Misperceptions and the healing touch of democracy

Yet the same government has been place since its electoral victory in 2002 and no substantial alteration has taken place in the basic tenets of the regime. However, the fear that such a danger is imminent has to be sociologically accounted for. Looking at the banners carried by the crowds; there is considerable resentment against the US and the EU. This could be indicative of the frustration of the Turkish middle class, who feel left out of the global process they wish to be part of.

If so their wrath is misguided, because the AK Party has brought Turkey closer to Western organizations, legal and economic standards than any other “secular” government in recent Turkish history.

Then could it be a power struggle between the new center and the old center? Indeed the AK Party has been instrumental in bringing peripheral social groups to the political and economic center in recent years, while the old and mainly bureaucratic center has become obsolete and increasingly dysfunctional because they could not read internal and global changes.

The old center now wants to regain its hold on politics as well as its waning privileged position. Within this context the old center perceived a great danger to its power and privilege (you can read this as its raison d’etre) and took the opportunity to exert itself through the military manifesto and drawing on the fears of the middle class that feels unrepresented, unguided and increasingly insignificant in politics.

What gave the opportunity to the military and the old-guard is the likely election of AK Party deputy Abdullah Gül, the current foreign minister. For the old center that identifies itself as “secularists,” the monopolization by the AK Party of all state positions -- the president, prime minister, and parliamentary president -- was too much.

The demonstrations that have mobilized considerable urban masses, supported by a memorandum of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), which issued a declaration that made three things unequivocally clear:

1- The AK Party may have the parliamentary majority but it draws on a minority popular support that has been artificially inflated because of the flawed election system. The current election system favors those parties that receive more votes than the others. Furthermore the 10 percent election threshold not only squanders an enormous amount of votes (45 percent in the latest elections) but also adds more weight to the gains of those parties that surpass the threshold by offering them the votes cast for the losers.

2- Drawing on this exaggerated gain, the AK Party had translated its electoral success to having two thirds of the seats in Parliament. Given the constitutional rule that the Parliament elects the president, now the AK Party is on the brink of adding the presidency to its spoils. Now they would control the legislature, the government and if they acquire (or usurp, as many think) the presidency -- which elects high court judges -- they cannot be stopped or challenged. They will take complete control of the state apparatus. Given the weakness of civil society and the incomplete division of powers, there is no way of containing the AK Party.

3- It is no secret that the AK Party started out representing the conservative peripheral social cohorts. Religiosity is at the core of conservatism. When the AK Party moved to the center by means of the electoral process, religiosity and symbols associated with it such as the headscarf became more visible in the public sphere. This visibility was met with panic by the old center and expressed as a danger to the secular regime.

However, none of the old guard explained where these people came from. On the other hand, some of the AK Party members had suffered from the teething problems of power wielding and made rash statements such as “democracy is not and end but only a means” or “secularism must be debated” in the early phases of their of public appearance. These were enough to keep them under surveillance and to fuel the fears of the secular urban classes, although the AK Party government did nothing significant to kindle this suspicion, except perhaps appointing like-minded officials to important government posts. But then every government in Turkey has been accused of partisanship and nepotism.

It is because of these reasons that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s most powerful and popular politician, could not break through the popular and official (read this as bureaucratic) opposition to be a presidential candidate, although he was unrivalled. Instead he nominated Mr. Gül, whose candidacy was also challenged by the military for the same reasons. Otherwise, being quite an amiable person and a successful foreign minister, he had a better chance than most candidates of all leanings.

Two things sparked the public uproar that was voiced by the military, which always saw itself as the guardian of the secular system in Turkey, and intervened with no concern to democratic principles. For the Turkish military the integrity of the regime was more important than democracy. Ironically, democracy is perceived as equally instrumental by the TSK as the putative challengers of the secular system.

Another reason for opposition to Mr. Gül’s candidacy by the old center was the way in which Mr. Gül’s candidacy was announced. His candidacy was neither conferred with other political forces nor was he popularly sounded. The AK Party left the nomination of the presidential candidate to its leader, Prime Minister Erdoğan. He exercised this methodologically unorthodox prerogative by virtually nominating the next president.

Now that the political crisis created around the presidential elections has been halted by calling for early national elections before it grew into a regime crisis, can we analyze what happened in Turkey, which is considered a shining example of reconciling a predominantly Muslim population with a secular state? An alternative question may be as follows: How easily could forces that have no political accountability to the electorate interrupt the democratic process?

These questions gained urgency, especially after two mass demonstrations held in Ankara and İstanbul and the threatening memorandum posted on the military’s Web site in between the two protests that made it obvious it will not tolerate the AK Party’s full grip on the state apparatus by winning the presidential elections.

This means no matter how democratic the election process is and how diligently legal procedures are abided by, the army as the voice of the secular establishment is not willing to tolerate a president elected by the AK Party, which is suspected of harboring a fundamentalist agenda and waiting for the opportune time to implement if. Otherwise, in a fully mature democracy, where souls and minds would not be so polluted against the presidential candidate of the AK Party, Mr. Gül’s election would have been a foregone conclusion.

Is this really a concrete danger to the secular way of life, which has not actually been directly challenged by the AK Party’s four years in government? Or is the current tension due to the power struggle between the elected and the appointed? The bureaucracy in Turkey was always felt to be the self-appointed protector of the regime, which is mainly defined by two tenets: the republic and secularism. If even the theocratic regime of Iran is a republic, then it is not the republic that is under threat.

If less than 10 percent (in fact, 8 percent) of the populace see Shariah law as a better legal system and a government that has adopted it as a better way of governance (according to 2006 research from the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, TESEV), there also can be no clear and present danger in this respect. Then signs and symbols of religious preferences, such as the headscarf, piety and religious rhetoric are conveniently used as bogeys to scare the whole nation for an imminent takeover of fundamentalists. Could this be a cunning excuse to call the “cavalry” to save the endangered nation?

More seriously, can it be a coincidence that following the statements of the highest ranking public figures of this country (the president and the chief of General Staff), who warned us that the republic is in danger like no other time in its history, the military refused to accept the results of a presidential election that will end with an AK Party member becoming the next president? If so, we must feel safer as a nation now that Mr. Gül’s election has been derailed!

Yet there are more critical questions to be asked: Aren’t election laws that leave out 45 percent of the electorate and exaggerate the gains of the winner by putting up the 10 percent election barrier the brainchild of the Consultative Assembly, which was handpicked by the military junta that staged the 1980 coup? Wasn’t it the same assembly under the watchful eyes of the generals who laid out the procedures for electing the president of the republic and codified party law that has created satrapies rather than democratic institutions that would have been the midwife of a full-fledged pluralist democracy?

Now the same institution that has led to so much regime damage is rejecting the outcome of the laws that are of its own making. Ironically, those demonstrating on the streets look up to this institution as their savior to ward off anti-secular forces that they are made to believe threaten their lifestyles.

Yes, there are fanatics and fundamentalist around that threaten people with their obscurantist deeds and rhetoric. But how big is this group? Moreover, who has put an end to elective religious training in middle schools? Unfortunately, it was the choice of the military to initiate obligatory education in junior high and high schools as a bulwark against the growing leftist movement that was the fear of the Cold War. It is now the same institution that is complaining about encroachment of religion on the secular way of life.

The more conservative, parochial and peripheral groups found their way to the political and economic center by the AK Party’s success in government. By and large they found a voice and a place for themselves in the system. They looked different and acted different. But their political parties and leaders, who became obsolete and dysfunctional, have failed those demonstrators of middle and upper middle-class people. This time around the more modern urban classes feel that they are devoid of representation, leadership and a political party or platform that can offer them a future they can believe in and feel safe. That is why their protest misses the target because the AK Party is not the reason for their insecurity but perhaps the lucky winner of the system that the masses protest for not representing them and endangering their way of life. That is why the principal threat to democracy in Turkey comes not from the AK Party but from its opponents.

What we can expect now is the healing effect of the national elections, which will be accompanied with the election of the next president by popular vote and under the guidance of a new constitution that will not allow extra-legal and extra-democratic forces to intervene in the will of the people anymore.