That it came in first in Sunday's nationwide local elections only after slipping several percentage points in voters' estimation does not seem at first glance violent enough turbulence to force the political pundits off automatic pilot. If anything needs explaining, it is how the country's most respected polling organizations came to the eve of the ballot conclusion that the AK Party might continue to defy economic gravity. However, the party has grown used to uninterrupted progress. There was a note of pain and incredulity in the prime minister's late night speech when he lamented that a hard-working mayor from Antalya had his majority overturned. I suspected some of his supporters might have finally gone to bed with the uncomfortable feeling that, like some ancient empire no longer able to expand, the party's fortunes might be tipping into decline. By the same token, an opposition conditioned to accept defeat has suddenly been presented with the novel frisson that victory might be within its reach. Although the AK Party held the İstanbul municipality with a higher than national average, there were moments during the tally when it almost seemed as if Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu from the Republican People's Party (CHP) might have grabbed the prize. In the far-flung neighborhood of Maltepe, the CHP ousted the sitting AK Party mayor. The victory in Antalya was in its way more telling: The city rallied to support as mayor the medical professor who, by rights, should have been appointed rector of the university (he won the most faculty votes), but who was turned down under the procedures of the Higher Education Board (YÖK) by the Turkish president. The government was forced to cross off its wish list the hope of capturing Turkey's third largest city, İzmir. Its most dramatic disappointment was in the Southeast, where it lost cities like Siirt and Van to the Kurdish nationalist Democratic Society Party (DTP) and saw the DTP soar out of reach in the metropolitan city of Diyarbakır.
One concern (I expressed it myself) going into the election was that Turkey was in danger of becoming a one-party state with a gnat-like opposition buzzing but incapable of posing a real challenge. Certainly the results confirm that Turkish society wants a multi-party democracy and will reward the party that reaches out to the grass roots and provides realistic hope. At the same time it would be wrong to exaggerate the scale of the defeat. If Sunday's election were repeated in a general election, the government would still have a secure working majority. However, the prime minister himself confessed the need to learn from the party's mistakes. The question is, what lessons will it learn?
Shortly before the election, canvassers for the AK Party appeared at my door, and even though I don't actually have the right to vote, they happily provided me with a strange piece of campaign literature. This was a description and biography of the candidate for the Üsküdar neighborhood of İstanbul, with the injunction that I, as a fellow Üsküdarian should (to repeat the national campaign slogan) "THINK BIG." The slightly odd thing is that this message was printed on a package of Turkish coffee, sizeable enough to keep a family awake for a week. The suggestion that I should be broadening my vision was being undermined by the subtext that my candidate wouldn't mind if I remained a wee bit petty and could be cajoled into casting a vote in exchange for a cup of Java. I cite this experience as shorthand for what I suspect is a new mood of suspicion among voters that the government is toying with their affections, concentrating on spin, not substance.
The hope has been expressed by different contributors to this opinion page that last Sunday's election was an obstacle the government had to overcome in order to proceed with a program of reform. Now that the poll is over -- and before the preparations for a general election begin -- it is time for the government to show its mettle. Certainly to regroup from last Sunday's election it needs, in its own words, to "think big."
