by Burak Bekdil
Four decades after emerging as marginal parties in the 1970s, Turkey’s militant Islamists and militant ultranationalists won a combined 53.6% of the national vote and 57% of parliamentary seats.
Screen capture of Recep Tayyip Erdogan from YouTube video
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 878, June 29, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Four decades after they
emerged as marginal parties in the 1970s, Turkey’s militant Islamists
and ultranationalists won a combined 53.6% of the national vote and 57%
of parliamentary seats. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
has said in the past that he would make foreign policy “in line with
what my nation demands,” highlighting the Islamist sensitivities of his
voter base. He will now add nationalist sensitivities to that foreign
policy calculus. This will likely mean confrontations with nations both
inside and outside Turkey’s region.
Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections
on June 24 sent messages on many wavelengths. The voters asserted the
unchallenged popularity of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is the
longest-serving Turkish leader since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder
of modern Turkey. They welcomed an infant center-right party, IYI
(“good” in Turkish); recognized the country’s Kurds as a legitimate
political force; and gave a cautious nod to an emerging social democrat
politician, Muharrem Ince, Erdoğan’s closest presidential rival.
More strategically, Election 2018 marked the
official birth of an Islamist-nationalist alliance that will recalibrate
Turkey’s foreign policy calculus in line with the strong wave of
religious/nativist nationalism that brought this alliance to power.
In power since November 2002, Erdoğan easily won
the presidential race with 53.6% of the national vote in the first round
(any number beyond the 50% mark would have sufficed). But his ruling
Justice and Development Party (AKP) won only 42.5% of the parliamentary
vote, down seven percentage points from its result in the elections of
November 2015. The AKP won 293 seats in Turkey’s 600-seat house, falling
short of a simple majority of 301.
Had this been just another parliamentary election,
the AKP would be unable to form a single-party government. But
legislative changes that followed the April 2017 referendum now allow
political parties to enter the parliamentary race in alliance with other
parties. Erdoğan chose as his ally the Nationalist Movement Party
(MHP), which has its ideological roots in the militantly
ultranationalist, pan-Turkic ideology of the 1970s. On June 24 the MHP
won 11.1% of the national vote and 50 seats, bringing up the “allied”
(i.e., the governing) seats to 343 – which gives the AKP-MHP alliance a
comfortable parliamentary majority.
Four decades after emerging as marginal parties in
the 1970s, Turkey’s militant Islamists and militant ultranationalists
won a combined 53.6% of the national vote and 57% of parliamentary
seats. Erdoğan has said in the past that he would put foreign policy “in
line with what my nation demands,” highlighting the Islamist
sensitivities of his voter base. He will now be adding nationalist
sensitivities to that foreign policy calculus. This is likely to mean
confrontations, perhaps bold ones, with several nations both inside and
outside Turkey’s region.
Turkey’s new ruling ideology will, first of all,
make it practically impossible to return to the negotiating table for
peace with the Kurds. That is an MHP red line that Erdoğan will prefer
not to cross. MHP’s militaristic posture will also boost Ankara’s desire
to show more muscle in Kurdish-related disputes in northern Syria and
northern Iraq. (MHP’s only solution to the Kurdish dispute is military
might.)
Turkey’s decades-long, obsessive foreign policy
goals include making Jerusalem the capital of the Palestinian state,
asserting an ideological kinship with Hamas, stoking sectarian
hostilities against Syrian President Bashar Assad, and making threats
about drilling off the shores of the divided island of Cyprus. To these
will probably be added an “Uighur cause,” a subject about which the MHP
is particularly sensitive.
The AKP’s election manifesto stated an intention
to “overcome problems and improve bilateral relations with the United
States.” But the manifesto also said Turkey would make an effort to
“improve bilateral relations with Russia.” It said, “We will continue
our close coordination with Russia on regional subjects, especially on
Syria.”
In practice, Erdogan’s balancing act between
Russia and the US resembles Brazilian dictator Getulio Vargas’s
“pendulum policy” during WWII. Vargas offered support to Hitler and
Mussolini at times, but ended up siding with the Allies.
MHP’s involvement in government policy will be totally irrelevant when it comes to operating the modern-day Turkish pendulum.
Erdoğan’s relations with the US are ideologically hostile but de facto
transactional. They will remain so. His relations with Russia are
largely transactional and will probably gain further ground, politically
as well as militarily, as the discrepancy between Turkish and western
democratic cultures widens. Erdoğan ideologically belong to the
strongmen’s club.
As Turkey’s gross democratic deficit, largely
created under Erdoğan’s governance, is blended with MHP’s notoriously
isolationist, xenophobic ideology, Turkey’s theoretical goal of
accession into the European Union (EU) will gradually become null and
void. Erdoğan will soon announce plans to shut down the ministry dealing
with accession negotiations with the EU and turn it into “a department
of the Foreign Ministry.” This should not surprise anyone.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/turkey-islamist-nationalist/
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