The longest year of Turkish politics: 2014.

• Author: Ozhan, Taha
• Position: Essay

Some political years are longer than others. Turkey witnesses a long political year every decade or so. The first half of the 19th century had several of these long political years. In 1945, for instance, not only the world but also Turkey witnessed the worst of the Second World War. For those who lived through it, 1945 must have seemed to stretch endlessly. Or, take the year 1960. The events that precipitated the coup d'etat of May 27, 1960 must have made every single day seem like a year. Same thing could be said for the year 1971. Then, there is the year 1980--every single day of which brought a different disaster. Any of the ten years that made up the 1990s, which has since been dubbed the lost decade, could be considered the longest political year of the decade. However, the year in which Turkey experienced a post-modern coup, 1997, was probably the longest.

At the turn of the millennium, the calendar seemed to move not day by day, but hour by hour. On the one hand, there was the anxious anticipation of the invasion of Iraq and, on the other, an ever-intensifying political and economic crisis that exhausted all hope. With the November 2, 2002 elections, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) brought Turkey a single party administration, after many long political years. (1) Since then, Turkey has moved further and further away from the political diseases of the coalition(s) era. However, this did not put an end to the phenomena of long years, as 2007 was another long political year. The presidential elections of 2007, which customarily took place in May, led the country into total chaos. (2) Like all long political years, the year 2014 did not begin on January 1st; rather, 2014 politically began at the end of May with the Taksim events. Nevertheless, the year may end on an optimistic note. It could be said that, unless the date of the upcoming general elections change, the long political year of 2014 will extend to June 2015. If so, the political year of 2014 will last two calendar years. Understanding how the political year of 2014 could last two calendar years can help clarify recent political crises in Turkey.

Why is 2014 likely to be a long political year? Since the June 12, 2011 general elections, even without knowing how exactly events would unfold, it was clear that 2014 would become a very difficult political year. Turkey, with its tripartite electoral calendar, would soon experience the same undercurrents that many countries, such as the U.S., Russia, China, Iran and France, experienced simultaneously in 2012--local elections in March 2014, presidential elections in August 2014, and general elections in June 2015. The tripartite of elections appears much like a flag race. The fact that the outcomes of local, presidential and general elections become tied to each other is not an ordinary occurrence. This extraordinary turn of events is as much a result of the peculiar characteristics of Turkish politics, as it is due to Turkey's transformation under the AK Party administration. (3)

The AK Party, having prepared Turkey for the transition to a Post-Kemalist era, has made it impossible for any other political party to win as it has a base of constituency across the nation as a whole. Since it came to power in 2002, the AK Party's capacity to represent all segments of the political landscape in Turkey has been unsurpassable. Other political parties will be unable to cultivate the same capacity of cross-national representation if they do not overcome their ethnic, sectarian, secularist, psychological and political barriers that constrain them to a particular social segment. As this is unlikely in the near future, local, general and presidential elections become indicators, not of voter preferences in terms of political actors or platforms, but of the identity politics that rule Turkish politics. It is precisely due to this reason that the AK Party, which emerged victorious out of the 2014 local elections, has a high chance of achieving the same success in the 2014 presidential and 2015 general elections. As such, the claim that 2014 will witness many difficult twists and turns would not be a far fetched prophecy.

The Political Year 2014 Began in 2013

Most of 2013 was spent debating the resolution process of the Kurdish issue. In 2012, the PKK, having misread the crisis in Syria, staged multiple attacks that resulted in the death of many civilians and over a thousand of its own members. When the PKK decided to take up arms once again even as Turkey was democratizing, all hope that the Kurdish issue would be resolved through political means was lost. At a time when it seemed hopelessness, Erdogan took a brave first step. In late-2012, he announced the initiation of peace talks between the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT). (4)

Turkey's century-old Kurdish issue became an armed conflict with the emergence of the PKK after the 1980 coup d'etat. This created an impasse in Turkey in which tens of thousands of people lost their lives between 1984 and 2000. On the one hand, the military tutelage regime, with its security focused perspective, reduced the Kurdish issue to a security threat. On the other hand, Kurdish nationalism, with its leftist utopianism, sought to gain Kurdish rights through armed struggle. Until the AK Party administration, any attempt to deal with the impasse politically, or even label the problem as the "Kurdish issue," was sanctioned by the military tutelage regime. Erdogan was the first leader to have the courage to make a public statement in August 2005, in which he admitted that the state had made many mistakes in the past and declared that he would make the "Kurdish issue" his issue. In the years that followed, the AK Party found itself in a struggle against the tutelary regime for its very existence. The AK Party, having survived coup threats in 2004 and 2005, barely escaped being dissolved by the Constitutional Court in 2008. (5)

After the AK Party survived the attempt, it became the first administration that took steps towards resolving the Kurdish issue. A project, dubbed the "Initiative," was launched in 2009 and became a target for tutelary groups. The military regime, in an attempt to mobilize the masses against the AK Party, resorted to the provocative discourses of lumpen nationalism and Kemalism. Nevertheless, the Initiative played a crucial role in the resolution of the Kurdish issue. Due to the progress made by the Initiative project, citizens learned the truth beyond the official discourse that was fed to the masses by the tutelary regime through its control of the mainstream media. For the first time in history, the Turkish Parliament (TBMM) convened to discuss the Kurdish issue, which was a revolution within itself. Erdogan managed to force the public, politicians and the parliament to confront the Kurdish issue without labeling it as such.

The 2009 Initiative failed because of the PKK's anachronically ideological structure. The PKK turned a deaf ear to Erdogan's calls to 'disarm and enter the political system'. It could be said that the PKK, which had been trapped in an armed struggle for years, was disconcerted by the possibility of a political resolution. The PKK's internal conflict became more apparent in 2010 during the constitutional referendum, which was a big blow to the tutelary regime. Only a year earlier, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which replaced the DTP after it was dissolved by the Constitutional Court, boycotted the constitutional amendments that would have rendered the dissolution of political parties unconstitutional. The BDP is still unable to offer an explanation as to why it sided with the Turkish nationalists and Kemalists in its rejection of the constitutional amendments. Shortly after the boycott, the PKK took to arms and started to plan attacks once again. The attacks resulted in the deaths of both soldiers and civilians. (6) In 2011, it was revealed that the intelligence agency was engaged in peace talks with the PKK. The voice recordings that were leaked to the media proved that the state was making an effort to reach a resolution. Nevertheless, the PKK, at a time when the tutelary regime had begun to retreat and steps towards actual democratization were being taken for the first time in Turkish political history, continued its insurgency as if nothing had changed. The continued violence is as much a result of the PKK's misreading of the crisis in Syria as it is due to the Kurdish political movement's failure to build an intellectual structure to aid the PKK in distancing itself from violence.

The year 2013 began with a revolutionary intervention into the Kurdish issue and a vicious cycle of PKK attacks. The resolution process officially began in late-2012 with Erdogan's declaration of the peace talks between Ocalan and the government. The 2013 Resolution Process, contrary to the 2009 Initiative, had a specific roadmap. According to the plan, to which all parties consented, the process would have three phases: the PKK would retreat from Turkey, legal and institutional reform would facilitate a certain degree of "normalization," and the PKK would begin to disarm. Erdogan took a great risk and used all his political capital to convince the public and manage the nationalist sensibilities. Resisting Erdogan's efforts, the Kemalist and nationalist opposition parties invoked the military tutelage regime's slogans from the 1990s to oppose the resolution process. The PKK failed to retreat beyond Turkeys borders and thus did not implement the first phase. Instead, it trapped itself in the impasse of a ceasefire. Despite this issue, polls showed that more than 70% of the public still supported the resolution process. This put great pressure on the PKK and it found itself at the risk of appearing as "the actor that rejected the resolution" if it chose to take up arms...