Erdogan is on the Warpath with the Kurds
Turkey is undergoing
the most severe domestic political crisis of recent years. In previous
years, R. Erdogan and his moderately Islamic Justice and Development
Party (AKP) managed to consolidate Turkish society with neo-ottoman
foreign policy slogans, iron out conflicts between secularists and
Islamists, balance the role of the army in Turkish politics, bring to
the end armed resistance of KWP (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) fighters and
evolve to finding a peaceful solution to the Kurdish problem. The
current situation, however, has once again become severely strained.
The Turkish parliamentary elections in June 2015 fell short of Erdogan
and his supporters’ expectations. The ruling Justice and Development
Party (AKP) couldn’t poll enough votes in order to form a single-party
government for the first time since 2002. As compared to the 2011
elections, it lost 10% of the vote. Erdogan’s plans to make amendments
to the constitution, with the help of the new National Assembly
(medzhlis), in order to transform Turkey from a parliamentary into a
presidential republic and push through a series of radical reforms in
Turkish politics have been put on hold indefinitely.
AKP’s attempts
to make a coalition in the National Assembly with opposition parties
also failed. Erdogan was forced to announce new parliamentary elections
on November, 1st 2015 and entrusted the current Prime Minister to form
an interim government.
AKP’s decline in popularity inside the
country can be explained by a number of reasons. For instance, failures
in foreign policy, the financial and economic decline, general tiredness
of voters and Erdogan’s inconsistent actions, his ever more complicated
relationship with radical Islamists, local nationalists.
Thus,
voters became public witnesses to Erdogan’s conflict with Fethullah
Gülen, the influential Muslim preacher whose doctrine enjoys
considerable influence among the Turkish public. Another significant
factor of AKP’s weakened position was the relatively large percentage of
votes polled by Turkish Kurds. Previously, Kurdish National Assembly
members only gained seats in single-party constituencies, as no Kurdish
party had been able to pass the relatively steep 10% vote threshold. In
the previous elections, the AKP and Erdogan received a higher percentage
of the voters’ support namely in areas densely populated by Kurds. This
time, the pro-Kurd Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) decided to stand
independently and seemed to become the AKP’s biggest competitor, which
allowed it to gain approximately 13% of the vote (80 out of 550 seats in
the National Assembly.) The legalisation of Kurds as one of the main
ethnic groups in Turkey, the possibility of education and local media
being conducted in the Kurdish language and the acceleration in the
social and economic development of the least developed Kurdish areas –
all of this brought about sharp criticism of Erdogan from right-wing
parties and Turkish nationalists.
