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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Pop beats politics in Turkey
By Gareth JenkinsWith a week left before the Turkish general election on 18 April, the pro-Islamist Virtue Party (VP) and the Democratic Left Party (DLP) of incumbent Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit have emerged as the front runners in a lacklustre campaign. But there is little prospect of any of the 20 parties contesting the elections winning much more than 25 per cent of the vote and most Turks are resigned to the polls producing what will be their eighth coalition government in less than four years.
Constantly changing governments, broken promises, squabbling leaders, frequent fist fights in parliament and widespread corruption have led to an almost universal public distrust of politicians.
"The Turkish people are disillusioned with politicians in general," admitted Professor Nevzat Yalcintas, a VP candidate from Istanbul. "It has been very difficult to generate any enthusiasm for this election at all. And nobody is discussing policy. It is all slogans and accusations."
Attempts by the centre-right Motherland Party (MP), which is currently third in opinion polls, to attract young voters by starting their campaign rallies with concerts by pop star Mahsun Kirmizigul backfired, as most people left as soon as the concert was over and before the politicians took the stage. This has forced campaign managers to reverse the running order in similar rallies and start with the political speeches.
One of the main reasons for an increase in support for the DLP has been Ecevit's reluctance to campaign at all. A crusty 74-year-old former social democrat who has become increasingly nationalistic with age, Ecevit was running third behind the VP and the MP. But his refusal to make political capital out of the February capture of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan and Ecevit's decision to remain in Ankara to deal with affairs of state instead of hitting the campaign trail during the recent Eid Al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, holiday have fuelled a surge in support.
"We still think we are a couple of points ahead of the DLP, but it is a lot closer than it was," admitted Temel Karamollaoglu, VP parliamentary candidate and member of the party's national executive.
But, although they will probably emerge as the two largest parties in parliament after the election, few expect the VP and DLP to cooperate and form a coalition government. Much will depend on the number of seats won by the MP and the True Path Party (TPP) of former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller. Privately, VP sources admit that their preferred coalition partner would be Ciller, who has recently shifted her political focus from Turkey's urban middle classes to the pious, conservative poor of rural areas, whose sufferings as a result of Turkey's endemic high inflation have recently been exacerbated by an economic slowdown.
Both the DLP and the MP have already indicated that they are prepared to renew an alliance that began in July 1998, when the DLP was a junior partner in a tripartite coalition led by the MP and which collapsed in November 1998.
"We would like to resume our alliance with the DLP after 18 April but the way things are going it could be us who are the junior partners," admitted a senior MP official.
Ironically, despite the lack of public interest in the election campaigns, most Turks admit that the 18 April elections could be a critical turning point in the long-running struggle for the soul of the country between Turkey's secular establishment and its grass-roots Islamist movement.
In March, the public prosecutor at the Ankara State Security Court filed a case for the closure of the VP and called for the death penalty for four Islamist politicians on the grounds that they were seeking to erode the principle of secularism enshrined in the Turkish constitution. The VP's predecessor, the Welfare Party (WP), was disbanded by the Constitutional Court in January 1998 and its leader, former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, banned from politics. On 26 March 1999, Tayyip Erdogan, the 44-year-old former VP mayor of Istanbul, and tipped by many to be the future leader of the Turkish Islamist movement, began a 10-month prison sentence for allegedly inciting religious hatred.
The VP has sworn that if it takes power after 18 April, it will abolish the laws under which the WP was disbanded and lift the bans on Erbakan and Erdogan. But the secular establishment, which is backed by Turkey's powerful military, is equally adamant that there will be no concession on the principle of secularism.
"The army supported the moves to ban the Welfare Party because it was trying to establish a religious state," said a high-ranking military source. "The Virtue Party is no different. If it comes to power it will try to do the same and we shall stop it. We'd prefer this to be within the system but a direct military intervention remains an option of last resort."
While it acknowledges that the military would prefer to see a DLP-MP government, the VP dismisses suggestions that the military could stage a coup. "If the people vote us into power at the elections, the hard-line secularists will protest and make a lot of noise. But that's all," said a leading VP official. "The military cannot oppose the will of the people. It wouldn't dare."
