Turkish election results are stunning, not so much for the clear victory of a moderate Islamic party, as for the unequivocal rejection by the voters of the crop of bickering politicians, who have failed so spectacularly to steer their country for the last twenty years.
Just two parties, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) of Kemal Dervis, (the finance minister whose resignation led to the collapse of the failing Ecevit coalition), have passed the ten percent threshold to secure parliamentary seats. Also wiped out are nine other parties, including the once-dominant Motherland (Anap) and True Path (Doru Yol) parties, whose leaders, Mesult Yilmaz and Tansu Ciller have both promptly quit politics.
On the face of it, Turkey now has its first strongly-mandated government since 1983, when Turgut Ozal’s Anap won overwhelming support after the military ended their third intervention in Turkish politics since the republic’s founding in 1923. Ozal unleashed a wave of economic reforms but lacked the political will to decimate the state’s overwhelming and hugely costly presence in the productive economy. No subsequent government ever had the clear majority, let alone the determination, to pick up that ball so tragically and short-sightedly dropped by the Ozal administration. The deadly result was structural inflation which seized-up the banking system, destroyed investment and left all governments spiraling ever-deeper into debt.
There is however a big difference from 19 years ago; confidence. Ozal’s reforms unleashed the pent-up economic energy of a country which had long locked itself away from the outside commercial world, whose biggest exports were hazelnuts. Today Turks are far from confident. They are cynical and weary and many of them have become distinctly poorer in the free market society. They ache for leaders who can be trusted to put their country and not political and sometimes financial interests first.
Erdogan is no political novice. A former mayor of Istanbul for an earlier and banned incarnation of the AKP, his administration was notable for its competence and lack of corruption. If track record alone were enough, he fits the bill. Unfortunately it is not. Though in the hustings, Erdogan accepted the stringent terms of the latest IMF $16 billion bailout following the 2000-2001 banking crisis, has committed himself to Turkey’s secular constitution and has reversed the long-standing rejection by Islamic parties of EU membership, he remains an object of deep suspicion for Turkey’s military, who remain powerfully behind the scenes. Indeed, thanks to a military-inspired prosecution, Erdogan was convicted in 1998 of inciting religious hatred and is thus constitutionally barred from holding any public office. It must be hoped that lawyers working under human rights legislation, recently accepted by Turkey, will be able to overturn this ban. It is not only unjust but, if upheld, will represent an extremely dangerous rejection of a ground swell of popular opinion.
Turkey’s new government should be given a clean and unencumbered start, because it has serious political as well as economic issues to address. The question of the US use of Turkish bases for an attack on Iraq may be one of the earliest. The new government also has a unique opportunity to bring peace at last to the Kurds in the east of the country. Oddly, although there are 12 million Kurdish voters, the three-party alliance of pro-Kurd politicians failed to gain any MPs. Erdogan will be wise to ensure that the Kurds do not feel disenfranchised and unrepresented in the new Parliament.
The confidence that greeted the 1983 Ozal victory has, with Erdogan’s outstanding success, been replaced by a fervent hope. Turks want leaders who will empty out the corrupt soup that Turkish politics has become and act with justice and honesty. If they can trust their government, they may even accept the substantial pain of closing down unproductive government industries, which have long been such a powerful source of political patronage at the tax-payers expense.
