Turkey elections: Defeat would not be the end of President Erdogan

The canny – and politically brutal – leader for the past 13 years faces a divided opposition

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on a campaign banner (Reuters)

I asked a friend, long resident in Turkey, if he thought that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan might be more conciliatory towards his enemies and more moderate in his pursuit of power after the parliamentary election. The friend laughed at my naivety. “Do you imagine that Dracula ever thinks he has enough blood?” he asked derisively. “Do rich men ever feel that they have made enough money? Do you imagine that there will be cuddly Erdogan toys in the toy shops six months from now?”

It is the figure of Mr Erdogan, leader of Turkey for the past 13 years, who stands at the centre of an election that will decide if he can win back his majority in parliament. He lost this by a whisker in the last election on 7 June, primarily because he had offended conservative and Islamic Kurdish voters, who previously supported his Justice and Development Party (AKP), by apparently favouring Islamic State (IS) over the Syrian Kurds in the war in Syria.

Mr Erdogan and his party have waged a ferocious campaign, as if they were fighting for their lives and liberty. This is not far off the truth, since they know that, if they lose power, their triumphant opponents will not hesitate to initiate corruption trials against them. Turkish politics is merciless towards losers. Mr Erdogan is ceaselessly combative and on the attack. “He takes no hostages,” said my friend who had used the Dracula analogy. He pointed to the case of two children, aged 12 and 13, in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir who are reported to have been arrested for “insulting the Turkish president” because they tore down posters of Mr Erdogan. The children, who are cousins and are known only by their initials RY and RT, now face up to two years and four months in prison. Explaining they did not even know whose face was on the posters, RY said: “We just wanted to remove them in order to sell them to a junk dealer.”

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan has demanded the EU’s support for a ‘safe zone’ in northern Syria (Reuters)

There cannot be many adults in Turkey who do not know what Mr Erdogan looks like. The former professional footballer and pious Muslim from a working-class family in Istanbul has been an essential ingredient in AKP’s success, winning three elections in a row since 2002, and progressively taking over other centres of power once controlled by enemies, such as the state apparatus, army, media and judiciary. The political analyst Cengiz Candar sees Mr Erdogan as combining features of three other world leaders: “the populism of [the late Venezuelan president] Hugo Chavez, the authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin and the tendency towards corruption of Silvio Berlusconi”.

But Mr Candar adds that Mr Erdogan is the most effective politician Turkey has produced for 50 years. He is a man who has repeatedly shown his ability to win elections, starting with his surprise elevation to mayor of Istanbul in 1994 and continuing with successive AKP general election victories in 2002, 2007 and 2011. He almost won again in June when the AKP was only 18 seats short of the 276 it needs for a majority in the 550-seat parliament.

The latest polls suggest the same indecisive result on 1 November, but Mr Erdogan’s control of most television coverage, reinforced last week by police storming into one anti-government media group to take it over, must count for something when it comes to gaining votes.

Mr Candar is certainly correct in seeing Mr Erdogan as an extraordinarily astute and successful political leader. And even if he fails to win a majority on 1 November, the other three parties in parliament (the number is so small because there is a 10 per cent vote threshold to enter it) detest each other too much to form a government. Mr Erdogan may therefore have to opt, unwillingly, for a coalition, most likely with the right-wing Nationalist Movement (MHP) or the more centrist Republican People’s Party (CHP). The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), whose breach of the 10 per cent barrier destroyed the AKP’s majority, is likely to get 13-14 per cent of the vote. On the other hand, Mr Erdogan might opt for a third election in order to get his way, recalling for one well-read observer the king in a Saki short story who holds an election every day until his subjects cry for mercy.

Mr Erdogan and the AKP are so swift to demonise their opponents, and their opponents are so quick to do the same for them, that it is difficult to keep a sense of proportion during a Turkish election. Mr Erdogan and his lieutenants like to project toughness in their rhetoric and their actions, so they should not complain too much if they are portrayed at home and abroad as intending to turn Turkey into an authoritarian state in which all the levers of power are in their hands.

But it is important to keep in mind that the traditions of Turkish domestic politics have always been divisive and violent. There was a military coup in 1960, after which the Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, was hanged, and again in 1971, 1980 and 1997. There was mass torture as hideous as anything seen in Argentina and Brazil in the days of their military juntas. In the 1990s hundreds of thousands of Kurds were driven from their homes in the south-east and 3,000 villages were destroyed.

Nothing as bad as this is happening in Turkey today. The AKP is certainly taking control of the state machinery and everybody comments on how the country is being polarised between hostile political, ethnic, sectarian and social groups. These divisions may be worse than they were a few years ago, but this is not really the most serious danger menacing 78 million Turks. The greatest danger is the same as that which destroyed Iraq and Syria: domestic political parties and communities winning foreign sponsorship for their struggles and becoming one battlefront in wider regional or global conflicts.

Thus, the Turkish state’s failure to negotiate a satisfactory settlement with its Kurdish minority, who make up 15-20 per cent of the population, means this conflict is being exacerbated by the rise of the Syrian Kurds who have created a de facto state militarily allied to the US. Soli Ozel, professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, says: “If the Kurdish issue was not so divisive domestically, then Turkey would not be so vulnerable to developments among the Syrian Kurds or consider them so important.”

Turkey is paying a price for its disastrous intervention in Syria since 2011. It underestimates the strength of IS and assists the ideologically similar Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, thereby injecting into the Turkish political bloodstream the venom of sectarian and ethnic hatreds bred in the Syrian and Iraqi wars. IS suicide bombings are used opportunistically by the state (although there is no reason to think it complicit in these atrocities) to its own advantage, but this gives IS a permanent and toxic influence on the political agenda inside Turkey. “Turkey is becoming more like a Middle East country,” Mr Candar says. “We are being Syrianised.”

Turkish influence over developments in Syria is diminishing, but embattled factions there have a growing and potentially catastrophic impact on Turkey.