The election schedule was announced. As the president of an institute that has conducted innumerable studies on Turkey's sociology and politics for almost 20 years, and as a person who is well-acquainted with the country's demography along with its political actors, I find it necessary to carry out an early evaluation of the now-crystallizing opposition politics for the upcoming elections.
Since the foundation of AK Party, the Republican People's Party (CHP) has been playing the role of the main opposition, and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) represent the remaining opposition in Parliament. As the prospective electoral success of these opposition parties seems to stabilize more or less at the voting rates of 25 percent for the CHP, 14 percent for the MHP and eight percent for the HDP, no considerable change is likely to emerge from the last general election on June 2011 to the next.
While the AK Party concentrated its energy during the last phase of its political power in the resolution of the long-standing Kurdish issue, it experienced various calamities from the Gezi Park protests to the attempted civilian and economic coup of Dec. 17 and Dec. 25. Consistently renovating its success in local elections, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the AK Party's political leader, succeeded with an unquestionable voting rate of 51.8 percent to win the presidential election that was, for the first time in Turkish history, held by popular vote.
When the electoral policies of the opposition parties are examined, it is by no means difficult to make an early prediction of the results of the upcoming elections even five months before they occur. When the AK Party came to power in 2002, the true threat to its political power was the military tutelage of democratic politics. In particular, the CHP as well as the traditional civilian and military bureaucracy frequently appealed to the army in the hope of undermining the AK Party's political power. Such reliance on military intervention, along with the existence of all kinds of anti-democratic scenarios and conspiracies, led these political groups toward political inertia in producing new policies alternative to those of the government.
The policies of the ruling party for expanding the space for democracy and freedom by defying the state's traditional authoritarian policies were almost always recast by the main opposition party as an imminent threat to the main pillars of the Republican regime.
In all the elections held up to the present, the main opposition party has adopted a political stratagem that aimed at making the AK Party's ruling power illegal, rather than developing alternative policies for the long-standing problems and demands of the electorate. These native Jacobins, who consider themselves as the sole heir to the state, politics and wealth, and used to act without the electoral consent of the people, participated to each election with an almost hysterical hope and never abstained from adopting anti-democratic electoral strategies such as:
- defining the ruling political party, which stands as the greatest party of Turkey with more or less 50 percent electoral support, as an anti-systemic, illegitimate political party;
- escalating the problems of public order right before elections with the support of Ergenekon, both now and in the past that of a parallel organization;
- propagating a discourse of animosity directly toward the AK Party's leader, Erdoğan and his personality, instead of critically considering the AK Party's policies;
- not developing any considerable policy for responding to the needs and demands of people in the fields of economy, education, health, transportation and so forth;
- trying to form popular suspicion of an alleged animosity of Western countries against the AK Party's political power;
- disregarding any developments and improvements realized whatsoever in the fields of human rights, freedom of expression, liberties and democratization that were launched with Turkey's membership process to join the EU, which in fact constitutes the essence of the ruling AK Party's popular legitimacy.
