Opinion
Auust 15, 2002
Year 13 No. 305

Early Elections in Turkey
M. Orhan Tarhan - After considerable controversies, the Turkish Parliament or The Turkish Grand National Assembly voted to hold early elections in Turkey on November 3. 2002. This threw all the so-called secular parties into a turmoil. Those of them who were part of the ruling coalition suspect strongly that their miserable performance during their ruling years will cause them to get less than 10 % of the national vote, thus eliminate them from the election. There are other parties whose vote estimates hover around 10 %. It is very iffy that they will send any one to the Parliament. The only party who feels fairly certain to receive considerably more than 10 % is the religious party. Actually there are some polls that forecast sufficient vote for the religious party (AKP) to form a government just by itself. This is a sad commentary on the unwise policies of the government that did not close the Imam-Preacher schools and on the childish behavior of the secular party bosses who cannot merge their parties by twos and threes to surpass the vote of the religious party.

Anyway, the election will not indicate the National Will, because in the present rule of Partycracy, sovereignty belongs to party bosses and not to peoples. The people do not have the right to elect those who represent them in the parliament. Those representatives are appointed by party bosses and people vote for parties and indirectly rubber-stamp party bosses' appointments. The Grand National Assembly made all sorts of amendments to the constitution to open the doors of Europe, but insisted in not changing the election law, that could have transferred the sovereignty back to the people , where it belongs.

There is one person, the economist Kemal Dervish, who has seen the writing on the wall and has campaigned to unite all the left-leaning parties under the same umbrella, so that (a) they may escape the Guillotine of the 10 % threshold, and (b) they may come together to power by surpassing the vote of the religious party. He did not succeed, because political parties in Turkey are not political organizations around a set of ideas, but they are the personal property of certain politicians whose dictionary does not contain the word "cooperation". It is reported that Mesut Yilmaz, the boss of the Motherland Party, is trying to merge with Tansu Ciller's True Path Party but is faced with a condition that she should be the prime minister in the joint government. Mrs. Ciller has been known to be ignorant of geography and a few other things, but I am surprised to learn that she is also ignorant of the Constitution. No one can promise her the prime Minister's job, it is the President of the Republic who decides that. It is very interesting to watch whether those party bosses will sacrifice part of their egos to merge with like-minded parties to survive or will lead their parties over the cliff of the 10 % threshold.

If the religious party ends up with the highest level of the national vote, the constitution will require the President Ahmet Necdet Sezer to offer the prime minister's job to the boss of the religious party , unless he finds any excuse to offer it to the second highest vote-getter. If the religious party boss becomes prime minister, and proceeds to dismantle the reforms of Ataturk, then the Military will think that it is more important to save the secular republic than to be admitted into the European Union, and it will surely force the religious prime minister out of the government, as it did to Necmettin Erbakan a few years ago. Actually, such an action would no longer be a reason for refusing Turkey's membership to the EU, because the atmosphere in Europe has changed considerably after September 11. Recently, the European Human Rights Court found it fully justified that the Turkish Constitutional Court had decided to close the previous religious party. It said that "Democracy and the Sharia may not exist at the same time. There can be no democracy under the Sharia."

Thus, the political atmosphere in Turkey will be in considerable turbulence, even after the election.

Turkey is condemned to muddle through with ridiculous coalitions of rightists and leftists parties until the election laws are changed. Such coalitions are by nature do-nothing governments, Turkey should abandon proportional representation and reinstitute primary election of candidates for "peoples' representatives" in so-called "narrow districts" That is a system that worked well in this country for over two hundred years. That would save Turkey from Partycracy.