Turkish Presidential & Parlimentary Elections – 24th June 2018

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Turkish Presidential Election – 24th June 2018. Another Political Crisis May Erupt In Turkey

On June 24, 2018 – pre-term presidential and parliamentary elections are taking place in Turkey.

The elections were supposed to be in November 2019. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, however, called for early elections back in April. He said that Turkey needed to “overcome uncertainty” at a troubled time in the region, amid its ongoing military operations in Syria and Iraq.

Critics, however, say the race was brought forward because Turkey’s currency and economy are suffering and the president wanted to preempt the downward trend. He may also be hoping to capitalise on nationalist sentiment after military victory in Syria, where rebels backed by Turkey defeated Kurdish militias near the border in a region called Afrin.

This is arguably the most important election in Turkey’s modern history. The new president will assume an office imbued with sweeping executive powers that voters narrowly approved in a constitutional referendum last year.

These include the power to issue decrees with the force of law, appoint the cabinet and vice-presidents as well as senior judges. If he wins, Erdoğan will continue to shape Turkey and its society for years to come.

Six politicians are running in the presidential election.

Incumbent President Recep Erdogan – the People’s Alliance, is an electoral alliance between Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP);

Muharrem Ince – the Republican People’s Party (CHP);

Selahattin Demirtas – the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP); In a situation labelled as blatant unfairness by activists, the HDP’s presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas has campaigned from a prison cell after his November 2016 arrest on charges of links to outlawed Kurdish militants.

After casting his ballot in his jail in the northwestern region of Edirne, Demirtas wrote on Twitter: “I wish that everyone uses their vote for the sake of the future and democracy of the country.”

Meral Aksener – the right-wing IYI (Good) Party;

Temel Karamollaoglu – the Felicity Party; has emerged as a key critic of Erdoğan even though their parties share ideological roots

Dogu Perincek – the Patriotic Party.

The presidential election can have either one or two rounds.

If a single candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, that the candidate is declared the winner.

If that does not happen, the two candidates who secured the highest number of votes in the first round will compete in the second round.

Over the past two weeks, Erdogan’s main competitor, Muharrem Ince, has enjoyed a surge in popularity. According to an opinion poll by SONAR, the CHP candidate has 31 percent of the vote, an increase of 10 percentage points compared with two weeks previously. This poll was conducted between May 29 and June 3 among 3,000 people in 26 provinces. Such popularity for a CHP candidate hasn’t been seen since the 1970s, Birgun newspaper said.

If there was a global contest for winning elections, Erdogan would see himself as the undisputed — and undefeated — heavyweight champion of the world.

In one and a half decades since his ruling party came to power, Erdogan has taken part in 12 elections — five legislative polls, three referenda, three local elections and a presidential vote — and won them all.

Known to his inner circle as “beyefendi” (sir) and to admirers as “reis” (the chief), Erdogan prides himself on being able to woo doubters with his indefatigable campaigning.

His only setback — so far — came in June 2015 elections when the AKP won the most votes but lost its overall majority for the first time.

Erdogan is losing his popularity because of a failure of the ecomonic policy of his government – mostly a high inflation and a currency turmoil (the fall of Turkish lira).

The opposition also launched a Twitter campaign telling the government and Erdogan “enough” (“tamam” in Turkish). The campaign was supported by over 600,000 people during its first day and #tamam was trending in Twitter. This campaign was launched after the Turkish president said he would “step aside if the voters tell him ‘enough’ through their votes in the upcoming snap presidential election.”

Pro-opposition activists also used “Sıkıldık” (from “Sıkıldık mı?” – “Are we bored yet?” as employed somewhat sheepishly by the president mid-way through a lengthy address to an AKP youth congress) as a Twitter catch phrase.

Erdogan supporters launched a counter-campaign #devam (“carry on” in Turkish) supporting the president and his government.

Muharrem Ince has de-facto become the main attractor of the anti-Erdogan protest sentiment. So, he may have a chance to unite both supporters of Ataturk ideas of secular Turkey [a significant part of military servicemen] and people sharing some parts of Gulen’s ideology.

Opposition parties and movements united their efforts in an attempt to remove Erdogan from the power. Their plan is to secure the second round of the presidential election. This will be possible if a joint number of votes of the opposition candidates in the first round is over 50%. This is highly likely.

However, the opposition parties should not expect that the Kurdish population would vote for Ince during the first round. However, this will not be a problem for a two-round strategy of the Turkish opposition.

“For a possible second round in the presidential election, Kurdish votes will again play an important role. It will most likely either be Meral Akşener or Muharrem İnce standing against Erdoğan in the runoff vote. Although HDP officials do not want to comment on who HDP voters would turn to in a second round, it is believed that the CHP’s İnce would have a better chance than Akşener in attracting Kurdish votes. After all, Akşener’s reputation as a former interior minister is not a good one in the eyes of most Kurdish voters. If Kurds opt to not go to vote in the second round, that would certainly work to the advantage of Erdoğan,” Serkan Demirtas writes in his article for Hürriyet Daily News.

Another indication of the consolidated strategy of the opposition is that ahead of the elections, the CHP supported the IYI Party with transfering to it 15 PMs.

In the second round, the opposition will likely support a united candidate – Ince. In this case, he will likely get serious chances to achieve a victory. This scenario is unwanted for Erdogan and his rulling party. So, he will contribute all the needed efforts to achieve victory in the first round.

If there is a kind of vote rigging, it will be highly possible that the united opposition starts massive protests against the results of the election. Thus, a reactive process could start in Turkey possibly triggering a civil conflict.

There are two main coalitions running for Parliament.

The first includes the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) of Erdoğan, which are in a coalition with the nationalists.

On the opposite side is an alliance that includes the secularists of the CHP, the breakaway nationalists of the Iyi party, and the Islamists of the Felicity party. They make strange bedfellows in a political system where secularists and Islamists have traditionally been bitter enemies, but such is the importance of these elections that former rivals have banded together to oust the president and his entourage. The HDP is running by itself.

The Turkish constitution requires that parties obtain at least 10% of the national vote to enter parliament, a law that favours larger parties. A new bill recently allowed the formation of election alliances like those described above, which will allow smaller parties like Felicity to win some seats in the legislature if their alliance as a whole crosses the 10% threshold.

If the opposition alliance performs as expected, and the HDP gets over 10% of the popular vote, the ruling AKP could lose its majority in parliament.

There is a very real possibility that Erdoğan will win the presidency but lose parliament to the opposition, which has promised to roll back the constitutional amendments passed last year.

But, under those same amendments, the president can dissolve parliament, and the legislature can call new presidential elections in response. According to some ruling party officials, that’s exactly what Erdoğan might do, which would give his party a chance at a do-over, but plunge Turkey into uncertainty.

The votes of Turkey’s Kurdish minority will be especially crucial in the parliamentary poll. If the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) wins seats by polling over the 10 percent minimum threshold, the AKP will struggle to keep its overall majority.

Voting already closed last week for Turkish citizens resident abroad, with just under 1.5 million out of just over 3 million registered voters casting their ballot, a turnout of just under 49 percent.

High security is in place across the country, with 38,480 police officers on duty in Istanbul alone. As is customary in Turkey on polling days, sales of alcohol in shops are also prohibited.

[Y

Turkey is one of the bigger Emerging Markets badly hit by investor capital outflow prior to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates due to Enrogan’s de-facto coup of the Presidency last year. This has made the country’s currency extremely inflated from loss of international confidence in the political stability of the government and financial losses from an over-reliance on oil exports and corruption within the government – much like Venezuela and Argentina.

A side issue was that Erdogan started the Syrian – Kurdish border war to bolster his position prior to the elections. However this has not solved any economic issues and as expected increased government debt from the war.

A new government will be an unknown while a win for Erdogan will only continue the economic death spiral the country is experiencing from failed policies and the crackdown on opposition parties disguised as the war on terrorism.

Either way Turkey is in for a jolly good spanking Y]

Citations
[1] https://southfront.org/another-political-crisis-may-erupt-in-turkey/
[2] https://sg.news.yahoo.com/erdogan-turkeys-pugnacious-chief-eye-history-033544167.html
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/18/turkey-elections-2018-everything-you-need-to-know

[Anonymous 12]

So will the Turkish people vote for more hardcore Islam or by the sounds of it something else that is also hardcore?

[Author]

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