Erdogan’s Party in Turkey Regains Parliamentary Majority

[frigidmagi]

NYTimes

In a stunning electoral comeback, the Islamist party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regained its majority in Parliament on Sunday, ensuring Mr. Erdogan’s continued dominance of Turkish politics after months of political turmoil and violence.

The result will permit Mr. Erdogan to maintain his position as the country’s pre-eminent political figure while pushing the boundaries of the constitutional limits of the presidency, a largely ceremonial position.

With 99 percent of the votes counted, according to the state broadcaster TRT, the Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., captured 49.3 percent of the popular vote, giving it a solid majority of 316 seats in Parliament.

The victory for the A.K.P. came at great cost to the cohesion of Turkish society. Critics say Mr. Erdogan’s divisive rhetoric, by denigrating opponents as terrorists or traitors, helped polarize the country. And a government crackdown on dissent in the lead-up to the vote, with mobs attacking newspaper offices and a recent raid on a media conglomerate opposed to the government, raised concerns abroad about Turkey’s commitment to democracy

The outcome was also a spectacular upset given that most polls had predicted a result similar to June’s national election, which had denied the A.K.P. a parliamentary majority for the first time in more than a decade.

The victory seemed to validate Mr. Erdogan’s electoral strategy of turning more nationalist, and taking a harder line with Kurdish militants in the southeast, where a long-running war resumed in recent months. Much of the party’s gains seemed to come at the expense of the far-right nationalist party, as voters switched to the A.K.P.

“The gamble has seemed to work,” said Suat Kiniklioglu, the executive director of the Center for Strategic Communication, a research organization in Ankara. Mr. Kiniklioglu, a former lawmaker in Mr. Erdogan’s party who has become a sharp critic of his policies, said, “It’s a huge success for the A.K.P.”

The election, a reprise of June’s vote, which failed to produce a coalition government after weeks of talks, came after six months of violence and political instability. Nigar Goksel, the Turkey analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the voting reflected “the yearning for stability and the end to this limbo.”

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who led the campaign for the A.K.P., wrote in a short tweet, “Elhamdulillah,” or “praise be to God.”

As Mr. Davutoglu departed his hometown, Konya, on Sunday for Ankara, where he was planning a victory speech, he told a crowd of supporters, “this is the victory of our nation. May God be pleased with you for siding with us at the most difficult times.”

The election results will return the country to single-party rule, and thus achieve a measure of stability by foreclosing the possibility of a fractious coalition, but it is unlikely to unite what has become a deeply polarized country, with roughly half of the population opposed to Mr. Erdogan and his party.

The vote, though close, also affirmed the political rise of Turkey’s long-oppressed Kurds: once again the Kurdish-dominated Peoples’ Republic Party, or H.D.P., surpassed a 10 percent legal threshold to enter Parliament. But the H.D.P. saw its vote decline, from about 13 percent in June to just a little over 10 percent on Sunday, as some religious Kurds seemed to switch to the A.K.P.

The celebrations this time were tempered, though, partly because of the loss of votes and partly by the continuing war between the Turkish state and the militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.

H.D.P. officials said there would be no celebrations in honor of those who died in a huge terrorist attack recently in Ankara that killed mostly Kurds.

And in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish-majority city in Turkey, there were street protests as Kurds angry about the vote losses clashed with the police, who fired tear gas at the crowd, according to Reuters.

In recent months, Turks have felt whipsawed, as they’ve watched their country come to resemble the chaotic countries of the Middle East more than the model of Islamic democracy that many Turks thought their country to be.

A decades-long war with Kurdish militants in the southeast resumed, killing hundreds. Two large-scale terrorist attacks blamed on the Islamic State, including the one in Ankara, the capital, killed more than a hundred people. A once-booming economy, perhaps Mr. Erdogan’s signature accomplishment, faltered, as did the Turkish lira, as investors fretted over the country’s future.

In seeking a comeback at the polls, Mr. Erdogan, who as president is supposed to be above partisan politics, and Mr. Davutoglu, the official head of the party, pushed a simple message: Invoking fears of the 1990s, a decade defined by shaky coalition governments and violence, they said a vote for them was a vote for stability.

Casting his vote Sunday in Uskudar, a conservative district on the Asian side of Istanbul where he owns a home, Mr. Erdogan said, “I hope our nation makes its choice for stability. We must all respect the result of the national will.”

For Mr. Erdogan’s core constituency of religious conservatives, and apparently many more this time around at polls, the message resonated.

“I will vote for the A.K.P. because in this environment of chaos we need a strong government,” said Bertan Aydin, a 28-year-old student and tax driver in Istanbul, just before voting on Sunday. “Coalition governments don’t work. They will only drag us backward.”

Voter turnout was high — more than 85 percent cast ballots — despite Election Day coming at the end of a four-day holiday for Turkey’s Republic Day.