Turkey’s president sweeps the board and assumes greater powers

“ONE nation, one flag, one homeland and one state,” Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, often calls out at the end of his speeches, urging his supporters to chant back each word. As of today, his mantra might as well include a new phrase: one man.

Mr Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AK) party, plus their nationalist allies, scored a double knockout in Turkey’s elections on June 24th, an outcome that gives the strongman sweeping new powers over all branches of government. In the presidential contest, Mr Erdogan defeated the main opposition hopeful, Muharrem Ince, taking about 52.6% of the vote compared with Mr Ince’s 30.7%. That obviated the need for a run-off second round. The remaining opposition candidates, an imprisoned Kurdish leader, Selahattin Demirtas, and the founder of the conservative Iyi party, Meral Aksener, received just 8.4% and 7.3% of the vote, respectively.

In the parliamentary vote held at the same time, AK and its coalition partner, the hardline Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), won a combined 53.6%, enough to ensure a comfortable majority of 344 seats (out of 600) in the assembly. The opposition alliance, led by Mr Ince’s CHP and the Iyi party, won just 189 seats with a combined 33.9% of the vote. Mr Demirtas’s HDP won 11.7%, just above the electoral threshold of 10%, enough to send 67 of its members to parliament.

Mr Ince, who had run a pugnacious, entertaining campaign, capped by a huge rally in Istanbul, finished on a surprisingly feeble note. The CHP candidate declined to make a personal appearance and ended up conceding the election to Mr Erdogan on WhatsApp, a messaging service. “The man won,” he wrote, referring to Mr Erdogan, according to a journalist who read out his text message on live television after midnight. “Of course, the race was not fair, but he won.” The opposition seems to be accepting the election as free, though not as fair, given the ruling party’s monopoly of the airwaves.

The biggest surprise, aside from the margin of Mr Erdogan’s victory, was a surge by the MHP, his new coalition partner, in the parliamentary elections. Written off by most analysts, the MHP took 11.1% of the vote, about twice as much as most polls had predicted, which translates into 49 seats. The result makes the ultranationalists and their septuagenarian leader, Devlet Bahceli, even more indispensable to AK, which won only 295 seats, five short of an outright majority. “Erdogan got his presidency, so he must feel very good, but he’s now beholden to Bahceli in parliament,” said Soli Ozel, a veteran commentator.

In a pair of victory speeches, Mr Erdogan lurched from offers of dialogue to displays of belligerence. “It is time to put the tension of the elections behind us and to focus our sights on the future,” he said at his waterfront residence in Istanbul. Hours later, speaking from the balcony of his party’s headquarters in Ankara, cheered on by thousands of supporters below, he suggested a connection between the opposition, expat voters in America and a violent coup attempt that rocked Turkey two summers ago. “Where did they flee?” he asked, referring to the coup plotters. “America. And now I look at the poll results in America, the main opposition got a lot of votes there.”

With both the presidency and parliament in hand, Mr Erdogan will benefit from the constitutional amendments he pushed through in a controversial 2017 referendum, and which now go into effect. The changes will transform Turkey from a parliamentary democracy into a presidential system, abolishing the post of prime minister, handing Mr Erdogan complete control over the executive and allowing him and his allies to pack the judiciary with political appointees. An opposition victory in parliament, the only possible check on the president’s powers under the new system, could have had a moderating effect on Mr Erdogan. As it stands, the assembly is once again in the hands of AK, a party of yes-men, and the MHP, which expects the president to back its far-right agenda. Mr Bahceli has previously made it clear that he opposes any new overtures towards the Kurds, prefers to extend the state of emergency imposed after the coup, and wants Mr Demirtas to stay behind bars. (The HDP leader has been under arrest since 2016 on vague terror charges.)

Mr Erdogan might in fact end the state of emergency, as he promised to do in the last days of his campaign. But there is little reason to think he will stop hounding opponents, including the tens of thousands arrested since the 2016 coup attempt, muzzling the press or picking fights with the West. The opposition’s failure to take control of parliament removes what might have been a brake on any of that. “He’s not authoritarian because he is crazy, but because he is rational,” says Soner Cagaptay, the author of a recent book about Mr Erdogan. “Down the line, it’s the only way for him to avoid losing power.”

Dig deeper

Turkey’s president deserves to lose on June 24th (June 21st 2018)
Turkey’s President Erdogan may yet be defeated (June 21st 2018)