Erdoğan’s Boomerang

With Turkey approaching its second election in five months, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan once again emerged from his gargantuan palace to campaign for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Although the constitution designates the presidency as a nonpartisan office, that didn’t stop Erdoğan from pushing during June’s elections for the super-majority needed to amend the constitution to centralize power in the presidency. To Erdoğan’s dismay, his efforts backfired. Not only did the AKP lose nine percentage points at the ballot box, but it failed to win a simple majority for the first time in its 13-year history.

Erdoğan is desperate to secure a simple majority, fearing that any coalition could lead to a revival of a 2013 probeimplicating him, his family and his cronies for graft. Recognizing that his call for a super-majority failed last time, he seems to have updated his rhetoric for Sunday’s election. Erdoğan issued a decidedly xenophobic call last month for voters to fill the legislature with deputies who are “national” and “native,” insinuating that opposition parties are neither.

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This is an absurd call by the supposedly impartial president of the republic. It’s also unnecessary.

All of the 550 deputies up for election are Turkish citizens. They couldn’t run for office if they weren’t. And they all need to represent one of 85 electoral districts, so the demand for “native” representatives is purely incendiary.

Initially, many pundits took Erdoğan’s rhetoric to be a call to exclude ethnic minorities, particularly Kurds. After all, the Turkish president resents the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) for clearing the 10 percent threshold for electoral representation in the June ballot, thereby denying a single-party majority for the AKP. The collapse in recent months of the Kurdish peace process and theescalation of violence in Kurdish-majority provinces have further stoked Erdoğan’s ire toward the HDP and its predominantly Kurdish base.

Erdoğan’s perceived call for ethnic exclusivism prompted widespread ridicule. The anti-Erdoğan and secular-nationalist daily Sözcü responded by publishing front-page photos of the AKP’s Kurdish, Armenian and other minority deputies under the headline, “Look who calls for nationals and natives!”

Erdoğan consequently felt compelled to clarify that Kurds are also national and native. He instead pointed the finger at a broad range of non-ethnically-defined but equally vague targets: those supposedly resentful of Turkey’s economic success or who chafe at the sight of the Turkish flag, and media outlets that allegedly support terrorism.

Since this new description was equally incomprehensible, Erdoğan tried to fine-tune his definition in an October 1 address to Parliament. He argued that the Turkish people’s “perceptiveness and insight” could distinguish national and native would-be lawmakers from those who are “non-national” and “foreign.”

The bizarre address received muted applause from the AKP ranks. But by that time, 80 HDP deputies had already left the plenary in protest.

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In less than a week, Turkey’s snap elections will tell whether Erdoğan’s nativist rhetoric has yielded fruit for his AKP. In the run-up to the election, the president is as much interested in consolidating the right-wing nationalist vote as in suppressing the Kurdish one. Erdoğan has swung so far right lately that even the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) has begun to sound like a voice of reason and moderation.

Erdoğan’s nationalist ploy to create his own nation within the Turkish nation could prove disastrous for him and the AKP. After all, with the exception of the HDP — which as a majority-Kurdish party has links to Kurds in Iraq, Syria and Iran — all of Turkey’s political parties are more nation-state-bound than the AKP.

The AKP is the most transnational party in Turkish history. Its commitment to Muslim Brotherhood ideology has spurred it to back like-minded groups fromSyria to Libya to Egypt, even when such support comes at the expense of the Turkish national interest. Egypt, for example, has instituted a boycott against companies from Turkey, thereby denying Turkish firms an 82-million-strong market on its Mediterranean doorstep.

In contrast to the AKP, the aspirations of Turkey’s social-democratic CHPopposition party, which I have represented in Parliament, have until recently been limited to within the nation state. It was only after Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu’s ascension to the party leadership in 2010 that the CHP started to bolster its global credentials by developing closer cooperation with sister parties and hosting a Socialist International council meeting in Istanbul.

The pan-Turkist MHP is paradoxically the most nation-state-bound of all parties. Although the party vows to unite its Turkic brethren “from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China,” the party has little to no contact with them, and its leader, who is scared of flying, rarely leaves the country.

In the end, if the Turkish electorate decides to heed Erdoğan’s call to pick “native” candidates, the AKP might suffer the worst electoral defeat in its history. The AKP, however, is lucky that the pool of voters who take Erdoğan’s rants seriously is dwindling fast.

Aykan Erdemir is a former member of the Turkish Parliament and a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. He currently teaches at Bilkent University in Ankara. Follow him on Twitter @aykan_erdemir