The Republican people's party and the 2014 local elections in Turkey.

• Author: Altunoglu, Mustafa
• Position: Essay

Introduction

In Turkey, each election cycle tends to receive special attention as elections typically spark both great excitement and tensions. For months at a time, elections dominate all public debate about the country's politics while politicians, candidates and party organizations compete to impress voters. Once election results start flowing in, winners passionately embrace their success while losers face disappointment.

The special attention that elections receive may be attributed to the various persistent shortcomings of the Turkish political system's democratic credentials. In regular modern democracies, elections represent an indispensable part of the political system while the Constitution safeguards individual rights and liberties from the majority's demands and expectations. In Turkey, however, government institutions tasked with protecting the Constitution and, by extension, individual rights and liberties (i.e. checks-and-balances) traditionally served another set of priorities--the protection of the state and its various institutions against a counter-revolution. In a sense, such government institutions represented safety switches that would deter and prevent elected actors from challenging the state and its red lines.

Various memorable confrontations between elected governments and the establishment in the Republic's history, including the 1960 military coup, the 'postmodern' coup of 1997 and the 2007 'e-coup,' reflected the aforementioned sense of protecting the state and the constitutional order against challenges and constituted the cornerstone of Turkey's infamous guardianship regime. This self-proclaimed role of the establishment historically justified a broad range of interventions in the political process as a necessary and, in some cases, mandatory act. The execution of ousted Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in 1961, for instance, represented one of the most extreme measures that the elites took over past decades. A series of controversial rulings by the Constitutional Court, coupled with various incidents where elected governments were forced to resign, would fit into the same category. While the Republic's history could offer numerous other examples of the sort, the point is that the establishment has traditionally chosen to serve and protect the state as opposed to the people, and turned a blind eye to elections and civilian politics at their own convenience.

Against the backdrop of repeated transgressions against electoral processes and civilian politics in Turkish history, both ordinary citizens and politicians attributed a special importance to the ballot box. For the general population, elections served as the only instrument within their means to influence the country's affairs. Similarly, the ballot box has traditionally offered a channel for the masses to stand against the aforementioned defamation of their representatives. In response, politicians often found that they could only rely on popular support in their pursuit of power and influence within the political system. (1) It is therefore that elections, local or national, remain of critical importance to this day.

Turkey's democratic shortcomings would also account for the widespread treatment of various local elections in past years, as well as in March 2014, as a national affair. Since 1960, local elections typically had repercussions beyond the limits of local races and therefore assumed the role of a referendum or a vote of confidence for successive governments. Simply speaking, local elections in Turkey either served as a nationwide opinion poll during the lead-up to national elections or represented a vote of confidence for the ruling party/ coalition government in the aftermath of national elections. (2)

In March 2014, two factors were influential over the local elections' treatment by voters and commentators as a matter of national politics. First and foremost, local issues rapidly lost their relevance to voters as political tensions, which became visible during the Gezi Park protests and grew more intense after the government was hit with corruption allegations on December 17, 2013, peaked right before election day. Secondly, the upcoming presidential race in August 2014 and subsequent parliamentary elections in 2015 further reduced the influence of local races and candidates over voter behavior. In light of these elements, it is possible to argue that all political parties deliberately brought national issues to the forefront of their campaigns in an attempt to test their strength prior to two key national elections over the next 18 months.

While almost all political commentators in Turkey made the case that the March 30 elections had to do more with national matters than local politics, it is worth noting that such a claim seems to discredit the various components of electoral behavior by exclusively relying on overarching national debates. In other words, assessments of the local elections without due attention to local concerns, policy issues and candidates would inevitably fall short of presenting an accurate and complete portrayal of the election results. (3)

Contextualizing the March 30 Local Elections

The outcome of the 2014 local elections reaffirmed the simple fact that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which won all elections since its establishment in 2001, remains considerably more popular than its competitors. With the exception of a handful of electoral districts, the ruling party either won or finished second in local races across the nation, while support for opposition parties was concentrated in only certain parts of the country.

Election results in Turkey and elsewhere tend to reflect their political, economic and sociological context which in turn carries traces of historic trends. In this sense, the specific context of the 2014 local elections represented a mix of structural elements (i.e., Turkish political culture including the country's historic quest for secularization and national unity), last summer's urban revolts and tensions between the AK Party government and the Fethullah Gulen Movement which became public in late 2013.

In the Republic's history, secularization represented an effort by the ruling elites to transform both state and society with reference to the Enlightenment ethos, which seeks to eliminate the influence of religion and traditional culture over everyday life and reshape routine practices according to Western standards. National unity, in this context, refers to the elites' reliance on nationalist ideology to create a homogeneous nation. In Zygmunt Bauman's words, the 'gardening' state seeks to eliminate and uproot all forms of diversity. (4) Just like secularization, the quest for national unity entailed repeated interventions by the state in everyday life. Against the backdrop of these practices, both the AK Party and the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) represent social forces that are fundamentally opposed to such interventionism.

Starting with the initial attempts (such as the Progressive Republican Party of the mid-1920s) to establish a multi-party democracy in Turkey, the above-mentioned circumstances contributed to the emergence of all the CHP's political opponents as the center of attention for the general population. As the Republic's founding party refrained from revising its role as the representative of the establishment seeking to dominate social and political life in the country, the majority of the population instead sided with a series of center-right parties, including the Democratic Party of the 1950s, the Justice Party of the 1960s and 1970s, and the AK Party. The most recent election results reaffirmed that similar sentiments maintain their influence over Turkish society today.

Moreover, the Gezi Park protests and recent tensions between the Gulen Movement and the AK Party emerged as centerpieces of the political context of the local elections as both conflicts created the expectation that the opposition front would become more active. While last summer's urban revolts portrayed the AK Party as an ever-authoritarian political movement seeking greater influence over individuals' lifestyles, the Gulen Movement launched an attack against the government on December 17, 2013 in the form of corruption charges and leaked sound recordings. Meanwhile, the movement announced prior to the elections that its members would support the AK Party's leading challengers in local races across the nation and sought to motivate the opposition front. The election results, however, made it clear that the opposition failed to meet its objectives. In light of the above, this study seeks to analyze the outcome of the 2014 local elections with reference to the main opposition, the CHP.

The CHP's Advantages and Disadvantages in the Lead-Up to the Local Elections

Ever since Turkey became a multi-party democracy in the 1940s, the CHP has experienced several losses against its competitors and therefore became nearly a constant part of parliamentary opposition. Despite various initiatives that the party developed to perform better in elections, such attempts proved futile to a large extent. The fact that ideological and organizational changes failed to deliver expected results represents another interesting phenomenon. (5) Despite discouraging results, however, experimenting with alternative political...