Election storm in Turkey: what do the results of June and November 2015 elections tell us?

• Author: Carkoglu, Ali

Introduction

Turkey has been rocked by an election storm. In less than two years since March 2014, the country has had four elections, the most recent taking place on November 1st, 2015. The ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AK Party) won three consecutive elections in 2002, 2007 and 2011 by continuously increasing its vote share from about 34 percent to nearly 50 percent; in doing so it became a rare example of a predominant party in a competitive democracy. (1) Following the local and presidential elections in March and August 2014, the AK Party incurred its first significant electoral loss in June 2015, leading to a parliamentary outlook that did not allow for the formation of any government. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan eventually took the decision to hold early or "repeat" elections which eventually led the AK Party to recover its losses in November 2015.

This Turkish election storm is significant in many respects. We will touch upon a selection of issues that the Turkish experience could shed light upon. First, we show how a predominant party builds its electoral base, loses, and then recovers votes to consolidate its support base. We show geographical patterns of voting across the country to illustrate how the electoral scene shifted in less than four months. Second, we illustrate the power and limitations of performance politics as a force that shapes electoral outcomes in contexts where security concerns override concerns about economic and social policy performance. We argue that lacking or diminished influence of performance politics is inherently harmful for Turkish democracy and given the divided nature of the electorate a consensus building approach to policy reform and constitution writing is more likely to succeed.

The Results of the June and November 2015 General Elections

Figure 1 summarizes the developments in the electoral scene for local, parliamentary and presidential elections since 2002. This familiar scene shows how the AK Party increased its vote share in consecutive elections in a zigzag pattern. In the initial phase a respectable 34 percent support was expanded to reach nearly 42 percent in the local elections of 2004. In the aftermath of the political turmoil prior to the 2007 elections, AK Party support was already about 47 percent. When the AK Party support was on the rise, mass public evaluations concerning the economic policy performance of the incumbent party was steadily high and even improving.

The first electoral challenge to the AK Party's tenure came with the global economic crisis that arose just prior to the 2009 local elections, leading to about eight percentage points of electoral support decline. The AK Party recovered from this decline by continuously improving its economic condition evaluations within the mass electorate. By the 2011 parliamentary elections the recovery was more than complete and the AK Party scored a record-breaking level of support, reaching almost 50 percent of the valid votes with about 21.4 million total votes.

By the time of the 2014 local elections, AK Party performance had led to a decline in electoral support, pushing the level of support down to about 43 percent. It was clear however, that even in times of crisis with local electoral forces in play, AK Party support was still higher than its original 34 percent by about 9 percentage points. Even in one of the worst electoral contexts, the number of AK Party votes in provincial council elections was about 17.8 million, up by more than 4.4 million votes compared to the 2004 local elections.

Then came the presidential elections of August 2014. This was the first ever popular election for the Turkish presidency. So, the whole party system was unprepared for a suis generis electoral campaign necessitated by the presidential election. The coalition determined the direction of the campaign in total rejection of the fact that this was a watershed election for the future of the country. The assumption that constitutional restrictions upon the presidency could be maintained, even for a popularly elected president, was unrealistic and untenable. The two large opposition parties, the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or CHP) and the Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetci Hareket Partisi or MHP), wanted to imitate the profile of the AK Party candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan by jointly picking a conservative intellectual of high caliber, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, thinking that he could not only keep the opposition party constituencies together but also convert some of the AK Party voters away from their candidate. The opposition coalition stuck with their erroneous calculations and was defeated handsomely by Erdogan, who received 21 million votes or 51.8 percent of the valid votes, securing the presidency in the first round of elections.

The presidential election was a watershed election that changed the very dynamics of Turkish electoral campaigns. Now that the biggest vote winner in the Turkish electoral system became a single individual, the constraints that had regulated campaign dynamics were de facto modified. As Turkey moved into the parliamentary elections of June 2015, president-elect Erdogan remained an active campaigner often perceived as supporting the ruling AK Party government. However, the influence of his active presence in the campaign was later questioned as being counterproductive for the AK Party's electoral support. (2)

The details of the pre-election campaign dynamics in the form of media content analyses for the June 2015 election are yet not available for researchers to study. However, the impression a casual observer gets from the 2015 election campaign is that President-elect Recep Tayyip Erdogan actively campaigned for the AK Party and openly criticized the three major opposing parties and their leaders. (3) Among these, the Peoples' Democratic Party (Halklarin Demokratik Partisi, HDP) was perhaps the most significant. The HDP is a democratic socialist and anti-capitalist pro-Kurdish party and follows the heritage of some earlier Kurdish nationalist political parties that typically obtained about 5-7 percent of the votes in earlier elections. The co-president of the HDP and its presidential candidate Selahattin Demirta? was quite successful in building a support base of 9.8 percent of the valid votes in the August 2014 presidential election. This strong showing signaled the voters and the leadership of all parties in the Turkish party system that the military imposed 10 percent threshold needed to secure representation in parliament might be surpassed by the HDP in June 2015. In fact, the HDP did obtain about 13 percent of the vote in June.

A significant shift in the electoral dynamics from June to November concerns the number of actual voters or turnout. We see that from June to November about one million more voters cast their votes, reaching a total of about 48.5 million actual voters. The participation rate was the highest since 1995 with 85.2 percent of the eligible voters participating, up from 83.9 percent in June.

The parliamentary election on June 7, 2015 resulted in an approximately nine percentage point loss for the ruling AK Party compared to the 2011 general election, necessitating a minority or coalition government for the first time since 1999. The AK Party nevertheless remained the largest group with nearly 41 percent, followed by the main opposition CHP with about 25 percent of the valid votes (down by about 1 percentage point from 2011). The Turkish and Kurdish ethnic nationalist parties at the opposing ends of the ideological spectrum, and the MHP and HDP jointly scored 3.3 and 6.6 percent point increases, respectively.

Since the two parties that scored significant gains in June 2015 elections, the MHP and the HDP, are at the polar opposites of the ideological spectrum, coalition negotiations proved to be difficult to conduct. The inherent ideological incongruence between the AK Party and the CHP, as well as the fact that both had incurred electoral losses, did not create a permissive ground for a grand coalition. Both the MHP and the HDP party leadership had already undertaken adversarial positions, and remained distant to the idea of a coalition with the AK Party.

The Election Context from June to November 2015

Coalition negotiations ultimately failed and the first popularly elected president of the country called for a "repeat" election. In the meantime, the stagnating peace process for the resolution of the Kurdish conflict took a sharp turn toward increased militarized action. On July 20, only six weeks after the election, a terror attack in the border district of Sanliurfa, Suruc killed 34 activists who had been carrying humanitarian aid to Kobani. Most of these activists came from socialist platforms and youth groups. Investigations revealed that ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) had conducted this attack. On the same day, the PKK also killed two soldiers in a terror attack and two days later, the PKK claimed responsibility for the killing of two police officers at their homes in Sanliurfa. After July 20, the conflict between the Kurdish PKK and the Turkish armed forces re-intensified and the media covered this conflict extensively, aggravating the public's security concerns.

The conflict went on from July 20 until October 10, when the largest terror attack in the history of modern Turkey occurred in the capital city of Ankara. The attack happened during a rally which was organized by leftist unions and confederations to protest the intensifying conflict between the PKK and Turkey's armed forces. 102 people were killed and more than 400 were wounded.

Among those killed were some HDP politicians and youth branch members of the CHP. The CHP and HDP announced that they would not hold rallies or large campaign meetings because of the threats. An intriguing development following...