Research Notes
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Number 23 — September 2014 RESEARCH NOTES THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY Revealing Trends in Turkey’s Presidential Election Soner Cagaptay with Ege Cansu Sacikara and Talya Yuzucu n August 10, former Turkish prime minister 19.4 million votes; and on August 10, Erdogan col- Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the country’s presi- lected 21 million votes. Odential election with 51.79 percent of the vote, com- There is another reason the AKP will not have the fortably surpassing his own Justice and Development luxury of remaining complacent. Turkey’s next par- Party’s (AKP’s) 43.32 percent tally in the March 30 liamentary elections are scheduled for June 2015, and nationwide local polls. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the the question remains whether the party can win again, joint candidate for the opposition Republican Peo- without Erdogan at the helm. No doubt, a triumph ple’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Action Party will rely on using Erdogan’s August tactic of appeal- (MHP), received 38.44 percent, underperforming the ing to the country’s right-wing voters to muster a bloc’s efforts in March, when it received 43.22 percent. winning plurality, or even majority. In the event of the The smaller Kurdish nationalist People’s Democracy latter, the party would have two-thirds parliamentary Party (HDP) received 9.76 percent, far exceeding the representation, allowing it to amend the Turkish con- 6.5 percent it garnered, along with its sister Peace and stitution, including possibly changing the country’s Democracy Party (BDP), in March; the HDP has government from a parliamentary to a presidential since absorbed the BDP.1 system, headed by Erdogan. Erdogan’s August victory reflects his success in As for the CHP/MHP, its recent dip can be attrib- building a coalition of the right, which has dominated uted to (1) certain MHP voters backing Erdogan Turkish politics for decades. This effort included peel- over Ihsanoglu and (2) votes lost by CHP to HDP ing votes from the MHP and also securing the sup- candidate Selahattin Demirtas. This suggests the per- port of small far-right movements, including the sistence of the traditional Turkish left-right divide— Felicity Party (SP) and Great Union Party (BBP). hence the seemingly unlikely voter shifts from the Despite Erdogan’s electoral majority in August, recent opposition to the government; in other words, from election tallies reveal that support for the new presi- one right-wing party, the MHP, to another, the AKP. dent and his AKP may have plateaued: in the 2011 Indeed, these voter migrations within the right have parliamentary election, the party received 21.4 million implications for the leftist CHP’s chances of ulti- votes; in the March nationwide local elections, it took mately seizing power from the AKP. Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family Fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute, and author of The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century’s First Muslim Power (Potomac Books). Ege Cansu Sacikara is the Yvonne Silverman Research Assistant and Talya Yuzucu is a research intern at the Institute. © 2014 The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. All rights reserved. Soner Cagaptay Further, analysis of the HDP suggests the party ish nationalism. While both parties stand for strict made large gains by promoting a decidedly liberal separation of religion and government, only the CHP message in place of its erstwhile exclusive empha- makes this issue a key part of its election platform. sis on Kurdish nationalism. This speaks well for the Given the ideological proximity between the two future of liberal thought in Turkish politics. Still, the right-wing parties, voters on the right have tradition- HDP itself remains a small party, and having violent ally shifted their allegiance between the MHP and Kurdish nationalists among its ranks could prevent it the AKP—and, before the AKP was established in from winning broader support. A stronger challenge 2002, between the AKP’s predecessors, the Refah to Erdogan could come from the left if the HDP and (Welfare) Party and Fazilet (Virtue) Party. Voters on CHP united around a committedly liberal platform. the left have been less inclined to switch from one Erdogan was sworn in as president on August 28. party to another due to the more pronounced differ- Although Article 101 of the Turkish constitution ences between the CHP and HDP and its predeces- stipulates that the president cannot have a party sors, including the BDP. affiliation, it is an open secret that Erdogan will seek At the same time, traditionally speaking, Turkish to control the AKP from the presidential palace by voters have shied away from crossing the hard wall appointing a prime minister and party head who will between left and right. The CHP and MHP’s place- report to him.2 ment of a joint candidate for this presidential elec- In the near term, all indications point to Erdogan’s tion, therefore, can be considered an unconventional continued quest for widespread influence. Studying strategy, aimed at bringing together left- and right- his election tactics will help shed light on his party’s leaning voters behind the same candidate. With future prospects as well as those of his opponents. his centrist political pedigree, Ihsanoglu, a secular scholar from a conservative family, appealed to many Left vs. Right in Turkey MHP and CHP voters. But he appears to have ulti- Excluding thirty-three months under the premiership mately failed to attract the full support of these par- of Bulent Ecevit ( January to November 1974, June to ties’ bases. Erdogan took advantage of weaknesses in July 1977, and January 1978 to November 1979) and this strategy to peel votes away from the MHP, and discounting left-right coalition governments, the away from Ihsanoglu. political right has held power since Turkey became How Erdogan Built His a multiparty democracy in 1950. Typically, parties Right-Wing Majority on the right receive 50–60 percent of the vote, with leftist parties gaining 30–40 percent. A leftist party On August 10, three candidates competed in Tur- crossed the 40 percent threshold only in 1973 and 1977, key’s presidential vote. Although the candidates when the CHP, under Ecevit’s charismatic leadership, technically ran on their names, not on party lists, successfully challenged right-wing dominance in the Erdogan was effectively the AKP candidate, Ihs- country. In many other years, by comparison, such as anoglu ran for the CHP/MHP, and Demirtas ran the 1999 and 2002 elections, the collective right-wing for the HDP. In this study, the March 30 election tally has crossed 60 percent; in the latter case, it bal- results were used to gauge party popularity; when looned to 69 percent. correlated with the August 10 results, this allowed In the Turkish political context, the AKP and for an estimate of party/candidate choices in the lat- MHP are similarly conservative and nationalist ter contest. movements, with the AKP having an Islamist pedi- On March 30, the four main Turkish parties col- gree and the MHP being more nationalist. On the lectively received 91.18 percent of the vote. Other left, the CHP and HDP have more visible political than these four parties, only the Islamist SP and differences. The CHP has a Turkish nationalist stance, BBP and the leftist HDP received more than 1 while the HDP is strongly identified with Kurd- percent, reaching 2.77 percent, 1.58 percent, and 2 RESEARCH NOTE 23 Revealing Trends in Turkey’s Presidential Election 1.97 percent, respectively. The remaining balance RP too have witnessed voter migration to the AKP or went to sixteen minor parties. This analysis will con- MHP and back in recent decades. sider voter shifts among the four main parties and On August 10, Erdogan likely received an over- also the direction of the SP and BBP votes, account- whelming majority of the 1,243,045 votes cast for the ing for more than 97.5 percent of the Turkish elec- SP in the March election. Getting these SP votes was torate as of the March election, to explain Erdogan’s an easy task. Even without the official endorsement winning August 10 majority. of party leaders, Erdogan’s RP roots likely helped him Whereas Erdogan received 21 million votes in win support from these voters. the presidential poll, 1.6 million more than his par- Although the SP does not figure largely in the ty’s March tally, the collective CHP/MHP count national picture, or dominate in any of Turkey’s 3 dropped from 19.4 million in March to Ihsano- eighty-one provinces, the party has a strong presence glu’s 15.5 million in August. Demirtas, for his part, in some of the country’s 957 subprovincial districts, received 3.9 million votes in August, compared to mostly in the Zaza Kurdish areas of the southeast his party’s 2.9 million in March, when it ran along- electoral region (see map, p. 4). Turkey’s Zaza Kurds side the BDP. live predominantly in mixed Alevi-Sunni areas and Voter turnout on August 10—excluding overseas tilt more toward right-wing and Islamist parties Turks, who were allowed to vote for the first time than do Kurmanji Kurds, who live mainly in exclu- in Sunday’s polls in their country of residence—was sively Sunni areas. 77.05 percent (or 40.5 million voters), 12.25 percent Analyzing SP, AKP, and other parties’ votes in dis- lower than in March (when 44.9 million ballots tricts where the SP performed well helps demonstrate were cast).