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Crisis in Turkey

Deeply torn: this was the picture Turkey presented to observers in the past weeks and months. In order to understand current developments, however, it's necessary to look into the history of the Turkish politics. Insights from JG, correspondent in Istanbul.

If surveys provide even a remotely realistic picture of the political landscape of a country, then Turkey is in a bizarre situation: one month after the political institutions received the best shaking up they've had in years; after a million people took to the streets to demonstrate for "their" secular republic and the military made relatively undisguised coup threats, according to a survey conducted by ANDY - AR, a university institute for social research, nothing has changed politically.

The Turkish military regards itself as protector of the constitution that enshrines the separation of church and state. Photo: AP

If elections were to be held this week, again only 2 parties would get into parliament because all the others (as was the case 5 years ago) didn't reach the 10 percent threshold. The conservative moderate-Islamic AK Party (the justice and development party) would again be around 15 points ahead of the left-wing nationalist Republican People's Party (CHP).

Although some change is possible before the elections on July 22nd, the basic opinion blocs have been set for years, if not decades. Around 50% of voters describe themselves as right-wing, and only 30% as left. That was the case 50 years ago and is not likely to change in the near future. What has changed, however, are the parties relating to the voter blocs, or to be exact, the parties on the right.

In order to understand the current turmoil, it's worth taking a short look at the political history of Turkey. After the grounding of the Republic in 1923, the country was governed by a single party until the fifties: the Republican People's Party (CHP). This party, also known as Atatürks Party, still regulates Kemalism. The CHP is a party which believes itself to be left-wing and progressive, at the same time however, it embodies the national party as such, because Kemalism, with its marked emphasis on secularism, represents a foundation of the state image. After the introduction of a multi-party system, a conservative right-wing party (the Democratic Party, or DP) was grounded as a counterpart to the CHP, and won the first free elections in 1949 with a majority of approximately 50:30. While the left-wing CHP is distinguishable for its extremely conservative structures that have correspondingly barely changed till now, a process of transformation has taken place on the right: essentially that the conservatives have increasingly incorporated Islam.

In contrast to the rest of Europe, the conservatives are not considered the national party; instead it is the Republican People's Party which upholds the inheritance of the Atatürk upheavals of the twenties and thirties of the last century. The abolishment of the caliphate, equal rights for women, the separation of state and mosque, the introduction of the Latin script and the westernisation of the country were revolutional changes at that time. They were pushed through from above, nonetheless, against steady resistance from the conservatives. The conservative trend, however, also remained mostly secular into the nineties. An explicitly Islamic party has existed since the seventies as a result, and its influence increased in the eighties until it managed to produce a prime minister for the first time in the mid-nineties in coalition with the conservatives. This Islamic party openly questioned the separation of State and mosque, as well as the westernisation of the country. As a result it was forced from power by the military in February 1997 and subsequently banned as a political party.

The founding generation of today's governing party, the AKP, grew from this movement. In contrast to the Islamic movement of the nineties, however, the AKP announced, upon its founding, that it accepted the secular constitution and westernisation of the country; religion was to be important in the party, but a personal matter. Faced with the self-crippling behaviour of the secular conservatives, who had become increasingly tangled in corruption and internal power struggles, the AKP managed to take over the majority of the conservative voters in the November 2002 elections. It was, however, confronted with reservations from the beginning. The pledge to the secular constitution was suspected of being a tactical maneuver that would be dropped like a worn glove as soon as they had firmly established themselves in power. When the AKP, from their majority position in parliament, declared at the end of April that they now also wanted to choose the president from their ranks (alongside the prime minister and the speaker of parliament), the Kemalist elite believed that this moment had arrived.

For General Yasar Büyükanit, chief of staff of the army, and for Deniz Baykal, leader of the People's Republican Party, this move by a party with Islamic roots for the position of president is nothing but an attempt at a fundamental revision of the principles of the Turkish Republic. According to the current president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Atatürks legacy has never been so threatened in the history of the Republic. Although many commentators are of the opinion that the issue for the protagonists of the old elite is not so much the upholding of principles, but rather their ancestral benifices, it would be foreshortened to see the current conflict simply as a power struggle between the old Kemalist elite and a new social movement speerheaded by the AKP. The AKP, although it has no hidden agenda for reislamisation of the country, does actually have something Janus-faced about it. On the one hand it fights for democratic renewal against the patronising authoritarian state, for the simple reason that it was never part of the authority. On the other hand, the Party basis is so conservative/reactionary-religious that particularly the women of the urban middle class rightly fear an AKP hegemony. For while the Party leaders, with Brussels, fight against the undemocratic claim of the army, the middle level of the Party is fighting for the head scarf, single-sex schools and the reintroduction of polygamy under Islamic law.

Those convicted Democrats with an eye on Europe thus find themselves in a dilemma. They do support the AKP when it comes to breaking up the traditional understanding of the old elite of the state as authoritarian power, but at the same time they are aware that no real progress is to be made with the AKP. Many of those protesters who carried signs with the slogan "no coup, no sharia" simply lack a political addressee at the moment. What is missing in Turkey is a modern democratic party which doesn't counter the Islam of the AKP with backward nationalism as the CHP does, but works towards social solutions on the basis of a modern State image in which the individual and not the collective comes first.

Turkey's advancement process towards the EU could have supported such a movement. Now, however, since there are more and more stop signs on the path to future EU membership, the opposite is occurring and a relapse into the old conflict patterns is to be observed. Progress is to be measured at the moment by the fact that tanks aren't rolling in reality anymore, but that the coup is taking place on the internet. Unless there are to be major surprises in the parliamentary election in July, which (see the survey mentioned above), is hardly to be expected, either the old conflicts will come to a head or, in the best case, continue to smoulder just below the surface.

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