The AKP: Turkey and Islamic Politics

The victory of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey’s elections was even more sweeping than the polls had indicated (in part because of Turkey’s electoral system, under which 45% of voters voted for parties which did not enter Parliament, to be discussed below.) The AKP’s victory, which makes it the first party in recent years to be able to govern without coalition partners, means that Turkey may indeed have a viable government quickly, but one that is untested, and one likely to be watched with great apprehension by the powerful Turkish military, which forced an ancestor of the AKP, Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party, to leave government in 1997.

There are many ironies involved. The AKP’s roots are Islamist, but unlike Welfare under Erbakan, it is publicly committed to pushing for membership in the European Union, and the prospects for joining Europe also help protect the AKP against possible military intervention, since that would likely be a mortal blow to the EU application. Yet another irony is that there have been attempts to ban the AKP, and these may go forward despite the overwhelming victory. Still another irony, of course, is the fact that the party’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Profile in The Estimate of October 4, 2002), is not a member of Parliament, having been barred on account of a previous conviction for reading a poem by the famous Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp which was interpreted as a criticism of the military. So the charismatic former Mayor of Istanbul, the man who built the party and gave it credibility after splitting with the more conventionally Islamist remnants of the old Welfare and Virtue Parties, will not be its Prime Minister unless legal rulings change at some point.

It is important, however, not to overreact. The AKP’s victory occurred in a distinctly Turkish context, and has little relevance to pack journalism which sees a “wave of Islamist victories” in Pakistan, in Morocco, in Bahrain, and in Turkey. Each of those elections was different, each of the Islamist movements involved was quite different, and of the four, only one — the MMA successes in Pakistan — reflected an anti-Western, radical Islamist stance.

This Dossier seeks to look at the AKP and its victory.

Many countries have sought to discourage the proliferation of minor parties by imposing a cutoff point, a percentage of the total vote below which a party is not permitted to win seats in Parliament. These can range from very small numbers (long 1% in Israel, 2% in some smaller European countries, 5% in Germany) to the rather high hurdle of 10% in Turkey. That high hurdle worked this time: only two parties won seats in Parliament, the AKP and the secularist Revolutionary People’s Party (CHP), the heir of Kemal Atatürk’s onetime sole party. Ironically, comparisons with the last election are of little help since the AKP did not exist last time, and the CHP did not win 10% of the vote. All three of the parties which shared the last government — the Democratic Left Party (DSP) of Bülent Ecevit, the Motherland (ANAP) Party of Mesut Yilmaz and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) of Devlet Bahçeli — all failed to make the 10% cutoff. So did another veteran party of the center, Tansu Çiller’s True Path Party (DYP).

In terms of providing a strong government that does not need to form a coalition, the 10% cutoff point may have worked well. But in terms of representative democracy, it has major flaws in this case. Based on provisional final returns, the AKP won 34.2% of the vote overall, and the CHP 19.4%, giving them 362 and 180 seats respectively. (Independents won eight seats.) But that means that the two winning parties accounted for only 53.6% of the votes cast. More than 46% of the votes cast went to parties that will not be represented in Parliament at all.

A clear example of this is what happened in southeastern Anatolia. A new party blending several former Kurdish-oriented movements, the Democratic People’s Party (DEHAP), strongly supportive of greater Kurdish rights working within the Turkish state, won overwhelmingly in many parts of the southeast. But its local landslides became meaningless because of the fact that it received only 6.2% nationwide. Most of the seats in the region went to the AKP instead, as the party that polled better of the two which were allowed into Parliament, but the AKP did not receive most of the votes of the people of the region.

Defenders of the system would say that it worked in the case of DEHAP: it blocked a regional party which Kemalists suspect of harboring ambitions of Kurdish autonomy, despite its denials. It therefore discouraged a regional fragmentation in Turkey. But it also means that most of the votes in the southeast were wasted.

The Genealogy of the AKP
The AKP has presented itself consistently and credibly as a new type of Islamic-oriented party. It insists that it is committed to the secularism of the Turkish state, merely opposed to the petty excxlusion of religious symbolism from public life, such as the ban on women wearing headscarves in state-owned buildings (which includes universities). It insists that it is Islamic in the same sense that Christian Democratic parties in Western Europe are Christian.

The secularist parties and the omnipresent but offstage presence of the military as the guardian of Kemalism and secularism are skeptical in part because of the legacy of the party, which is a direct descendant (though not an identical clone) of Necmettin Erbakan’s various movements.

Longtime readers of The Estimate will be aware of much of that history, which was the subject of a number of Dossiers in 1996, when Erbakan was Prime Minister, and 1997, when he stepped down after the military forced coalition partner Tansu Çiller to break the coalition.

Erbakan was a rather different type of politician than the man who was once his protegé, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Originally entering political life by founding the Islamist National Order Party in 1970, that party lasted only till 1971, when the Constitutional Court declared it anti-secularist and banned it. Erbakan exiled himself for a while in Switzerland, but in 1972 returned to lead a new incarnation of the party, as the National Salvation Party, In the 1973 elections, the party won 11.8% of the vote and entered Parliament. In 1974-1977 it served in three coalition governments with Erbakan as Deputy Prime Minister.

When the military seized power in 1980, all political parties were abolished and their leaders banned from politics. Erbakan and 21 other party officials were imprisoned for a year, but subsequently acquitted on charges of anti-secularism.

In 1983, though Erbakan remained banned from politics as a leader of a pre-1980 party, his followers founded the new Welfare (Refah) Party, known as RP for its Turkish acronym. When the ban on former party leaders was lifted in 1987, Erbakan again became the head of the party.

In 1994, the RP swept to victory in many of Turkey’s major cities. Recep Tayyip Erdogan became Mayor of Istanbul. In December of 1995, Welfare won 21% of the popular vote and became the largest party in Parliament. For months, the secularist parties struggled to put together a coalition without the RP, but failed: the personal rivalry between Mesut Yilmaz and Tansu Çiller kept the two big centrist parties, ANAP and the DYP, from working together, though ideologically they are virtually identical. Ironically, though ANAP has a religious wing, it was the DYP which ultimately formed a coalition with Erbakan and Welfare in June of 1996. Erbakan served a period as Prime Minister in rotation with Çiller, but in 1997 the military, using what is sometimes called a “soft coup” or “silent coup”, pressured Çiller to break the coalition. The following year, 1998, the courts banned the Welfare Party. Erbakan was banned from politics.

The parliamentary deputies from Welfare were for the most part still in place; it was their party, not their seats, which had been abolished, though some of them were also barred for personal activities. The remnant formed a new party, the Virtue (Fazilet) Party, known as FP in its Turkish acronym.

In the 1999 elections, Virtue received 15.4% of the vote, becoming the third largest party in Parliament. The stunning aspect of the 1999 elections was the strong performance of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), a right-wing, nationalist (its critics have sometimes said crypto-fascist) party, which had long been considered a fringe movement. Thus two of the main victors in 1999 were parties outside the centrist mainstream of Turkish politics.

The secularist response was the usual one: court cases were launched to ban the Virtue Party, and pressure was brought on prominent FP politicians. Erdogan, the Mayor of Istanbul, had quoted in a speech from the nationalist poet Ziya Gökalp which included the lines “Minarets are bayonets, domes helmets...” This was interpreted as a veiled criticism of the military and promotion of Islam; Erdogan convicted of “inciting hatred” by “distinguishing between people” on account of religion. Although he served only a few months in prison, the conviction itself was enough to bar him from running for Parliament.

In June of 2001, the courts banned the Virtue Party. At each previous banning of the party, it reconstituted itself under a new name: National Order, National Salvation, Welfare, Virtue. But this time there was a split between the more conservative Islamists, led by Recai Kutan, and the more pragmatic wing of the party, led by Erdogan and Abdullah Gul (one of the likeliest candidates to be the Prime Minister under AKP since Erdogan cannot serve). The latter formed the Justice and Development Party, AKP, while Kutan and the more conservative Islamists formed the Saadet (Contentment) Party, which won only 2.5% of the vote in the 2002 elections. Erdogan set out to make the AKP something other than just another incarnation of its predecessors: for one thing, even before the party split, he had split with Necmettin Erbakan, who despite the ban on his running for office remains the eminence grise of Saadet.

Though the AKP has led throughout the current campaign, that has not made it immune to pressure. Just last month, the Chief Prosecutor sought to ban the AKP on the grounds that its party leader, Erdogan, is barred from politics. The courts held that case in abeyance because of the elections. Erdogan has also sought to use the potential admission of Turkey to Europe as a means of regaining his right to run for office, but for the moment, despite the AKP’s solid victory, he is going to have to watch from the wings while his colleagues form the government.

Two things make a coup, or even a “soft coup” like that of 1997, unlikely at this juncture. For one thing, Turkey’s hopes to join Europe would be fatally set back if the military moved, even as subtly as it did in 1997. For another, the solid majority of the AKP in Parliament makes it politically impractical. And finally, the AKP is seeking to position itself as a very modeate, pro-Western party, though it is less likely to support a US operation against Iraq or to be enthusiastic about the strategic alliance between Turkey and Israel (largely a creation of the military anyway) than the secular parties might. (On potential implications for an Iraqi operation, See the Lead Story.)

The AKP in its Turkish Context
There has been a natural response in the West to what headline-writers have naturally enough been tempted to call an “Islamist victory in secular Turkey”; but the AKP is a particularly Turkish phenomenon, and the degree of “Islamist” commitment among its supporters probably varies considerably.

Although it may be premature to overanalyze the results, one reason that the CHP, or Republican People’s Party, was the only other party to win seats is almost certainly because that was the party that former Finance Minister Kemal Dervis (Profile in The Esitmate of August 16, 2002) eventually chose to join after the Democratic Left Party splintered. The two parties that won seats were thus the party least identified with the economic crisis of the past two years, the AKP, and the party which included the one man many in the establishment felt could solve it, the CHP.

Economic frustration was also, certainly, combined with what an American would call a “throw the bums out” mentality: a disgust with the centrist, secularist establishment parties’ constant bickering and inability to master the economic crisis or deliver on promises.

That is not to say that there was no Islamist sympathy involved. Turkey is still an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and outside the elites, substantial numbers of Turks are mosque-going, practicing Muslims. With the exception of the late President Türgut Özal, and Erbakan when he was Prime Minister, Turkish leaders usually do not publicly attend religious events or otherwise acknowledge the role of Islam in the lives of most Turks. This is a far cry from the public, if essentially civic and ceremonial, religious practice of most American leaders. The ban on headscarves and other indications of Islamic practice is seen as extreme by many Turks. The fact that Erdogan’s wife wears a headscarf makes many in the establishment uncomfortable, but echoes with a great many more traditional Turks.

But this is a far cry from, say, the MMA in Pakistan, which recently won in North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan (See the Last Issue). The MMA is a genuinely radical Islamist movement with an anti-Western and at least some degree jihadi ideology. The AKP is virtually the opposite: It does not seek to impose the headscarf; it seeks to remove the ban on headscarves.

In the Turkish context, an Islamist party is one which acknowledges that Islam plays a role in the lives of most Turks. The AKP insists, and so far its leaders seem to mean, that it has no intention of reversing the secularist system (officially, “laicism”, Atatürk having borrowed the term from the French), but merely moderating the extreme restrictions on Islamic symbols.

It must be remembered that Atatürk, in the atmosphere of 1920s and 1930s Europe, sought to impose secularism through authoritarian decree. He shifted the alphabet from the Arabic to the Roman, changed the day off from Friday to Sunday, banned the Fez and other traditional headgear (the average Turkish farmer today looks more like a French farmer of the 1920s, in his cap, than French farmers do), and even tried to change the call to prayer from Arabic to Turkish (though this was eventually rescinded). The traditional Sufi orders, a major part of Ottoman society, were banned, and still are. This sort of radical societal change from the top did indeed make Turkey superficially somewhat European and secular; but it did not change the basic attitudes of the Turkish populace. The AKP and its Islamist predecessors may include a few who want to impose shari‘a and create an Islamic state, but the evidence suggest most of their voters just want to acknowledge the role of religion in public life, as is often done even in European societies with fewer churchgoers than Turkey has mosque-goers.

And again, of course, the AKP won only 34.2% of the vote, even if it ended up with 80.4% of the seats in Parliament. That was a quirk of the 10% rule, which, as noted earlier in this Dossier, essentially rendered 46% of the votes cast by voters irrelevant.

It is particularly important, in this context, not to confuse the impulses (and electoral quirks) behind the AKP success with other Islamist developments elsewhere. In Bahrain’s elections, analyzed on Page Three, Islamist groups won a large bloc of seats, but these groups are divided between Sunni and Shi‘ite, and represent several different degrees of Islamism within each category. Nor should the success of the Party for Justice and Democracy (PJD) in Morocco, which ran third in September, and the MMA successes in Pakistan all be lumped together as a “wave of Islamist victories at the polls”. In fact, the PJD is itself a mix of parties, and while its Islamist elements did no doubt win it votes, it still ran behind both the Socialists and the old-guard nationalist Istiqlal. The elections in Morocco and Turkey had little, if anything to do with attitudes towards America and the West. In Bahrain there was, apparently, some anti-Americanism involved in the results (but then the country is headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet); the only one of these recent “Islamist” electoral successes that can be directly related to the US War on Terrorism and/or intentions in Iraq was that of the MMA in Pakistan. The distinctions are real and important.

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