Erdogan victory risks making country an authoritarian state sliding into Syrian mire

Turks vote on Sunday to choose a new parliament amid fears that Turkey is turning into an authoritarian one-party state and political, ethnic and religious polarization is so great that the country is becoming permanently unstable.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2002, need to elect just 18 more MPs to win back the majority in parliament that they lost in the last election on 7 June. If they succeed, then Erdogan will be able to expand his already extensive power over the state, security forces, media and judiciary, The Independent reported on Saturday.

The election outcome is too finely balanced to predict, according to the latest opinion polls, which show that as many as 50 million Turks are intending to vote. The AKP is expected to slightly increase its share of the votes to 42 to 43 per cent and the opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) vote is forecast to rise to 26 to 28 per cent. The most important development of the last election was the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) getting 13 per cent – well above the crucial 10 per cent level that a party must reach to get representation in parliament.

The HDP’s success deprived the AKP of its majority and precipitated a five-month-long crisis in which this election is the latest, but probably not the last, episode. The AKP is unlikely to win back Kurdish support and is looking to take votes from the floundering right-wing anti-Kurdish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) to get at least 276 seats in the 550-seat parliament.

The election is taking place in an atmosphere of agitation and fear because of suicide bomb attacks on pro-Kurdish activists and demonstrators, which were blamed on Isis. The most recent attack, on 10 October in Ankara, left 102 dead. It was the worst terrorist incident in the history of Turkey and has led all parties, aside from the AKP, to cancel their campaign rallies.

The ability of the opposition to promote their policies was already limited by state television’s almost exclusive focus on Erdogan and the AKP. Private media companies have been intimidated or taken over.

But Erdogan and the AKP are not solely or even mainly reliant for their political strength on partisan use of the security forces and judiciary, media bias, patronage and demagoguery. Elections in Turkey since 1950 have shown that there is a permanent centre-right majority, though it was for long constrained by military interventionism and by military coups. Though theoretically in power since 2002, the AKP only gradually took control of centres of power like the army, state apparatus, media and judiciary.

Zeynep Cermen, a journalist in her thirties living in Istanbul says that it is clear to her that Turkey is “evolving into an authoritarian state” and is being sucked into “the Syrian quagmire”. She sees extremism everywhere and is frightened by the growth of what she describes as nationalist fascism and claims support for Isis is at 10 per cent.

Isis has every incentive to increase ethnic and sectarian divisions in Turkey and is doing so successfully through its suicide bomb attacks. Kurds and some of the Turkish opposition accuse the government of creating conditions in which Isis can successfully operate. Drawing on its experience in Iraq and Syria, Isis is expert at carrying out atrocities that provoke a vicious circle of retaliatory killings and massacres.

The outcome of tomorrow’s election is unlikely to produce a clear-cut result, but even if it does, it may still not produce stability because divisions are too wide. Even the government’s takeover of much of the media seems to be having only a limited impact because people were already entrenched in their opinions. For the moment, Turkey exists in a state of permanent crisis.

Source: MENA