Ruling party seeks supermajority to ease path for constitutional changes
Turks heads to the polls on Sunday in what will be a make-or-break election for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who is seeking to overhaul the country’s constitution.
By
EMRE PEKER And
JOE PARKINSON
June 5, 2015 12:01 a.m. ET
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ISTANBUL—Over the past decade, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has steadily solidified his political dominance in Turkey, winning six consecutive elections and centralizing power around himself.
Now, his political supremacy hinges on an election in which he isn’t a candidate.
Facing a weakening economy and a revitalized opposition, Sunday’s parliamentary election has emerged as a make-or-break moment for Mr. Erdogan’s bid to overhaul Turkey’s constitution and create a super-presidency that could help him rule for another generation.
At stake is the nature of political power in Turkey—an important but increasingly fractious U.S. ally, North Atlantic Treaty Organization member and aspiring candidate to join the European Union. Ankara’s increasingly assertive foreign policy and domestic efforts to muzzle dissent have provoked more frequent clashes with Washington and Brussels.
Opinion polls show a slide in support for the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, that Mr. Erdogan co-founded and led until his election in August 2014 to the nonpartisan presidency.
Its backing has fallen from a record 52% last summer to closer to 40% now. While the AKP remains comfortably ahead of all other parties, some polls predict it could fall short of winning a majority of seats—much less the three-fifths Mr. Erdogan would need to attempt constitutional changes.
Mr. Erdogan thus has been campaigning ferociously in support of his old party—despite holding a job that is supposed to be apolitical.
For the past month he has been zigzagging across the country, meeting with business groups and holding dozens of political rallies. In the first week of May alone, television stations broadcast 44 hours of speeches in which he repeatedly slammed his rivals—giving him more airtime than the other political parties combined.
The Supreme Electoral Council and Turkey’s media watchdog have rejected multiple complaints from opposition parties, who charge the president with breaching the constitution.
Mr. Erdogan has billed the ballot as a vote of confidence for the AKP government. But even the pugilistic president—at once Turkey’s most popular and most polarizing politician—is sounding less confident.
“I don’t see the excitement of previous elections. The old livelihood, the old hustle and bustle that I’m used to is unfortunately not there,” Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday in a television interview.
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In Kasimpasa, the hard-scrabble Istanbul neighborhood where Mr. Erdogan grew up, posters of the president and prime minister fill streets lined with AKP flags. While known generally as die-hard AKP supporters, some residents also voiced dissatisfaction with the party’s 12-year rule.
“I can’t put bread on the table anymore,” said a 32-year-old Kurdish man who peddles fruits and vegetables part-time on the street on top of another, full-time job. Having voted for the AKP once and other Islamist parties in the past, he said he is considering a pro-Kurdish party this time.
As prime minister for 12 years, Mr. Erdogan oversaw a rapidly growing economy that tripled in size to $800 billion, expanded Ankara’s diplomatic clout and removed the military’s tutelage over politics.
But in recent years, relations with Western allies and Middle Eastern neighbors became increasingly tense, as Mr. Erdogan’s reputation shifted from gifted reformer to budding autocrat.
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His push for a stronger presidential system is the latest flashpoint. Currently, the presidency controls the National Security Council and decides on the use of military power, but is otherwise largely ceremonial.
Mr. Erdogan says that giving executive power, such as control over the budget and infrastructure projects, to the president rather than the prime minister and his cabinet would streamline decision making. That, he argues, would allow him to realize his vision of a “New Turkey”—an era of Turkish greatness not seen since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
His detractors say it would transform Turkey into an autocracy, rewiring state institutions to serve the president in ways more likely to resemble Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin than the White House or Elysée Palace.
Those arguments are at the core of Turkey’s most finely balanced election for a decade, spotlighting a growing mismatch between the AKP’s diminishing authority and Mr. Erdogan’s outsize ambitions.
“Turkey’s political backdrop is set to become less predictable and stable than it has been since 2002,” said Wolfango Piccoli, managing director at New York-based risk consultancy Teneo Intelligence. If Mr. Erdogan is unable to change the constitution as he wants, he will “continue to control the country’s politics for the foreseeable future, resisting any attempt to limit his power,” Mr. Piccoli said.
On top of the slowing economy, another key challenge for Mr. Erdogan comes from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, or HDP. If it crosses the 10% threshold to enter parliament, it would get at least 50 or so seats—eating into the AKP’s numbers and potentially prompting the first coalition government since 2002.
The AKP needs 276 of the 550 seats to govern alone. With at least 330 seats, the AKP could pass a new constitution but would then have to put it to a referendum. With 367, it could rewrite the constitution and adopt it with just a parliamentary vote.
“Talks about a coalition are not realistic,” said Mustafa Sentop, an AKP lawmaker and deputy chairman in charge of election affairs. “The only question is whether the AKP will have the majority to adopt a new constitution.”
Most members of the governing party—handpicked by Mr. Erdogan before the 2011 elections—are adamant that Turkey would be a more stable and democratic country under Mr. Erdogan’s presidential system.
“Erdogan doesn’t need this,” Mr. Sentop said last week. “Turkey won’t have stability problems when it has Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but if there is no such powerful actor, stability becomes an issue” unless the constitution is changed.
Yet Mr. Erdogan’s towering presence over the AKP and push to consolidate his grip over the state betray a paradox: the elections threaten to rob him of his long-held goal when he is arguably at his most powerful.
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A supporter of the ruling AKP holds a phone with a cover with a picture of President Erdogan before a rally in Istanbul last month. PHOTO: SEDAT SUNA/EUROPEAN
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In the last two years, Mr. Erdogan has firmed his control of the bureaucracy, replacing thousands of civil servants and law-enforcement officials deemed disloyal to the AKP government.
He also pushed through sweeping security laws to muzzle dissent: criminalizing street protests, blocking social media, banning companies considered sympathetic to the opposition from state tenders and seeking life imprisonment for a journalist who uncovered government about arming Syrian rebels.
“The judiciary, the police, the media—one by one Turkey’s institutions have fallen to Erdogan’s dominating political will,” said Suat Kiniklioglu, a former AKP executive and lawmaker, who says Mr. Erdogan purged liberals and centrists from the party in 2011 and 2012.
Whether Mr. Erdogan can realize his ambitions depends on the outcome of Sunday’s election.
“Frankly, democracy is at stake. It will be weaker or stronger after this election,” said Marc Pierini, a former EU ambassador to Turkey who is now a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.
Write to Emre Peker at emre.peker@wsj.com and Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com
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