This was published 9 years ago
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan should quit, but don't hold your breath
By Paul McGeough
Washington: There's something in the political air in Turkey that we've not sensed in a long while – the notion that with risk, there is consequence.
So how does the nation's president and former prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan respond to the humiliation of Sunday's national vote, a poll all about him even though he was not a candidate?
A supporter of the People's Democratic Party (HDP) celebrates in Diyarbakir.Credit: AFP
Without a parliamentary majority, his Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym AKP, now confronts a walk on the wild side – either it soldiers on as a minority government which will achieve little, or it calls another election – and maybe takes a bigger thumping than it did on Sunday.
There's talk of a coalition government. But while they will be tempted privately, all three likely candidates as bedfellows for the AKP have publicly sworn off – and certainly won't change their minds as long as Erdogan sticks to his grandiose imitation of the scam that Vladimir Putin pulled off in Moscow, making all politics about himself while shifting between the offices of prime minister and president.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has found that you can't fool all the people all the time.Credit: AP
The election campaign was marked by a classic Erdogan manoeuvre: first create a bogy - in this case a Western and Jewish conspiracy bent on defeating the AKP - and then propose vastly expanded presidential powers as the only policy to see off the plotters.
It was the same with his official residence. Claiming it was infested by cockroaches, he insisted on a new $US615 million ($804.8 million) presidential palace that dwarfs both the White House and Buckingham Palace.
By most counts, the AKP is 18 seats short of a parliamentary majority. A coalition with either the arch-secularist, Kemalist Republican People's Party (CHP), the far-right National Movement Party (MHP) or the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) - each of which now has more than 80 seats - would get Erdogan over the line.
Could the AKP be relied on to respect the policies of a junior coalition partner? Hardly. Yet, the position of the MHP and the HDP is intriguing - each could seriously entertain coalition with the AKP, if only to thwart the policies of the other on the rights of Turkey's newly empowered Kurdish minority.
The lavish new presidential palace in Ankara, Turkey.Credit: New York Times
After more than a decade in which Erdogan consolidated power and finally overreached, this election is proof again that while you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
But that point seems to have been missed by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a puppet whose strings are controlled by Erdogan. Davutoglu chose to lecture the other parties: "Nobody should make a victory out of an election they lost – the winner is the AK Party."
A man wounded in an attack on an HDP rally casts his vote in Turkish parliamentary elections.Credit: AP
Hmmm. Whose previously unassailable party is desperately in need of coalition support in the wake of the vote? Which party is seriously talking of going back to the people, in a desperate hope that next time they'll get it right? Which party has just seen its founder and leader humiliated, in what one observer likened to a political nuclear explosion?
By the yardstick of its policy ambitions, the AKP lost the election. The era of Erdogan the dictator who masquerades as a democrat is over.
HDP supporters hold aloft a picture of jailed Kurdistan Workers' Party leader Abdullah Ocalan.Credit: AP
Erdogan may have tarnished the AKP's reputation as a political-religious blend worthy of emulation across the Muslim world, but Turkish voters have revealed themselves as a role model for the people of the region — should they ever genuinely enjoy a version of that luxury called democracy.
On Sunday, Turkey's electorate demonstrated a clear understanding that Erdogan's bid to switch from a parliamentary to a presidential system of government, for which he needed two-thirds of the parliament's 550 seats, was a lunge for power that would further dilute their voice at the top table.
Will Erdogan quit? Or now that his power has been questioned, will he lash out in all directions?Credit: Reuters
The performance of the predominantly Kurdish HDP, in particular, revealed a level of party and voter sophistication that must have surprised the president.
There's a brutal rule in Turkish politics, by which a party that fails to capture more than 10 per cent of the vote is deemed to have "lost" and any seats that it wins are redistributed. To avoid such punishment, candidates for the HDP and other lesser parties have in the past stood as independents.
But this year the HDP took courage. Its candidates stood in the name of a party that widened its policies to appeal to Turkey's more progressive voters. Had they fallen a whisker short of that 10 per cent threshold, their 80 seats – and a face-saving, workable majority –would have been delivered to Erdogan.
Analysts are drawing parallels between Sunday's rejection of Erdogan's grand designs and the 1950 rejection of the CHP - the party of Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk", the founder of the Turkish republic - and voters' courageous rejection, in 1983, of a party sponsored by the generals who led the 1980 coup.
Don't underestimate Erdogan. After more than a decade in power, he has entrenched his supporters at all levels of the bureaucracy.
But there are signs that Turks have had enough. The economic miracle delivered by Erdogan worked for a time and he was championed for health and transport reforms and for removing the military elite from politics.
Yet the more entrenched he has become, the less he seems to understand the notion of excess.
If the only way to command respect is to jail your critics or to open fire on them in the streets, you have a problem. If they only way to kick-start an economy is with cronyism on a scale that would make Brian Burke and the late Alan Bond blush, you are the problem.
After a drubbing such as Sunday's vote, does Erdogan check a dictionary for the Turkish equivalent of the word "chastened", or does he become like a wounded lion when cornered – lashing out at every perceived threat?
The right thing to do would be for him to resign. But it's been some years since Erdogan did the right thing.