Turkish voters reasserted their commitment to democracy in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. More than 86 percent of them cast ballots, a level of participation far above the 57 percent turnout posted by Americans in 2012. The Turks made clear they would not allow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an increasingly authoritarian leader, to amass even more power, denying him a parliamentary majority while voting in significant numbers for a party representing the Kurdish minority.
This was a resounding rebuke for Mr. Erdogan, who now faces the task of assembling a coalition government. He turned the election into what amounted to a referendum on himself and, in the end, emerged gravely tarnished, even though he remains president as well as the country’s most formidable politician.
His Justice and Development Party, also known as A.K.P., entered the election with 327 seats in the 550-seat parliament. It emerged with 258. This is the first time in 13 years that his party has not had a majority. The results also mean that Mr. Erdogan has nowhere near the votes needed to seek the constitutional changes he wanted to endow his office with even greater powers.
Mr. Erdogan once seemed to offer a different future in which his Islamist party would be an enlightened advocate for enhancing democracy as well as the rights of religious minorities in a Muslim-majority nation. Turkey is a NATO ally and for a while took important steps to advance those freedoms in pursuit of a potential membership in the European Union.
But Mr. Erdogan has veered sharply off the democratic path, crushing efforts to challenge or limit his powers. He reacted with excessive force to peaceful protests in 2013 and was dogged by a corruption scandal. He mishandled regional issues. His obsession with overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad of Syria caused him to allow jihadists to cross from Turkey into Syria to join the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. His refusal to field integrated defense systems and make military bases available to the American-led coalition against ISIS has raised doubts about Turkey’s commitment to NATO.
Under his tough-guy image lay the thinnest of thin skins. He has a long history of intimidating and co-opting the Turkish media, but grew more desperate and vicious in the closing weeks of the campaign, filing bogus criminal complaints against opposition newspapers and describing the pro-Kurdish party, the People’s Democratic Party or H.D.P., which backed the first openly gay candidate, as controlled by terrorists and homosexuals.
Mr. Erdogan has long benefited from a weak political opposition. But this time, H.D.P. put up serious competition, receiving 13 percent of the vote, more than enough to be represented in Parliament for the first time, with 80 seats. The party not only provided an outlet for secularists, women and others unhappy with Mr. Erdogan but also enabled the Kurds, an ethnic minority that waged a bloody insurgency against the state for 30 years, to take on an important new role as political power brokers.
The weeks ahead are likely to be unstable and uncertain, and new elections may be necessary if a coalition government cannot be formed.
Even if one is formed, formidable challenges remain: a stalled economy, two million Syrian refugees living in camps within Turkey’s borders, the Islamic State just over the horizon in Syria and Iraq, and troubled relationships with the Turkish Kurds and the West that need repairing. The country can ill afford protracted indecision.
Source: NYTimes