As you all know, Erdogan and the AKP lost their majority in June. Since then the country has seemed to unravel and much of it can be laid at the feet of Erdogan.
John Hannah, a former national security advisor to Dick Cheney, wrote an article yesterday he called ‘Erdogan’s Deadly Ambitions‘, where he explains why Erdogan lost his majority, what’s happened since the election and what lies ahead for the upcoming elections on November 1st. This is a must read if you want to understand what is going on in Turkey right now and where Turkey is headed.
We break from our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this disturbing news: Turkey, a vital NATO ally, is teetering on the brink of civil war. Dormant for more than two years thanks to a 2013 ceasefire, the state’s four-decade-old conflict with the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) is again raging. The peace process that once generated such high hopes lies in tatters. Since late July, close to 1,500 people have been killed.
Here’s another news flash: The person most responsible for the resurgent violence is Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This is a political war if ever there was one, ginned up by Erdogan to salvage his political fortunes and advance his despotic agenda.
Hannah goes on to talk about how Erdogan wants to be the Sultan of Turkey and needs the AKP to do it. This presents a problem though, considering the elections didn’t go his way in June. Since then Erdogan has launched an offensive against the Kurds. Hannah explains why:
The cynicism behind Erdogan’s calculation to launch a full-scale war against the PKK is stunning. The biggest reason that the AKP lost its parliamentary majority was the fact that a pro-Kurdish party with ties to the PKK, the People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, succeeded in crossing Turkey’s 10 percent electoral threshold for the first time, leaving it with 80 seats. And the key to the HDP’s success was its ability to win over large numbers of conservative and religious Kurds who had previously supported the AKP — whether out of attraction to the AKP’s Islamist agenda or, more likely, because they saw the AKP as the party most committed to addressing Turkey’s longstanding “Kurdish problem.”
Erdogan and the AKP lost those votes for two key reasons: The first was mounting Kurdish frustration with the lack of real movement in the two-year old peace process. More and more Kurds had come to the realization that the effort was less about addressing core Kurdish demands for equal citizenship, including political decentralization in Kurdish-dominated areas of Turkey’s southeast, than it was about Erdogan’s desire to lock the Kurds in as a reliable voting bloc that would give him the majorities he needed to fulfill his increasingly despotic ambitions.
Second, Turkey’s Kurds were shocked in the fall of 2014 by Erdogan’s harsh reaction to the plight of Kobani, a Syrian Kurdish town near the Turkish border that had come under assault by the Islamic State. Knowing full well that the town’s inhabitants faced possible extinction, Erdogan at first refused to allow international assistance to flow to the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Syrian Kurdish militia defending Kobani that has close links to the PKK. Despite his supposed peace process with the Kurds in Turkey, it quickly became apparent that Erdogan viewed the rising power of Kurds in Syria as a much bigger threat than the barbarian hordes of the Islamic State. While international pressure finally forced Erdogan to allow assistance to flow and Kobani was saved, the deep sense of betrayal felt by Turkey’s Kurds was profound. Erdogan’s fundamental animosity had been laid bare. His hopes of coopting them into his Machiavellian schemes were dashed, probably irreparably.
So the AKP loses their majority because they lost the Kurdish vote. The conservative and religious Kurds realized Erdogan only wanted them for a voting block.
So like any good despot, Erdogan goes to war with the Kurds and now all hell is breaking loose. As Hannah has already pointed out, over 1500 people have already died since late July.
Erdogan has also ordered new elections because no coalition government could be formed. The new elections are scheduled for November. It looks like Erdogan is hoping that he can win back support for the AKP by rallying his country against the Kurds. This would seem like a winning strategy.
But according to Hannah, recent polling has shown that the Turkish people are wise to Erdogan’s plan and blame him for the new Kurdish conflict and the fact that no coalition government could be formed. This makes the prospects for Erdogan winning his majority back in November look somewhat slim:
Whether the Turkish people will fall for Erdogan’s machinations is far from clear. Many recent polls suggest that they might not. By large majorities, they remain opposed to his demand for an empowered presidency. They blame him for the failure of coalition talks. If anything, his anti-PKK campaign is consolidating Kurdish support behind the HDP. The chances that he will again be denied a parliamentary majority are not insignificant.
Now remember, Erdogan doesn’t just want an AKP majority, he wants a large enough majority to give him power to rewrite the Constitution and make himself Sultan. And if he can’t even win back his majority in November, it leaves big questions for what this despot will do next:
How far Erdogan will go, especially if he senses that the Nov. 1 elections will not deliver the result he demands, is anyone’s guess. An even more systematic crackdown on opposition media? Outlawing the HDP entirely as a terrorist organization? Arresting its leadership, or allowing even worse to happen to them? Using his war against the PKK as an excuse to declare a state of emergency and cancel the elections entirely? Given what he’s done already, nothing, no matter how outrageous, seems out of the question.
That’s a scary thought, indeed.
You should read Hannah’s entire article as he goes through much more than I’ve highlighted here. It’s quite the eye opener and I highly recommend it.