Tag: Politics

The Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party has been reelected for an unprecedented third consecutive term. The party increased its votes securing just over 50% of the ballots cast. But the prime minister fell well short of his goal of a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

Supporters of the Justice and Development party began their celebration early. As soon as results started to come through, it was clear the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was set for a big victory. His party, campaigning on a booming economy, secured just over 50% of the vote, an improvement on its 2007 landslide victory. Mr. Erdogan, addressing his supporters at his party headquarters in Ankara, reached out to the whole country.

He said “This is a victory for Turkey. This is a victory for democracy, for stability, for peace. This is a victory for all our 74 million people.”

But the success, observers say, will be a little bittersweet. The prime minister fell more than 40 seats short of his declared goal of a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which is needed to replace the 1982 constitution, written by Turkey’s then military rulers. A new constitution was a key electoral pledge. But there was growing concern both in and outside Turkey that if Mr. Erdogan achieved that goal, he would have had too much power. Mr. Erdogan even failed to secure the 330 seats needed to submit constitutional reforms to a referendum.

Mr. Erdogan did not realize his goal largely because candidates supported by the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy party defeated candidates from the prime minister’s party. The pro-Kurdish party increased its representation from 20 to more than 30 seats.

Observers say the election has served to underline the increasing power of Turkey’s Kurdish rights movement. The Kurdish rights issue is predicted to be one of most important and contentious aspects of any new constitution. While the prime minister still has a massive parliamentary majority of more than 100 seats, he will now have to seek support from at least another party to pass a new constitution.

via Turkey’s Ruling Party Wins 3rd Term | News | English, AOL

By SEBNEM ARSU

With 99 percent of the returns counted, Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party won about 50 percent of the votes, according to the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency. The main opposition group, the Republican People’s Party, won nearly 26 percent, and another opposition party, the Nationalist Action Party, had 13 percent, the agency said.

The returns give the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., its third term in office since it first won a parliamentary majority in 2002. The results, however, failed to provide the absolute majority that the party wanted to push for major changes, including a shift to a presidential system and the drafting of a new constitution. The party will now have to work to forge consensus with its opposition.

Mr. Erdogan, in an address to hundreds of cheering supporters at his party headquarters in Ankara, the capital, acknowledged the need to work for a consensus if constitutional reforms were to be realized, a priority shared by the country’s political parties and civil organizations.

“Our nation delivered to us a call for consensus and dialogue in making this new constitution,” Mr. Erdogan said. “This constitution will be established upon brotherhood, support, sharing, unity and togetherness.”

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party, congratulated Mr. Erdogan on his success, but emphasized that he and his party would be scrutinizing the government’s approach to upholding democratic principles as any push for a new constitution went forward.

The current Constitution was prepared after a military coup in the 1980s, and many here believe that it elevates protections for the state above those of citizens, at the expense of individual rights and freedoms. Under Mr. Erdogan’s stewardship, the government restored political and economic stability after years of turmoil, though opponents say the gains have come at the price of an increasingly autocratic exercise of power.

Supporters credit Mr. Erdogan with elevating Turkey’s profile in the Middle East, turning the country into an increasingly assertive regional player at a time when several of its neighbors are locked in sometimes violent struggles for democracy. One of most violent, in Syria, Turkey’s neighbor to the southeast, has sent thousands of refugees spilling over the border.

Mr. Erdogan has moved the country further up the road, although sometimes a bumpy one, to European Union membership. His party has brought the country strong economic growth of 8.9 percent, though unemployment remains stubbornly high at nearly 12 percent and income distribution remains uneven.

But his party has moved from the reformist approach it took in the early years of its rule, leaving an opening for opponents like the Social Democratic Republican People’s Party, which had some success in the current balloting for 550 seats in Parliament in winning back centrist Turks wary of the conservative tack the ruling party has taken.

“I support some of the party’s politics for stability in the country,” Bahar Forta, 62, a dermatologist, said as she was leaving a polling station at a high school in Sisli, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Istanbul. “However, I also see that the power they hold — almost like a single-party system — will ultimately pave the way for an autocratic regime.”

For many younger voters, their biggest concerns were violations of civilian liberties.

“There is a thin line between stability and democracy,” said Mustafa Guler, 27, a computer technology consultant, who was on his way to vote.

“Freedom for minorities is still an issue, alcohol use is controlled by a government agency,” he said, adding: “Even leave all that aside — what can be more absurd in this day and age than to close down YouTube? My vote is to break their majority.”

Many Web sites, including YouTube, have been blocked in recent years by the government Internet Monitoring Agency, often without explanation.

Critics point to the fact that Turkey currently has more than 60 journalists in jail, many charged with crimes related to their published work, according to the Turkish Press Association.

At least two — Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik, both investigative journalists critical of the A.K.P. and supportive Islamic organizations — have not been notified of their charges since their arrests in March.

Despite these shortcomings, some liberal circles have praised government efforts in challenging the status quo of the powerful military, which has staged three coups and until recently maintained a virtually untouchable place in Turkish politics.

The government oversaw a controversial trial of a group accused of plotting a coup against the ruling party in 2003. The investigation included the arrests of hundreds of officers, retired as well as active duty, tarnishing the military’s image and effectively eliminating it from politics.

Supporters in Ankara cheered screen images of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his wife, Emine, on Sunday.

Turkey’s ruling party is in line to win the election by a landslide on June 12. Can anyone stop them from changing the country’s constitution?

BY AFSIN YURDAKUL | JUNE 10, 2011

ISTANBUL — Durdane Coskun is in a frantic rush. A housewife with three children who spends most of her time at the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) campaign office in the working-class Istanbul neighborhood of Beykoz, she organizes meetings, answers phone calls, distributes brochures and flags, and sometimes even cooks for more than 20 other volunteers. Her colleagues dash around the office, which is painted in a dull yellow and covered with large portraits of a smiling Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s prime minister, and a grainy picture of Turkey’s founding father, Kemal Ataturk, praying with his deputies, hands open, palms facing skyward.

“My waking hours are dedicated to this cause,” Coskun says. “I take care of the household chores after midnight.” Then, with a big smile on a face neatly framed with a colorful, silk headscarf, she says, “It’s for the love of our prime minister, our country. It’s for the future of our people.”

With less than two days left before Turks go to the ballot box in parliamentary elections on Sunday, June 12, the AKP is riding high in the polls. With thousands of volunteers like Coskun working around the clock, there is little doubt that the party will win a landslide victory for the third time.

It’s still an open question, though, just what the AKP’s agenda will be. Erdogan, who has won the admiration of many in the past eight years for bringing political and economic stability to a formerly crisis-prone country, has long promised an inclusive, pluralistic constitution — if he wins a third term. “After the 2011 elections, we will definitely make a new constitution,” he told Taraf newspaper in August 2010. Turkey’s current constitution is a relic of a bygone military era, a straitjacket designed by the country’s adamantly secular generals in the aftermath of the 1980 coup to curb civil liberties. But many fear that this new constitution may entrench the AKP’s power and weaken the opposition, including the country’s large and unhappy Kurdish minority.

Indeed, Erdogan’s fiery campaign rhetoric has polarized the country. His frequent references to the opposition leader’s minority religious identity (Kemal Kilicdaroglu is an Alevi Muslim) were interpreted as derogatory. Recently, he said he would have “hanged” Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned head of the outlawed Kurdish separatist group, putting more strain on the already tense situation with the Kurds, many of whom have been beaten or tear-gassed at anti-Erdogan rallies in the past weeks. But in the absence of a robust opposition — and with the military’s influence in politics significantly reduced from its heyday — Erdogan’s power is mostly unrivaled.

The margin of the AKP’s victory, which is the only unknown about Sunday’s vote, will play a critical role in determining Erdogan’s leadership style and the country’s post-election atmosphere. According to Konda, a private survey company, the party seems to have secured 46.5 percent of the votes, which translates to 328 to 332 seats in the 550-seat parliament. The Republican People’s Party, the main opposition party known as the CHP, is poised to get 26 percent of the votes and thus secure 145 to 155 seats; the MHP, a far-right nationalist party struggling to cross the 10 percent threshold required to enter the parliament, is polling at 10.8 percent.

Konda’s manager, Bekir Agirdir, explains that if the AKP gets 367 seats in the parliament — admittedly unlikely, according to the latest polling — it will reach the two-thirds “supermajority” it needs to rewrite the constitution, without the cooperation of other parties or having to call for a referendum. That would raise suspicions about how inclusive the new charter would b

via The Coronation of Erdogan – By Afsin Yurdakul | Foreign Policy.

Sirri Sureyya Onder is neither a Kurd nor a politician. Yet, when the popular filmmaker and writer was approached by Turkey’s Kurdish party to run for an Istanbul parliamentary seat in Sunday’s elections, he felt he could not refuse. “This parliament has an opportunity to make history,” he said, between campaign stops at coffeehouses in Zeytinburnu, a working-class district near Istanbul’s airport populated by Kurds who migrated here over the past three decades years to flee fighting in the southeast. “It will be tasked with drafting a new constitution which could finally secure democratic rights and freedoms for everyone. For the first time, I feel as if I can make a difference.”

With the Arab Spring having reached its doorstep in neighbouring Syria, Turkey may finally have run out of time to defer addressing the grievances of its restive Kurdish population, estimated at around 14 million. For years Ankara denied the Kurds existed — they were called mountain Turks — and banned the Kurdish language from being spoken. In 1984, the PKK took up arms in a fight for Kurdish independence, and some 45,000 people have been killed in the ensuing conflict. But Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who took power in 2002, vowed to seek a political solution to the conflict, declaring in a historic speech that “the Kurdish problem is my problem”. Erdogan acknowledged that the government had mismanaged relations with the Kurdish population, and promised greater democracy. (Turkey’s Election: The Massive Implications of a Foregone Conclusion)

But Erdogan’s initiative to allow the PKK to disarm and reintegrate were abandoned under nationalist pressure; Kurdish language reforms were stalled; and clashes between Kurdish youth and the authorities continued in the southeast. So, the Kurdish issue has returned to the top of the political agenda as Turkey goes to the polls on Sunday. “A new constitution and resolving the Kurdish problem … are the most important jobs awaiting the new Turkish parliament,” says Cengiz Candar, an influential columnist for Radikal newspaper.

The good news is that conditions for addressing Kurdish grievances have never looked so promising. Despite numerous obstacles, the country’s pro-Kurdish party BDP is poised to take more seats than ever before, energised by a clever move to integrate pro-peace Turks like Onder, other minorities and more mainstream Kurds. Meanwhile, the main opposition CHP party, standard-bearer of the hawkish nationalism against which the Kurds butted heads for decades, has abandoned its longstanding pro-military line and is fielding a well-known Kurdish human rights lawyer as its deputy leader. In the current election season, politicians have been allowed to campaign using the Kurdish language for the first time ever, part of a series of reforms introduced by Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which is all but guaranteed to win on Sunday.

“We are no longer afraid,” says Gulcin Erdemci, 50, part of an enthusiastic crew of Kurdish women dressed in bright pink sweaters canvassing door-to-door in Zeytinburnu on behalf of Onder. “Before I could never say who I was voting for, or even wear this in public,” she says, pointing to her loose white headscarf embroidered in typically Kurdish tradition. “We just want full equality.”

Regardless of who wins on Sunday, the Kurds — both the BDP and the armed rebel group PKK (whose leader, Abdullah Ocalan, is serving a life sentence for treason) — have given the new government until June 15 to meet their demands for more autonomy, the right to be educated in Kurdish and an end to military operations. Already, waves of popular unrest have swept the mainly Kurdish southeast in recent months. (Why Syria and Turkey Are Suddenly Far Apart on Arab Spring Protests)

“These elections are like a referendum for the Kurds,” says Mustafa Gundogdu, Turkey and Iraq officer at the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project. “They are looking to see how many MPs they can post and what happens next. There is the question of whether this might be a last chance.”

What happens next depends on the slimmest of calculuations. Prime Minister Erdogan is set to secure a third term in power, but it remains to be seen whether his party will gain the legislative supermajority that would allow it to draft a constitution without needing to compromise to win the votes of opposition parties — an alarming prospect to many given his self-professed desire to set up a presidential system like France or Russia, with greater executive powers. “For the new constitution to stick, it must be the product of a genuine consensus, including the Kurdish national movement, not a top-down imposition,” says Hugh Pope, of the International Crisis Group.

Tarhan Erdem, a pollster renowned for the accuracy of his forecasts, sees the AKP falling just short of its goal of 330 out of 550 seats. Less than 330 seats would mean that while the AKP would still form a single party government, it would also be forced to compromise with the CHP and the BDP to legislate. “This would be very good,” says Candar.”It looks like the elections will deliver good results.”

Onder is similarly optimistic. “If we can replace the war-mongering with lasting peace, then we’ll all feel alot lighter,” says the affable filmmaker, dragging on a cigarette at the end of twelve hours on the campaign trail. He gazes briefly out of the car window at Istanbul’s bumper-to-bumper evening traffic. Then he smiles. “And you never know, if that happens I might even be able to shoot again next summer.”

via Turkey’s Election Offers a Last Chance to Integrate the Kurds – TIME.