It is likely that the general election will be held in 2011. In a period of approximately one year, the AK Party government was planning to find a way to complete the Kurdish initiative before the election period. With this in mind, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has met with public figures to explain why Turkey needs to complete the Kurdish initiative.In fact, the Kurdish question is one of the most urgent problems requiring a solution. However, the opposition parties have already started developing their election strategies to turn the government’s Kurdish initiative into a matter of political referendum against the government and are expecting to push the government into a corner so that neither the Turkish nor the Kurdish voters will be happy with the government’s policies.
While the AK Party government was preparing to resume a new campaign on the Kurdish initiative, a crisis erupted in Erzurum. When the prosecutor arrested Erzurum Chief Public Prosecutor Ilhan Cihaner for his alleged connection with the Ergenekon criminal network, the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) stripped specially authorized Erzincan prosecutor Osman Sanal and three other prosecutors of their powers and decided to file a criminal complaint of abuse of power at an extraordinary meeting following Cihaner’s arrest. In response, the minister of justice, the prime minister and the president reiterated that this country urgently needs a reform package to address the problems within the judiciary.
Under these circumstances the government now needs to address the country’s two most urgent problems before the 2011 elections: the Kurdish initiative and judicial reform. The two problems are the major causes of polarization in society. The polarization occurs along the line of Kurdish vs. Turkish communities and conservatives vs. secularist elites. The polarization over the former helps the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) gain some ground among Turkish voters, yet when it comes to the polarization over judicial reform, it helps the AK Party government to regain some of its conservative constituencies.
This formula makes the MHP a critical party to maneuver around if the AK Party is to gain a strategic position. If the MHP, for the sake of gaining the support of the larger conservative vote, highlights the demand for judicial reform and becomes a frontrunner in advocating this reform, it may isolate the AK Party on the issue of the Kurdish initiative. In this case, the MHP can steal the political opportunity that the AK Party has if it successfully passes the judicial reform package through Parliament, isolating the AK Party and its Kurdish initiative.
The AK Party’s failure on the Kurdish initiative would again help the MHP to push them into a pro-Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) corner in the eyes of the larger Turkish electorate and appear as the absolute winner of the recent political crisis.
On the AK Party side, if the situation is managed correctly, as much as it loses votes from the larger segments of society, the recent political polarization could turn into a rare opportunity for the government to overcome the two critical problems and enter 2011 as a reformer. If the AK Party government manages to gain the MHP’s support for the judicial reform package and pass it through Parliament, then it would have an equal opportunity as the MHP to explain to people that they managed to get it passed.
While co-opting the MHP on judicial reform, if the government finds a way to address some of the critical problems in the Kurdish question and convinces the majority of Kurdish people that violence should be removed from Kurdish politics, in a relatively peaceful period at least until 2011, by using the state apparatus and its traditional supporters in social networks, the AK Party could also gain a significant share of the vote.
