In Kayasehir, a high-rise satellite housing scheme in the outer suburbs of Istanbul, you would hardly know that Turkey is at a crossroads. There is little sign that the country faces yet another fateful election next Sunday, except for a couple of posters in support of the ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP, and a solitary election van trundling through the streets blaring AKP’s campaign messages through the rows of immaculate yellow and beige housing blocks.
Across from a chain restaurant next to the local Imam Hatip secondary school, AKP election spots are played in a loop on a screen, intermittently reminding passers-by of the dark days before the party’s ascent to power 13 years ago. Ahmet and Ismail, both 29 and working for a water delivery company, are big fans of the Ankara government.
“Before the AKP came to power, our country was in debt, we had to stand in line for everything, we barely had running water,” Ahmet says, repeating the election spot voiceovers almost verbatim. “They will build the world’s biggest airport only a few kilometres from here.”
When an election van of the main opposition Republican People’s party drives past the restaurant, he shakes his fist at the vehicle. “Many are out to topple Erdogan and the AKP,” Ahmet says angrily, in reference to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former party leader and prime minister who has dominated Turkish politics since 2002. “They are traitors. They are spies. They are jealous of Turkey’s successes.”
Local media reported recently that a boys’ school set up in a Kayasehir basement was a front for an Uzbek jihadi outfit said to be allied with Islamic State.
“Erdogan will clean up all this filth, all these terrorists. Isis, the PKK [Kurdistan Workers party], the spies of Assad – they are all in cahoots but will get swept away,” says Ahmet, echoing Erdogan’s implausible allegation that all these groups cooperated in the recent Ankara suicide bomb attack, the deadliest terrorist strike in Turkey’s history. “He is the only man who can save Turkey. Before the AKP came to power, nobody had heard of Turkey and our politicians. Now the whole world talks about us.”
However, recent headlines featuring Turkey might not be the kind he is hoping for. Voters go to the polls against a backdrop of worsening domestic dynamics and staggering violence. Many fear that any chance of improvement looks increasingly unlikely, no matter what the outcome. Opinion polls indicate that next Sunday’s results are likely to echo those of national elections in June, when the AKP failed to win a parliamentary majority for the first time since it came to power in 2002.
Coalition talks collapsed amid a rapidly worsening security situation both in bordering Syria and at home. The economy has ground to halt, with fears of a recession adding to domestic tensions. Human rights groups are alarmed at the rapid erosion of the rule of law and human rights, and a twin suicide attack that killed at least 100 people at a peace rally in Ankara this month indicates how far Turkey has been dragged into the Syrian quagmire and how unable – or unwilling – the government is to tackle the threat of domestic Islamist terrorism. Dialogue between opposition factions has become all but impossible. One shop owner in the central district of Okmeydani said that political differences had become unbridgeable.
“This district votes for the [Peoples’ Democratic party] HDP. A few streets down, it’s all AKP, and further down the hill are the nationalists,” he said. “They have been pitting us against each other for years, but never before have divisions been as sharp. Now it’s like south pole and north pole.” His cousin was recently fired from his work on a construction site after the owner, an AKP supporter, heard that he voted for the HDP.
Since June’s election stalemate, the government has reignited war with the outlawed PKK, wilfully abandoning fledgling peace talks under way since 2012 and the attempt to end a bloody conflict which has killed approximately 40,000 since it began in 1984. Hundreds more were killed on both sides over the summer as the confrontation crept from the mountains into cities and towns in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, where civilians suffered the brunt of the violence, many as victims of excessive violence by security forces. While the PKK stepped up attacks on the police and the military, reports of torture and extrajudicial killings of Kurds, sometimes children, emerged from the towns where Ankara imposed temporary blanket curfews.
“[The AKP government] punishes us for having voted against them,” said one resident in Cizre, a restive town on the border with Syria and Iraq where dozens were killed and many more injured during a massive security operation in early September. “They said the peace process would end if the HDP made it into parliament. We now know that this was not a prediction but a threat.”
In a small HDP election office in an Istanbul working-class district, several elderly men sit around a table preparing letters to voters, while watching a speech by the party’s co-chair, Selahattin Demirtas, on TV.
“People in our district asked us not to hang up flags in front of the office this time,” Halil Isik, 61, who volunteers for the HDP in Gaziosmanpasa, explains. “They are afraid it would make the whole street a target. Even Kurdish voters are scared. Today the shop owner received a threatening letter, and people fear something worse might happen.”
He says that the twin suicide bomb attack in the capital has added to the climate of fear and the perception that leftists and Kurds are a legitimate target that the government, at best, is unwilling to protect. Some say that the AKP’s vitriolic rhetoric against opponents, especially against non-Sunni, non-Turkish minorities has encouraged racist violence in the country while seeking the nationalist vote.
In September angry mobs attacked Kurdish shops and HDP party offices all over the country, but no perpetrators have been brought to court. After the devastating Ankara suicide bomb, the party decided to suspend all election rallies ahead of 1 November.
“One the one hand, we are in mourning and the joy is gone,” said one HDP activist in the extremely divided district of Okmeydani. “But we are also afraid more of our supporters will be killed. They have turned the southeast into a battlefield after people there did not vote for them. Now they want to push us back beneath the 10% hurdle though fear and intimidation.”
The AKP failure to secure a parliamentary majority in June was at least in part due to the HDP’s success in surmounting the 10% of the vote required to enter parliament. Opinion polls showed that the AKP lost voters both to the pro-Kurdish HDP and the Nationalist Movement party (MHP), with the former disillusioned by the slow progress in the peace talks with the PKK, and the latter angry at the government’s willingness to engage with a group they view as separatists and terrorists.
Now the embattled ruling party is seeking a better result by wooing the nationalist base, while issuing thinly veiled threats against Kurdish voters.
Speaking at an election rally in Van, a city in eastern Turkey, last week, acting prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that forced disappearances and murders of Kurdish dissidents by secretive paramilitary agents might resume in the southeast if his party lost power. “If the AK party is toppled, these terrorist gangs, or the white Toros [cars] will be returning,” he warned, referring to the white Renault cars associated with grave human rights violations, kidnapping and murders during the 1990s.
But Kurds are not the only target in the campaign. In a desperate bid to cling on to power and parliamentary seats, the interim AKP government has cracked down on all critics. Independent media are intimidated or banned altogether. Social media are regularly threatened and curtailed. Erdogan’s office launched numerous court cases against those deemed to have insulted the president, including a schoolboy who made fun of him on Facebook.
The AKP also failed to distance itself from mob violence against the Turkish daily Hürriyet after the paper was accused by the party’s supporters of “spreading lies” about Erdogan. The assailants of a prominent Turkish journalist all walked free after breaking his bones for criticising the government.
“The twin crackdown on media freedom and the judiciary is especially poisonous,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior Turkey researcher for Human Rights Watch. “The criminal justice system has been brought to its knees by the government and is fully under AKP control, which in turn means they can use it to go after its critics and opponents. The government can get any decision it wants from a Turkish court now.”
With all key state institutions firmly in the hands of the AKP, the party is arguably the mightiest and most organised political machine Turkey has ever seen. Yet it might be in trouble. Opinion polls show that there is little chance of the AKP increasing its vote.
“Since the elections in June, the political debate has changed, and the question of introducing an executive presidential system has entirelydropped off the agenda,” said Gencer Özcan, professor for international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “Now the AKP is struggling for its survival, despite the fact that they got 40% of all votes in the June elections.”
Erdogan’s initial aim was to secure a big enough majority to rewrite the constitution and turn Turkey into a presidential system, enthroning himself at the top. The likelihood of this happening legally has evaporated. Hesitant voices of dissent have emerged from the AKP ranks, and rumours persist that former president Abdullah Gül and other senior party cadres might walk away with Erdogan’s critics to form their own party. This month the news magazine Nokta published the minutes of a meeting during which senior party officials acknowledged that Erdogan’s aggressive divide-and-rule strategy and his lording over all party decisions had taken its toll on the AKP’s popularity.
The Nokta website has since been blocked by a court, but the party’s election strategy seems to have taken the perceived Erdogan fatigue into account. The president’s face, ubiquitous ahead of the elections in June, has vanished from walls and billboards, while the AKP slogan “With the love of the first day” strikes a tone nostalgic for the party’s success, and increasing popularity, in 2002.
Yilmaz, 48, a chef who owns a workers’ restaurant in the central Beyoglu district, will abstain from voting: “I voted last time with high hopes that things would get better. But now I don’t expect any change anymore. This is a country now run by thieves, by a government that lets killers run free, while others are jailed for writing one sentence on the internet. I feel like Turkey has been stolen from us.”
2002 The Justice and Development party (AKP) wins landslide election victory.
2003 AK party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, wins seat in parliament and becomes prime minister.
2004 EU agrees to Turkey’s accession talks on penal code reforms, abolition of death penalty, more cultural rights for Kurds.
2007 Journalist Hrant Dink assassinated, AKP wins parliamentary polls for second time, Abdullah Gül elected president.
2008 Trial begins of ultra-nationalist Ergenekon group accused of provoking a military coup against the government. Petition to the constitutional court to ban the AKP for allegedly undermining the secular constitution narrowly fails.
2009 Government introduces more Kurdish language rights, Kurdish Democratic Society party is banned by Turkish constitutional court.
2010 Members of military arrested over alleged “sledgehammer” coup plot.
2011 AKP wins another landslide victory in general elections, Erdogan embarks on third term.
2013 Corruption scandal involves four ministers and members of Erdogan’s close circle and family.
2014 Erdogan first president elected by popular vote.
2015 AK loses parliamentary majority in elections, leftist HDP clears 10% election threshold.
