Some observations on the March 28, 2004 municipal elections in Turkey:

  1. AKP has strengthened its electoral mandate by increasing its votes from 34% in 2002 general elections to 42.1 % in this past municipal election. It received more votes than the next three parties combined. AKP now clearly owns the electoral center.
  2. Turkish voters have rewarded AKP’s service-focused approach to politics and penalized the main-opposition CHP’s reliance on the etatist-secularist ideology and poor municipal record. Some well-publicized cases of influence peddling pointing at some AKP officials did not seem to have made a dent in the voters' choices at all.
  3. On March 28, 2004 many Turkish voters in effect have said “we really don’t care if some of our politicians question secularism, favor a religious lifestyle and have their wives and daughters cover their heads with turban, or some others are implicated in corruption scandals and cover-ups. We do not think these things matter a whole lot as long as our roads are paved, our water is running, public parks are in good order, the trash is collected on time, public transportation is cheap and available, municipalities continue their welfare programs for the poor – in short, as long as the municipalities work like the service organizations that they should be.”
  4. CHP’s loss in the Mediterranean resort city of beautiful Antalya, the hometown of its chairman Deniz Baykal is a clear indication of CHP’s continuing erosion. For some reason it reminded me of Al Gore losing his home state Tennessee in the year 2000 Presidential election in USA. Not good and downright embarrassing.
  5. Top-two of the three largest Turkish cities continue to be dominated by AKP (44.9% in Istanbul and a whopping 55.0% in Ankara). Izmir continues to be CHP’s bright star where the party received 47.2% of the votes. Ahmet Pristina’s resounding victory in Izmir shows that voters actually reward performance even when the candidate represents the CHP.
  6. In 81 mayoral races held in 81 provinces, conservative AKP won 58 of them, social-democrat CHP won 8. Others: social-democrat SHP (in coalition with pro-Kurdish DEHAP) 5, nationalist MHP 4, social-democrat DSP 3, conservative DYP 1, pro-Islamist SP 1, Independent 1 (Ardahan).
  7. Oddity 1: In the Black Sea province of Sinop, AKP won the mayoral election by a single vote.
  8. Oddity 2: Tunceli was the only Turkish province that elected a woman as mayor - from the SHP ticket. Why did AKP and CHP not produce a single female mayor?
  9. CHP, Turkish Republic’s first and the oldest party founded by Ataturk himself, is still far away from understanding and/or publicly admitting its failure. CHP leader Deniz Baykal actually announced that March 28 was a “victory” for the party since with 18.2 % of the votes it came in second. According to Baykal, comparing 2002 general elections to 2004 municipal elections is like comparing apples to oranges and the real comparison should be between this one and the April 1999 local elections when CHP received 11.8% of the votes. Thus Baykal reasoned that CHP actually has “increased” its votes by 8% ! But by the same logic, as Hurriyet’s Oktay Eksi has demonstrated, one has to admit that AKP has actually “increased” its votes by a full 43% since it did not even exist back in 1999. Even if one regards the now-defunct Virtue Party as the “predecessor” of AKP, that still translates to an increase of 26% in VP-AKP composite votes. On that account CHP still falls short of the mark. As to “comparing apples with oranges,” the municipal elections of 1999 and 2004 are not the same fruits at all since 40% of the 20 parties that participated in this election did not even exist back in 1999. So Baykal is not on firm ground in that regard either. CHP’s self-denial continues.
  10. CHP senior officials have blamed the failure on the media for not giving adequate coverage to CHP’s views. Now, where would the politicians be if they did not have the media to kick around, the same media that they are so happy to use and abuse as a platform when they have anything to say? There are two weaknesses to CHP’s media argument. First of all, as in the case of Cyprus and EU, it is false that the media did not cover CHP’s views. I forgot the number of times I’ve read in the Turkish press what Baykal or Oymen or some other CHP higher-up had to say on the Annan Plan, EU membership, etc. Secondly, if the media coverage was a source of electoral failure (which the CHP does not admit to anyways) then how should one explain the modest gains registered by DYP (10.2%) and MHP (10.3%), two parties that were certainly covered a lot less than CHP by the Turkish media? How come the media neglect benefited DYP and MHP but handicapped CHP? A scapegoat is not explanation.
  11. ANAP (2.6%), Ecevit’s DSP (2.2%) and Uzan’s Genc Party (2.7%) were wiped away on March 28. AKP victory (45.8% ) in Ecevit’s hometown Zonguldak was as humiliating as losing Baykal’s Antalya to AKP. Genc Party gave the protest votes that it steered in 2002 away from DYP and MHP back to their original owners. The heavy-handed manner in which the AKP government went after the Genc Party chairman Cem Uzan and his corporate empire might have played a role in the way the voters avoided the aggressive Genc Party on March 28. And I believe ANAP has disappeared like all political entities that lose their defining boundaries and differentiating core. No one knows what ANAP stands for anymore. Thus, the exit.
  12. Milliyet’s Taha Akyol provided a sharp analysis of how ethnic-based voting suffered a setback in the Southeast where pro-Kurdish DEHAP did not live up to its own expectations. DEHAP received 4% in 1995 elections which increased to 6.2% in 2002. In March 28 municipal elections DEHAP ran on a joint ticket with SHP. Despite the SHP support its votes fell to 5%. In Diyarbakir, DEHAP’s dominance shrank from 64% (in 2002) to 58% while AKP went from 17% to 35%. The DEHAP mayors of Van, Agri, Siirt and Bingol lost on March 28 to their AKP rivals. SHP-DEHAP coalition won in Adiyaman where AKP was not on the ballot. SHP-DEHAP registered impressive gains only in Hakkari and Batman.
    Akyol interprets these numbers as follows:
    “The narrowness of ethnic nationalism is felt by DEHAP’s rank and file as well. Because we also have other important identities and needs beside our ethnic identities and needs.
    AKP’s conservatism and democratic reformism succeeded in pulling votes away from DEHAP’s base constituency and thus has contributed to ‘political integration’ which is a dimension of the ‘national integration’ process. 79% of DEHAP members are against women covering their heads with (the Islamic headgear) turban. This means that the liberal and conservative values do have a positive role in the national integration process. One of Turkey’s most serious problems is this fact’s denial by CHP and the official ideology.”
  13. One thing I could not yet ascertain is whether the pro-Islamist “National View” candidates in Erbakan’s defunct Welfare-Virtue-Party mold have managed to win in significant numbers on the AKP ticket. If that is the case it could become a liability for AKP in the future. AKP has managed to allay at least some of the fears in the Turkish public regarding its presumed “Islamist agenda” by pressing on with a pro-Western, pro-EU foreign policy and a “democratic reformism” at home to which Taha Akyol has referred. Revival of the divisive and confrontational “Nationalist View” agendas in Turkish municipalities may trigger the same fears once again.
  14. And the “Most Radical Commentary Award” goes to … Ahmet Altan who interpreted the March 28, 2004 elections as “the end of the Ittihatcilik (Committee of Union and Progress) ideology that has shaped the last era of the Ottoman Empire and the first era of the Turkish Republic.”