June 25, 2015 | Quote

Coalition Dreaming

THE inauguration of Turkey’s new parliament on June 23rd was a heady day for this wobbly democracy. Pious Muslim women were able to take the oath with their heads covered for the first time without being harassed by secular dinosaurs. Three Armenians, two Yazidis, a Syriac, a Roma and numerous Kurds and Alevis (and a total of 96 women) made for the most colourful chamber in the republic’s 92-year history. And though an openly gay candidate for the People’s Democracy party (HDP) did not win, his party easily cleared the 10% threshold imposed in the 1980s to keep small parties out.

None of the day’s cheer will have rubbed off on Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, who brushed aside constitutional constraints to campaign for the incumbent Justice and Development (AK) party. He hoped AK would win enough seats to amend the constitution, either outright or via a referendum, to elevate the presidency from a quasi-ceremonial job into an executive one. In the event AK took only 258 seats, 18 short of a majority. Turkey faces coalition rule for the first time since 2002. Frenzied chat over potential partners has not let up since.

Many predict that AK will link up with the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP). The parties are ideologically close. For all his grandstanding about refusing to talk to the Kurds and reviving corruption probes against former AK ministers, Devlet Bahceli, the veteran MHP leader, can be accommodating. He is a former deputy prime minister, who signed a 1999 law that saved the Kurds’ imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, from hanging. Moreover, a string of Kurdish victories against Islamic State (IS) in Syria has spurred a new hawkishness within AK that sits well with the MHP. Worries about a newly independent Kurdish entity along Turkey’s borders have increased since Syrian Kurds, backed by American air power, drove IS out of an important border town, Tel Abyad.

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Others claim that a “grand coalition” between AK and the main secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is all but sealed. Its supporters argue that this would halt the trend of growing authoritarianism, adventurist foreign policy and economic decline that marked the past five years of AK rule. But a third of CHP deputies were selected in primaries and “many are unlikely to toe the party line”, says Aykan Erdemir, a former CHP MP. “AK would not want such unpredictable partners.”

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Issues:

Turkey