The Turkey Analyst

Vol. 4 no. 12, 13 June 2011

ANALYSIS

Turkey's Urbanization: The Secret Behind the AKP's Third Consecutive Electoral Victory
Andrew Finkel
At 12 June’s general election, Turkey’s governing Justice and Development party (AKP) pulled off a rare political hat trick, securing a third consecutive parliamentary majority and doing so with an ever-increasing share of the popular vote. The result is a clear endorsement of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose style and personality continues to dominate Turkish politics. It is also his answer to a growing chorus of critics at home but also abroad who accuse him of having abandoned his party’s EU-oriented reform agenda in favour of an increasingly centralised and autocratic style of rule.  The AKP is now the party of the new urban middle class. The party is literally building its own constituency, a process in which the opposition finds it hard to engage.

A Divisive Election in a Polarized Turkey
M. K. Kaya
The June 12 general election was historic as it was the first general election in Turkey over which the shadow of the military and the other institutions of tutelage did not fall. Yet the ruling party’s tactics ensured that the election campaign still took place in an environment whose atmosphere was all but democratic. The elections underlined Turkey’s traditional split between a rightist majority and a leftist minority; it also showed that the AKP and the Kurdish BDP – the election’s main winner – both benefited from the polarized electoral environment; further, the main opposition CHP’s impossibly eclectic crop of candidates had too little of a common denominator to challenge the AKP. It will now be up to the new parliament to put the divisive campaign behind it and achieve a new constitution through compromise. Whether that is at all likely nevertheless remains doubtful.

What the Columnists Say
Several commentators in the Turkish press have expressed concern over the way Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has conducted himself during the election campaign. Erdoğan has been severely criticized for his chauvinist discourse; his attempt to lure away voters from the far-right Turkish nationalist MHP by stating that he would have hanged Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish PKK, if he had been in power when the death sentence against him was pronounced back in 1999 was found chocking by pro-AKP commentators as well. In general, the thread that runs through many of the commentaries is an apprehension that the defeat of the old system of military tutelage may not translate a victory for democracy, as many of the old habits persist.

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NEW Silk Road Paper published

Reconciling Statism with Freedom: Turkey's Kurdish Opening
by Halil M. Karaveli, October 2010.



The Turkey Analyst
The Turkey Analyst is a publication of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Joint Center, designed to bring authoritative analysis and news on the rapidly developing domestic and foreign policy issues in Turkey. It is published weekly, and includes a topical analysis, as well as translations and summaries of selected Turkish news reports. It is edited by Halil M. Karaveli.

The Turkey Analyst welcomes article submissions.

The Joint Center
The Joint Center, created in 2005, is the product of the merger of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, and the Silk Road Studies Program, at the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy.

The Turkey Initiative
The Joint Center launched a Turkey Initiative in 2006 in order to improve understand of Turkish domestic and foreign affairs in Europe and the United States.

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