Etyen Mahçupyan in Akşam reminds that in 2002, after AKP won its first election, he predicted that the party was going to score at least four consecutive election victories. If we honor this prediction, the AKP is going to win the 2019 election as well. The reason is simple. This movement is the vector of the sociological change that became visible in Turkey from the beginning of the 1990s. The party’s vote potential hovers between 35 and 55 percent, and if the “right” things are done, it will not stop at 55 percent.  The AKP’s successful performance in the management of the economy, its health, urban and infrastructure policies have converted this “new” movement toward conservatism into a modern middle class movement as well, and it has consolidated its voter base. This is the fundamental reality of the last fifteen years in Turkey. Turkey’s future depends on the AKP doing the “right things.” When the AKP does the right things, other parties become insignificant. That is because AKP is an authentic reality that connects the past to the future, and the local to the global…

Kadri Gürsel on the Diken news site writes that the election results are very easy to analyze: By creating an atmosphere of terror and chaos prior to the November 1 election, conservative and nationalist voters who had started to ask for political change were persuaded to abandon this demand in favor of authoritarian status quo. The tactic worked perfectly. Now, the regime is going to have a difficult time; it is faced with a major problem – the fight with PKK – that it will have to try to figure out how to end. As a consequence of regional political developments, the bar for a solution has now been raised; it is no longer possible to return to the parameters of the previous “solution process” with the Kurdish movement. In short, the regime won the election not by reducing the problems of this country, but by exacerbating them. Unless the terror problem is not dealt with successfully after the election, the regime and its party are going to be hurt. AKP has already forfeited its ability to deal with these issues, so it is in any case impossible for the party to maintain the hormone-conflated November 1 election result. The trend of decline is going to continue one way or the other.

By Gareth H. Jenkins

November 10th, 2015, The Turkey Analyst

The November 1 general election was a victory for the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rather than for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Although he is likely to try to use the AKP’s parliamentary majority to try to push ahead with his plans for an autocratic presidential system, the result showed that he has no popular mandate for one.

By Halil Karaveli

November 3rd, 2015, The Turkey Analyst

The combination of military and deep state operations has rescued the power of the AKP, restoring its majority in parliament. Now, it is in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s interest to call back the army from the Kurdish areas and offer the Kurds some kind of carrot, after wielding the stick has had the desired effect. The future stability of the AKP regime is to a significant extent going to depend on its success – or lack thereof – in coping with the Kurdish challenge. The all powerful Turkish president should probably not assume that he and his regime is out of the woods just because the Kurdish voters were intimidated back into the fold this time.

Orhan Bursalı in Cumhuriyet argues that the HDP, despite appearances, is not a leftist party, but a Kurdish nationalist party. Just like the AKP, the HDP is playing the religious card heavily in the fanatically Islamic Kurdish areas. As a social democrat party, the CHP, for instance, is not using religion to collect votes.  The heavy Islamist emphasis of the HDP, which has built up a myth that presents itself as a “leftist party,” can only be explained with Kurdish nationalism. A policy that focuses on Kurdishness will also aim at “bringing together all the different colors of the Kurdish nation.” The HDP’s calls for radical democracy sound nice to the ear. They are asking for democracy, and a radical one at that! But when you look at the contents of their radical democracy all you see is identity politics. What they are calling for us is liberty for the identities! There is no citizenship, no nation-state, only an absurdity, a “federation of identities.”  The display may look nice, but when you search what is inside, separatism is in the forefront.