rates and quantitative easing (QE) in the US kept the illusion going for another three or four years after the Lehman crisis but the underlying deformities have become clear in a string of countries, including Brazil, Russia, and increasingly China.

    Emerging markets have borrowed $2 trillion in US dollars since the Lehman crisis, pushing their total dollar debts $4.5 trillion. Much of it was borrowed at real interest rates near 1pc.

    The IMF warned in April that those countries that drank most indiscriminately from this pool of excess liquidity in the QE era could face a crippling squeeze on two fronts and a “cascade” of woes if the dollar spikes yet higher and rates climb back to anywhere near historic norms.

    		 The Telegraph Investor
  • Turkey’s election could set its path: stronger democracy or autocracy

    Turkey’s election could set its path: stronger democracy or autocracy

    Turkey election
    By Glen Johnson and Patrick J. McDonnell contact the reporter

    Turkish voters go to the polls Sunday in the culmination of an acrimonious election campaign pitting a fractious opposition against the long-dominant ruling party and the country’s most divisive figure: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

    The parliamentary vote, analysts say, could determine whether this dynamic nation of 80 million fortifies its vibrant democracy or slides further toward autocratic rule dominated by Erdogan, a charismatic leader who inspires fierce loyalty among supporters and revulsion from critics.

    The president has called on the electorate to give his ruling Justice and Development party a supermajority in the parliament, which would facilitate constitutional changes bolstering his power as president.

    Turkey elections

    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan greets supporters in Eskisehir, Turkey, on June 5, 2015.

    (Kayhan Ozer / Presidential Press Office)

    However, polls have suggested that the party will garner 42% to 45% of the vote, which would be a significant reversal of fortune from the nearly 50% it took in the 2011 general election. A recent economic slowdown and increase in unemployment have unnerved many voters.

    The election has been marred by violence, as tension and polarization sweep Turkey. On Friday, an explosion at a final rally of the People’s Democratic Party killed two supporters and wounded 100 in southeastern Diyarbakir, according to local news accounts.

    The prospect of diminished support for Erdogan has raised hope among opposition blocs, including the upstart Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, which has endeavored to expand its base beyond the nation’s Kurdish minority. The left-wing party aims to capture the votes of liberals who have grown disillusioned with both Erdogan and traditional parties, such as the center-left Republican People’s Party, the main opposition bloc.

    “We have to make a new start by putting people at the heart of the system,” Selahattin Demirtas, HDP leader and human rights lawyer, said in April.
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    Erdogan has demanded for months that his support base deliver a resounding victory for the conservative ruling party with Islamist roots. The party has ruled Turkey since 2002, presiding over a period of rapid economic expansion that also saw Erdogan increase the profile of Islam in a republic long torn between Islamic roots and secular present.

    If the party can secure at least 330 seats in Turkey’s 550-seat parliament, critics say, Erdogan can rewrite the constitution and hasten the nation’s move toward authoritarian rule. A supermajority of 367 seats would allow the president to make the change without a referendum.

    “He is establishing a system of personal rule,” said Ergun Ozbudun of Istanbul Sehir University, a leading constitutional law scholar. “What he desires is nothing like the U.S. system, as he does not care for checks and balances…. It is a system which we can no longer call democratic.”

    But the president’s defenders deny any drift toward one-man, one-party rule and note that the Erdogan years have brought unprecedented prosperity to Turkey. Erdogan himself says the constitutional changes would spur growth and Turkey’s ascension as a global power.

    “Erdogan is like the conductor of an orchestra,” said Mustafa Yildiz, 64, a civil servant and supporter strolling recently outside Ankara’s Kocatepe mosque. “The presidential system will create harmony in Turkish politics.”

    Erdogan has bristled during mass rallies, assailing opposition movements as part of “the Armenian lobby, homosexuals … representatives of sedition.” He has repeatedly rejected allegations that Ottoman-era Turkey committed a genocide against the nation’s Armenian minority a century ago.
    cComments

    Orientals are different. An autocrat with quirks and bad manners is frequently perceived as the projection of one’s own strength, which actually doesn’t exist. More prosperity causes more secularization, which could allow Turkey to move from an oligarchy (CHP) via an autocracy (AKP)…
    jgttgns
    at 10:07 PM June 05, 2015

    Add a comment See all comments
    2

    Erdogan’s bellicose campaign rhetoric has outraged opposition leaders, who note that the constitution requires the president be nonpartisan and above party politics. Erdogan stepped down last year as party leader to run for president, receiving 52% of the vote. But he has hardly remained above the partisan fray.

    “Erdogan is not a president who could stay passive,” noted Huseyin Bagci, head of International Relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. “The problem for him is the constitution is not ‘his’ constitution.”

    Intimidation of critical journalists, now commonplace under Erdogan, has increased.

    Most recently, Erdogan demanded a life sentence for the editor of the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, Can Dundar, for publishing images of a shipment of heavy weapons to Syrian Islamist rebels on trucks belonging to the Erdogan-controlled National Intelligence Organization, or MiT, in January 2014. The weapons were hidden below medical supplies, the newspaper reported.

    Erdogan’s foreign policy, particularly support for Syrian rebels, is deeply unpopular among many Turks. Turkey’s more-than-500-mile border with Syria has functioned as a rebel resupply and logistics zone.

    In this election, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, an Erdogan loyalist, was supposed to be the public face of the ruling party. Posters of the bespectacled Davutoglu are everywhere. But he lacks Erdogan’s charisma, so the president has hit the campaign trail with gusto, counting on his cult of personality to bring in votes.

    The two men regularly attend “opening ceremonies” together, where they appeal to the grandiose ambitions of their conservative Sunni Muslim support base.

    “By God’s will, Jerusalem belongs to the Kurds, the Turks, the Arabs and to all Muslims,” Davutolgu reportedly said during the recent inauguration of a new airport in southeastern Turkey.

    But Erdogan’s march toward a more powerful presidency could be thwarted if the HDP manages to capture more than 10% of the vote, the threshold needed to enter the parliament. That would give the group a substantial bloc.

    The left-wing party, founded in 2012, has run an upbeat campaign. Half of the HDP’s candidates are women, and religious figures and gay candidates are also in the ballots.

    “I like their speeches, that they don’t discriminate against anyone,” said 40-year-old Emine Tunc, sitting in a billiard hall in the predominantly Kurdish Istanbul neighborhood of Tarlabasi, speaking of the HDP. The ruling party “will help the Syrians, but when it comes to us, they do nothing.”

    The HDP strategy is a gamble, however. If the Kurdish-linked bloc’s vote drops below that watershed mark, the Justice and Development Party probably will absorb most of those votes and move closer to securing the large majority it needs to push through constitutional changes.

    Erdogan has pursued a peace bid with the country’s Kurds, strengthening Kurdish rights after decades of insurgency that cost of tens of thousands of lives.

    However, as Islamic State militants last year laid siege to the ethnic Kurdish city of Kobani, Erdogan refused to support the defenders of the Syrian border city. The policy alienated the nation’s Kurdish minority and sparked riots.

    Appealing to more religiously austere Kurdish voters, Erdogan brandishes Kurdish-language Korans at rallies in an attempt to arrest resurgent Kurdish nationalism.

    “I hope my conservative Kurdish brothers can realize Erdogan is just using religion as a tool to get more power,” said Sedat Ocal, a 29-year-old Kurdish man who hawks cheap jeans from a shop in Eminonu, a suburb on the fringes of Istanbul’s iconic Bosporus Strait.

    Yet to his supporters, Erdogan can do little wrong.

    Standing in his spice store in Istanbul’s conservative Fatih district’s Egyptian market — a ruling party stronghold — Savas Cinar, his beard fashioned in the style favored by Erdogan’s pious supporters, rattles off a list of the party’s achievements, including giant construction projects and the rescinding of a government ban on women wearing Muslim head scarves at universities and government offices.

    “Before Erdogan, we Muslims had no life,” Cinar said. “Soldiers used to come to our Koran recitals and harass us. Now we are a global power.”

    Special correspondent Johnson reported from Istanbul and Times staff writer McDonnell from Beirut.

    Twitter: @mcdneville

     

  • Emperor sans clothes: Turkish election strips Erdogan of former glory

    Emperor sans clothes: Turkish election strips Erdogan of former glory

    Turkey elections

    By Laura King contact the reporter

    Turkey Europe Elections Recep Tayyip Erdogan Twitter, Inc. European Union London School of Economics

    Stunning election loss in Turkey is a slap in the face from voters for once-revered Erdogan
    After an election setback, Turkey’s ruling party is seeking a coalition government — with little success

     

    It’s difficult to pinpoint just when the leader once nicknamed “The Sultan” became a figure more akin to the emperor who had no clothes.

    For more than a dozen years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s gilded career had taken him from one electoral triumph to the next, heaping spoils and glory not only on the Islamist-rooted political party he co-founded but on the 61-year-old leader himself.

    All that changed Sunday, when voters delivered the electoral equivalent of a stinging slap in the face to the man once considered the most popular politician in the country’s modern history.

    The voting results deprived Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, of the single-party power it had enjoyed since 2002, and derailed his personal vision of transforming the largely ceremonial post of president, which he assumed in August, into an overarching seat of power.

     

    The ballot-box verdict could be read as an affirmation of what had long been buzzed about in Turkey’s ancient bazaars and spanking-new skyscrapers: that Ergodan, once seen as a savior, was in danger of becoming a national liability.

    Wearied by years of harsh crackdowns and grandiose gestures on Erdogan’s part, many Turks came to view him as a leader who burned bridges rather than building them. The aura of fear and reverence dissolved into something unfamiliar and far more subversive: laughter.

    It wasn’t always like that. Erdogan came of political age as an outsider who mounted courageous challenges to Turkey’s often-sinister military-dominated power elite. Jailed for reciting a poem, he dabbled in prison verse. In his early years in power, with his star on the rise, he was a darling of the West, hailed as the moderate face of political Islam.
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    He empowered an entrepreneurial class of pious Muslims who became an engine of Turkey’s eye-catching economic growth. In a diverse and complex society struggling to find a foothold in the modern world, Erdogan preached inclusiveness and backed up his words with actions.

    As prime minister, he risked considerable political capital to reach out to the minority Kurds and worked to halt a bloody civil conflict of decades’ standing. For a time, he worked assiduously to forge friendly relations with neighbors — even with Israel, reviled throughout the Muslim world.

    On the misty shores of the Bosporus, Turks on Monday offered differing day-after assessments of when and how it went wrong for Erdogan. Some traced the trajectory to the violent crackdown on demonstrations that sprang up in 2013 in Istanbul’s Gezi Park — initially a relatively narrow green-minded protest movement that turned into a broader expression of popular discontent.

    “The Gezi movement was important, beginning a discourse of change,” said Esra Ozyurek, a scholar of contemporary Turkey at the London School of Economics. As arrests and beatings mounted, Erdogan, who had entered politics as a champion of the oppressed, began to be seen as an oppressor.

    Hard on the heels of the Gezi protests came a corruption scandal that spurred Erdogan, then still prime minister, to purge hundreds of supporters of a rival movement led by a onetime ally, exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, from the police, judiciary and media.

    At the same time, it escaped the notice of few that Erdogan appeared bent on supplanting the secular-democratic legacy of Turkey’s founding leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Seeking to symbolically undo one of Ataturk’s signature feats, a rendering of Turkish in the Western alphabet, Erdogan last year vowed to impose compulsory lessons in Arabic-alphabet Ottoman script.
    cComments

    Regardless, yesterday was a great win for Kemalism and the secular nature of Turkey’s government. It should be celebrated, not feared and there is the possibility albeit remote at this point that the three opposition parties could form their own coalition if Erdogen doesn’t get back…
    affableman
    at 9:07 AM June 08, 2015

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    Bellicose and retrograde statements became the new norm. A women’s job, Erdogan told a female audience, is motherhood. Twitter, he declared, was “evil.” To the European Union, when it urged greater media freedom, he replied: “Mind your own business.” For the New York Times, which recently wrote a sharply worded editorial about Turkey losing its way, he offered this riposte: “Know your place.”

    Virulent attacks on journalists and social media became routine as the list of matters over which the president was ridiculed grew longer. There was the opulent 1,150-room presidential palace — complete with Ottoman-era touches such as a team of food testers to guard against poisoning — whose $615-million cost Erdogan justified just before the election by saying that his previous residence had suffered from an infestation of cockroaches.

    There was the movie-set presidential guard, done up in Turkic warrior costumes from centuries past, and the teenage boy dragged from his classroom to account for a Facebook post. A politician once known for skillful, even spellbinding rhetoric fell back on conspiratorial rants, with the final days of the campaign consumed by his dark mutterings about the seditious tendencies of Armenians and homosexuals.

    Such rhetoric went down well with the president’s conservative base. But the unhappy state of Turkey’s affairs of state was memorably encapsulated last month by author Stephen Kinzer, a long-respected observer of the country.

    “Once seen as a skilled modernizer, he now sits in a 1,000-room palace denouncing the European Union, decreeing the arrest of journalists, and ranting against short skirts and birth control,” Kinzer wrote of Erdogan in a column in the Boston Globe. Retribution was swift: The author said a high civic honor that was to be bestowed on him by a Turkish city was swiftly rescinded.

    Erdogan, who was ubiquitous during the campaign — in defiance of a constitutional role that is supposed to keep the president aloof from politics — remained silent for a full 18 hours after it first became clear that the AKP’s hopes for a parliamentary majority had gone unrealized. Even then, his first public response was in the form of a written statement, not a personal appearance.

    The election results, he said, “do not give the opportunity to any party to form a single-party government” — implicitly inviting the AKP’s rivals to consider forming a coalition.

    So far, none has expressed an interest in partnering with the AKP. If a new government cannot be assembled within 45 days, Turkey will likely go to new elections. Shock waves from Sunday’s election results, meanwhile, rattled Turkey’s financial markets Monday, with the stock market sliding and the lira touching new lows.

    The party’s titular head, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, reminded the public that the AKP was still the largest bloc in parliament, after winning about 41% of the vote. “It is the winner; it finished first in these elections,” he said.

    Some analysts pointed out that it is easy to forget that Erdogan skillfully harnessed powerful political impulses that remain widely felt in Turkey — and could do so again.

    “He is still president for the next four years, and he has considerable authorities, and has by all accounts exploited every one of them,” said Francis J. Ricciardone, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey who is now vice president and director of the Atlantic Council think tank. “He is clearly going to be influential.”

    Twitter: @laurakingLAT