Parliamentary elections over the weekend put paid to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hopes of bringing in major constitutional changes that would have introduced an executive presidency, greatly enhancing his powers.

His Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power since 2002 (Erdogan himself was prime minister between 2003 and 2014), won just over 41 per cent of the vote. It remains the largest party by a long margin but its share is a significant slide from the 2011 election when it won just under 50 per cent of the vote.

It was also a long way off the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to bring in presidential changes unilaterally, or the smaller majority needed to bring in a referendum on the issue.

Left gains

While the second largest party, the centre left Republican People’s Party (CHP), saw its vote barely changed, at around 25 per cent, another significant shift was a surge in support for the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) the leftist, pro-Kurdish party, which for the first time crossed the 10 per cent threshold needed to secure itself parliamentary seats. It won 13 per cent of the votes as its strategy of reaching beyond the Kurdish population paid off.

The success of the HDP had huge implications for the AKP. “Had the HDP received 3 per cent less than they did they would have been stuck at the election barrier, with t 70 or 80 seats in South East Turkey shifting to the the AKP,” explains Ege Seckin, a political analyst covering Turkey at IHS Global Insight, who said that the election had been the most unpredictable and surprising in over a decade.

The elections have left Turkey’s immediate political future in a state of uncertainty: Seckin anticipates one of three scenarios — either a minority AKP government, the AKP in coalition with the right-of-centre party, or fresh elections — all of which would be far from the situation the AKP had anticipated even days prior to the election.

Personality parallels

During last year’s general election, parallels were drawn between the Modi administration and that of Erdogan. Writer Amitav Ghosh, for one, pointed to some of those factors, including the humble origin, charismatic personalities and oratory skills of the two popular but polarising leaders, heading parties with religious roots, taking on secular establishments and ambitious pledges for reform to fuel economic growth.

Erdogan took the helm of Turkey at a time of spiralling debt, and helped transform the economy, with massive infrastructure projects and structural reforms (instigated by the IMF) into a highly successful and fast growing economy, growing over 8 per cent in 2010 and 2011.

Are there lessons to be learnt? Certainly, if not just for India, for the rest of the world too.

One is that economic growth can never be taken for granted. Turkey’s buoyant performance in the first decade of AKP rule gave way to lacklustre growth — the economy grew by a tepid 2.58 per cent last year and is expected to grow at just over 3 per cent this year, with exports struggling, high inflation and a depreciating currency which threatens to increase foreign currency held private and public sector debt.

“Debt-fuelled private consumption could not deliver growth on a sustainable basis unless major structural reforms are brought in and they failed to implement any major structural reforms since 2007-08,” says Fadi Hakura of policy think tank Chatham House.

“The key reason for Erdogan’s declining popularity is the state of the Turkish economy which is suffering from prolonged stagnation and the middle income trap,” he says, pointing to a poll conducted by respected pollster Ali Carkoglu that found that the percentage of Turks who had a negative assessment of the economy had skyrocketed from a quarter in 2013 to nearly half in 2015.

“It was primarily the state of the Turkish economy that brought him to power in 2002 — and high growth rates kept him in power for more than a decade. Sluggish economic environment is now eating away at his popularity.”

Attempts by the government to interfere in central bank policy — Erdogan himself launched a stinging attack on the governor of the central bank, for failing to raise interest rates — has done little to increase investor confidence. Business confidence has also been undermined by unashamedly political decisions — including taking control of Bank Asya, a Turkish-Islamic bank into which a number of foreign investors including Blackrock and Vanguard had put money.

Though purportedly over irregularities at the bank, the move has been widely seen as an attack on supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Turkish cleric, and opponent of Erdogan, whose movement has links to the bank.

The Kurdish question

Another broad lesson from the Turkish election is the ease with which a poll can be misread, and supporters can be alienated. Seckin points out that the government had taken a slump in support from pre-election polls as a sign that they were alienating nationalist Turks who believed the AKP had made too many concessions in the peace processes with the banned Kurdish independence movement, the PKK.

“They intensified their rhetoric against the PKK and HDP which led to the alienation of those in Kurdish society who would have voted for the ruling party,” says Seckin. There had been considerable support for the AKP within Turkey’s Kurdish population, with its conservative, religious message preferred over that of the secular CHP. (The decision to bring out an official version of the Quran in Kurdish for the first time just ahead of the election, brandished in public by Erdogan himself, symbolised the significance of this voter base, now partly alienated).

Instead, the HDP, under the charismatic young leader Selahattin Demirtas, a lawyer who won 9 per cent votes in last year’s presidential poll, managed to broaden its appeal to include gay rights activists, secularists, environmentalists and minority groups.

Democracy wins

But perhaps the most important message is the most encouraging one: attempts at authoritarianism are a harder sell in established democracies than some might anticipate.

The decline in the AKP’s parliamentary standing came despite a steady, and sustained clampdown on media (Turkey now ranks 149th out of 180 on Freedom House’s media World Freedom Index; India 136th), particularly social media, and media ownership heavily concentrated in the hands of government and government supporters.

Erdogan’s bitter, nationalist attacks on the Western media — claiming that negative stories, particularly over the Gezi Park protests of 2013, and the current perception that Turkey had been soft on ISIS militants in Syria, were a Western conspiracy against a resurgent Turkey — also failed to convince. Instead Turkey’s electorate sent a clear message — on a staggering 86 per cent turnout — that after a decade, and clear authoritarian streaks, many want change.

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