The 2014 local elections in Turkey: a victory for identity politics.

• Author: Ete, Hatem
• Position: Essay

The 2014 local elections in Turkey marked a historic event with repercussions that went far beyond mayoral races and municipal assembly seats, as the vote closely resembled national elections and practically served as the first round of the upcoming presidential race in August 2014. Never in modern Turkish history had an election season been so prone to tensions and aggressive campaigns. Typically, the country's overly centralized administrative structure would result in an overall lack of interest in local elections, which primarily serve as large-scale projections for parliamentary elections. As such, local races hint at popular sentiments and political inclinations among voters. In recent decades, at least two local elections were particularly remarkable for signaling nationwide trends: the 1989 election results indicated that the Motherland Party (ANAP), which had been in government for six years, was beginning to lose some of its popular support; and the 1994 local elections which, in contrast, established that the Welfare Party (Refah) could appeal to an ever-larger group of voters. Just as the local ballots suggested, ANAP lost power in 1991 and Refah became a coalition partner in the 1995 parliamentary elections. (1)

Despite such historical precedents, the 2014 local elections carried unique importance as a series of interrelated factors came into play. One of the main reasons why observers paid so much attention to the election results was the proximity of the presidential race in August and parliamentary elections scheduled for mid-2015. Since the two upcoming contests would have tremendous influence over Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's political future and, by extension, Turkey's roadmap, the local vote attracted unusual attention from political commentators and politicians among others.

Prior to the local elections, the overall sense was that the Prime Minister would make a much-anticipated bid for the presidency if his party could break the 40-percent mark, while failure to achieve this level of success would jeopardize such plans. Considering the AK Party's landslide victory in the 2011 parliamentary elections (where the party won 50 percent of the vote) and various polls which documented its continued appeal among voters, Erdogan would ostensibly become the country's next president if he participated in the August 2014 race. (2)

In truth, the upcoming presidential election and the question of Erdogan's candidacy had been at the top of the country's political agenda for quite some time. One of the main reasons behind this interest was his vocal support for equipping the presidency with greater political power and introducing a presidential regime in Turkey. Following a 2007 standoff with the secularist establishment over the nomination of then-Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul for president, the AK Party government (which controlled enough seats in the legislative chamber to unilaterally vote the next president into office) organized a constitutional referendum that amended electoral laws to introduce direct presidential elections. (3) The constitutional referendum thus required the president to participate in popular elections for public office and allowed each president to serve up to two five-year terms. The adoption of proposed amendments immediately triggered public debate on the potential changes, including greater influence of the president over the political process, that direct presidential elections would entail. Noting that an elected president facing re-election after five years in office would inevitably have more political influence than previous heads of state who were elected by the Parliament for seven years, the ruling AK Party advocated the expansion of the president's constitutional mandate. In line with this thinking, the party officially proposed that the country replace its parliamentary regime with a presidential system during all-party talks on the drafting of a new constitution between 2011 and 2013. (4) Prime Minister Erdogan, in his capacity as AK Party chair man, later announced that they would be willing to settle for semi- presidentialism or a party-affiliated presidency if the opposition parties were willing to cooperate with the ruling party on other issues. (5) Claiming that Erdogan sought to transform the political system for his personal interests as future president, the opposition protested the plan and refused to negotiate on the matter. (6)

In the absence of an agreement between the AK Party and the opposition over proposed changes to the president's constitutional mandate, a number of public figures, including Parliament speaker Cemil Cicek, warned that the existing institutional arrangement paved the way for future clashes between presidents and prime ministers over political power and would leave the political process vulnerable to frequent crises. (7) Despite such warnings, divisions continued as the AK Party called for a stronger presidency with party ties while the opposition vehemently opposed all reform efforts to keep Erdogan from establishing complete control over the political process. Assuming that the Prime Minister would insist on expanding his power if elected president, the opposition simultaneously focused their attention on preventing an Erdo?an presidency.

To be sure, efforts to curb the Prime Minister's popularity and discourage him from pursuing the presidency date back to the 2011 parliamentary elections. A case in point was the 2013 Gezi Park protests (8) where an almost exclusive focus on Erdogan was identified by opposition parties and political commentators as an attempt to derail the Prime Minister's presidential bid. (9) Six months later, as political parties slowly geared up for the upcoming local elections, the Gulen Movement launched a potentially devastating campaign against Prime Minister Erdogan and his government and sought to dictate their terms to the political leadership. A surprisingly aggressive anti-government campaign, which dominated public debate between the initial breakout on December 17, 2013 and the local elections on March 30, 2014, rested on allegations that Erdogan and his government had been involved in widespread corruption. To corroborate the Gulenist account of government misconduct, anonymous sources uploaded illegally acquired surveillance data and doctored video footage on social media outlets. The smear campaign sought to present Prime Minister Erdogan as a corrupt, authoritarian politician who was no longer able to keep a lid on widespread discontent.

A series of operations since December 17 aimed to shed doubt on the AK Party's commitment to its decade-long agenda of fighting corruption, poverty and exclusion and garner support from other anti-government groups that sought to capitalize on the Gezi Park protests. (10) Statements from supporters of the anti-government campaign indicate that they attempted to link the AK Party with corrupt center-right parties of the past in order to discredit the government. Implicating the Gulen Movement as the driving force behind the attacks was the timing of the operations (i.e., immediately after a public fallout between the government and the Gulenists over plans to shut down prep schools, a vital source of recruits and revenues for the movement) as well as repeated public statements from the Journalists and Writers Foundation (GYV), the movement's flagship institution where Fethullah Gulen himself serves as honorary president. (11) In light of the Gulen Movement's overt involvement in the affair, Turkish and international media outlets alike referred to the December 17 operation as a power struggle between the group and the country's government. Meanwhile, Gulenist news outlets reduced the campaign to a question of corruption in an attempt to alienate AK Party supporters from the political leadership. Similarly, Fethullah Gulen's public addresses indicated that the group primarily targeted the Prime Minister as opposed to his party. The idea, therefore, was to create necessary conditions for Erdogan to take a hit in the local elections and deprive him of the political momentum necessary to win the presidential race in August 2014.

It was against the backdrop of the interplay of these extra-parliamentary forces that the 2014 local elections effectively turned into a vote of confidence for Prime Minister Erdogan and his government. Traditionally, a number of factors including local divisions and the lack of an electoral threshold caused the AK Party to perform worse in local elections than national races; while the party won 42 percent and 38.8 percent of the vote in the 2004 and 2009 local elections, respectively, it dominated the parliamentary elections immediately succeeding these races--47 percent in 2007 and 50 percent in 2011. As such, a landslide victory for the ruling party in local ballots, paradoxically, gave Erdogan the upper hand prior to...