Voters are concerned about persistent high unemployment even as the economy booms and they place concerns about terrorism as their No. 2 priority. But when politicians and analysts count the tallies, foremost of their minds will be whether the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has captured a big enough parliamentary majority to ram through an overhaul of the country’s constitution.
“Constitutional reform is the real issue for this election because it has the potential of improving quality of democracy in Turkey. It means altering balance of power,” Birol Baskan, assistant professor of government at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Doha, told The Media Line. “But it’s more an inter-elite issue rather than an issue for ordinary people.”
Presiding over a booming economy as well as encouraging Islamic practice in a country where secularism has been national policy for more than eight decades, the AKP is making a virtually guaranteed bid for a third term. More controversially, the party and its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have sought to shift Turkey’s orientation away from the West and more towards its neighbors in the Middle East.
The final opinion polls before a pre-election ban went into effect nearly all show the AKP winning close to 50 percent of the vote. That would put it more than 20 percentage points ahead of its chief rival, the secularist, left-of-center People’s Republican Party (CHP). Behind them, are a host of small factions whose success could determine whether AKP can get an amendment-friendly parliament.
They include the Nationalist Movement Party, which is likely to exceed the 10 percent threshold required to win seats even though it was shaken by the release of videos showing some of its candidates engaged in extramarital sex. The Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, running a slate of independent candidates to get around the 10 percent threshold imposed on parties, will also be represented in parliament.
That unusually high threshold to get into parliament virtually ensures that the AKP will have a large majority in the 550 parliament. The question is whether it will be a majority in excess of 367 seats or 330 seats. The wider majority would enable the party to pass constitutional amendments solely by parliamentary vote, while the narrower one would force it to put them to the public as a referendum.
“Today they have 336 seats, and they want to repeat that performance,” Sinan Ulgen, director of the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM) think tank, told The Media Line. “They have a fighting chance. It can’t be ruled out. But they would need to reach a vote of 47 or 48 percent.”
Outside of Turkey, the AKP is mostly associated with what is often called its mildly Islamic agenda aimed at paring away at the official secularism imposed by modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s.
But Ulgen, who is also a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels, said the AKP is playing down Islamic politics in the current election. The CHP, which in previous elections played foil by campaigning on fears of creeping Islamization in Turkey, is also avoiding the subject this time around.
“In the past, they [the AKP] campaigned very heavily on this issue, but it didn't help them to increase their share of the vote,” said Ulgen. “They’ve rebranded the party. It doesn’t mean the AKP doesn’t care about the issue, but they have adjusted their electoral rhetoric.”
For most Turks, the party’s popularity lies mainly in the country’s economic success story. Turkey bypassed the last global recession, and gross domestic product jumped 8.9 percent in 2010. Per capita income grew from less than $3,000 before the AKP came to power in 2002 to $10,000 last year. That stellar performance hasn’t been without blemishes — Turkey’s current account deficit is ballooning and some economists are worried that the economy is overheating — but analysts said voters aren’t yet concerned with those problems because they haven’t affected them personally.
A poll taken Pew Global Attitude Project showed Turks are more satisfied with the general direction of their country than anytime in the past nine years, although the 48 percent reporting they are “satisfied” are slightly outnumbered by the 49 percent who are dissatisfied.
The one economic issue that has gained some traction is the country’s high level of unemployment, which stood at 11.5% in the first quarter and is likely to rise higher.
“When you look at platforms of the parties, compared to previous elections they've put a lot of emphasis on social programs,” said Ulgen “It’s not so much about growth but about the distribution of growth.”
Analysts mostly agreed that a third AKP term is unlikely to produce any major changes in Turkish foreign or other policy. Rather, Erdogan will focus his efforts on what is likely to be a bruising battle over constitutional reform, said Wolfango Piccoli, a director with Eurasia Group in Europe.
“Politics in Turkey after the June election will almost instantly focus on the constitutional referendum and take the government's focus away from pressing economic issues and its efforts to boost the country's international profile,” Piccoli wrote in Foreign Policy last month.
While probably most Turks agree that the 1982 document, written by the military after staging a coup, needs an overhaul to make it more democratic, amendments enhancing Kurdish and other minority rights and the introduction of a presidential system will likely raise opposition hackles.
