The catchall nature of the ruling Turkish party, despite new ideological alignments in parliament, may leave Turkish politics lacklustre, writes Mustafa El-Labbad The results are in, but discussion of the Turkish elections has barely begun. Between hooplas on one side and dejected silence on the other, the rush to score political capital on the results has overshadowed the significance of these polls and the need to assess their repercussions in that important and strategically located Middle Eastern power. Unfortunately, figures alone give little insight into the deeper layers of the intricacies of Turkey's political and economic rivalries and how these will play out in the forthcoming parliament. What they do tell us, or course, is that the Justice and Development Party (JDP), also known by the Turkish acronym AK, has succeeded in increasing its popular support from 35 per cent of the electorate in 2002 to 47 per cent this year, and that this percentage entitles the JDP to handpick a government, free of any constraining coalition with another party. But to describe these results as a "sweeping victory" or a "Turkish landslide," as some Arab commentators have done, is taking it a bit too far. The JDP now controls 340 seats in parliament, as opposed to 367 in the last parliament. Under the rules of the Turkish electoral system, parties that fail to win 10 per cent of the vote are not allocated seats in parliament. Instead, the votes cast in favour of the parties that fail to break the 10 per cent threshold are distributed among the winning parties, which are allocated additional parliamentary seats accordingly. As this has not happened this year, the JDP is down in seats from the last parliament, which means that it is short of the two- thirds majority it would need to control the 550-member parliament. Such a majority would have placed it in a position to effect major legislative and even constitutional changes. Had the party obtained it, it could have justifiably been trumpeted a "landslide" victory. Also drowned out by media fanfare is an assessment of the contours of the new Turkish parliament, in which, even before it convenes, it is possible to identify five political-ideological divides as opposed to the single divide that characterised the previous parliament. As in the previous parliament, this one will be split between Islamists (as represented by the JDP) and secularists, as represented by the Republican People's Party (RPP), 121 seats. In addition, with the entrance of 24 Kurdish MPs who won on independent tickets, Kurdish versus Turkish ethnic and nationalist affiliations will form another line of confrontation. A third stems from the return of the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (NMP), 71 seats, reviving the split between ultra-nationalist, pro- interventionist "hawks" and "moderates" from the other parties. The fourth alignment revolves around attitudes towards the military establishment and has as its exponents the NMP and the RPP on the one side and the JDP and Kurdish MPs on the other. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the new parliament will be the stage of increasing polarisation between the right (JDP and NMP) and the left (the Kurds, who traditionally vote with the left, some liberal MPs who entered on the RRP ticket, and representatives of other left-wing parties). The latter polarity is one of the more significant outcomes of the elections, as it has been relatively absent from numerous parliamentary sessions in which the prevailing weight swung between the right, centre right, the centre and the left. In this parliament, left and right have coalesced into two more or less distinct camps. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the JPD drew a considerable amount of its support from the centre to far right and that the most conspicuous losers in the recent elections, therefore, were the famous Motherland Party and True Path Party, whose political and social agendas set the course of Turkish politics throughout the 1980s and 1990s but who failed to score the minimum 10 per cent in the 2007 general elections. The new and multifarious political and ideological dichotomies are certain to imbue the forthcoming parliament with new and vigorous vitality. On the one hand, this may work to wrest the initiative from the JDP, in spite of its victory. On the other, it may alleviate the intensity of the secular versus Islamist divide by shifting the focus to some of the other lines of confrontation in Turkish politics. Perhaps, therefore, it is more appropriate to describe the JDP's victory, as sure as it was, as a "landslide defeat" for conventional right wing parties and an unmitigated success for its own campaign platform, which voiced the concerns of the right and the interests of the Turkish economic elite. Certainly, the architects of the JDP electoral campaign strategy performed brilliantly. Somehow they managed to secure the support of Turkey's millions of marginalised urban poor and underprivileged and, simultaneously, to reach out to the modern business community and traditional bazaar economy. With this new and magical fusion of quintessential opposites, Tayyip Erdogan's JPD has struck a very special and uniquely Turkish truce. It has given vent to the hopes and aspirations of the traditional and culturally conservative swathes of the populace that form the party's vast grassroots base, but simultaneously ensured that this spirit does not spill over into something that would jeopardise the foundations of the Ataturk republic and, hence, the interests of the party's economic constituency. Therefore, it would be precise to describe the JDP as a conservative party in the fullest sense of the term as translated into Turkish politics and society. It promises to secure the interests of the upper echelons of Turkish society in founding a period of unprecedented political and economic stability. But its primary condition for doing so is to continue as a classical rightwing party that identifies with the cultural, national and economic aspirations of the Turkish people, which are heavily tinged with Islamic religious overtones. Without transcending the bounds of the constitutional order, it carefully played on the secularist-Islamist divide to build up an enormous following from among the urban dispossessed and establish itself as a permanent feature on the Turkish political map. In a sense, the Erdogan formula has camouflaged what in other societies would be a natural polarisation between left and right, but without being able to resolve its priorities in favour of his party's grassroots base. Meanwhile, the "secularist" parties have, in their own way, contributed to the successes of the "fusion of opposites" upon which the JDP thrives, primarily through their cheap attempt to foreground the religious versus secular controversy in Turkey, the prime example of which was their opposition to the candidacy of Abdullah Gèl in the presidential elections on the grounds that his wife wears the veil. Incidents such as this have driven home that secularism in Turkey, rather than embodying the philosophy of the separation between religion and the state, civil liberties and individual rights, has become a religion of its own. This new "secular religion", more than anything else, has driven millions of Anatolians to rally behind the JDP. What distinguishes Erdogan's party, in this confrontation, from Necmettin Erbakan's Welfare Party is the JDP's blend of political alliances, with the wealthy Turkish bourgeoisie at home and with the US and Israel abroad. These alliances and the domestic and foreign policies that stem from them furnish the JDP a ready shield to ward off attack from its adversaries in the military establishment and in the secularist parties. On the other hand, these very pragmatic domestic and foreign ties tend to undermine the progressive and democratic substance of what the JDP stands for. So one could also say that what "swept" the polls in the Turkish general elections, whether you call it a party, or a platform, or a blend of political alliances and pragmatism, was akin to a genetically modified banana: oversized but flavourless.
