Saturday evening, we thought we knew for certain what these elections were all about. It was a referendum not just on the relative standing of the political parties, but on the party leaders themselves. In that sense, it was no contest. Prime Minister Erdoğan, though not actually running for office, was depicted on poster after campaign poster, from Edirne in the west to Van in the east, lending his popularity to this candidate or that. Opposition leader Deniz Baykal, though not actually wearing his "I'm a Loser" T-shirt, also lent his image to the race, but it was hard not to imagine that the candidates on the poster weren't trying to look the other way. By Sunday evening, the Erdoğan magic appeared have lost some of its fizz. Even the prime minister confessed himself perplexed how, after visiting Antalya 28 times, the voters there could still support a rival team. In the Southeast, the prime minister's rhetoric did not work at all. People went to the polls precisely to declare that they felt patronized by the government's stance that all they needed was Kurdish television and cleaner streets and resentful that a party that had the word "Justice" in its name could dismiss demands for truth and reconciliation as ideological cant.
Even so, Mr. Erdoğan's oratory stood him in good stead. Fellow columnist Hüseyin Gülerce, a man with a canny feel for the middle road, sat across from me on an election night panel of pundits and declared that had it not been for the prime minister's outburst in Davos, the party might have lost another 5 percentage points. The challenge the opposition still faces is how to deal with the prime minister's effortless political instincts. Mr. Baykal's strategy of butting heads has patently failed, but his party's mayoral candidate in İstanbul, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, appears to have chanced upon the far cleverer tactic. With dexterity worthy of the modern Machiavelli, Karl Rove, he tried turning the prime minister's strength into the party's weakness -- accusing his own opponent Kadir Topbaş of hiding behind the prime minister's skirts. It wasn't enough to make him win, but he certainly finished stronger than anyone might have expected. The more the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) depends on the prime minister's charisma, the more vulnerable it becomes to charges that the party itself is of little substance. And however redoubtable Mr. Erdoğan is as a political fighter, his opponents are bound to land an occasional punch.
By contrast, the Republican People's Party (CHP) is encouraged by the realization that they posed a credible challenge in İstanbul while carrying the weight of an unpopular national leader on their back. The next step would be to shed the handicap. The İstanbul party organization has done much to try to change the "exclusive" image of the CHP, of a party that looks down its nose at the lifestyle of the ordinary man. It must know the CHP was absent for over a decade in the debates that gripped the European left over the relation of state to society. The economic recession has prompted a new cycle of debate, and it would be a mistake for the CHP to sit on the sidelines of history yet again.
Mr. Erdoğan's own next move should be not to polish his own image but that of his party. The purpose of a Cabinet reshuffle should not be (as some commentators have predicted) to punish those ministers who failed to get the constituency vote. Rather it should be to convince the country -- and the world -- that the AK Party is not a one-man band. The party strategists will plausibly argue that it was the worldwide recession and not the cleverness of their opponents that caused a dip in their vote. By the same token, they must realize that the economic situation is not about to improve quickly and heed the warnings against complacency.
