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.

Abdülkadir Selvi in Yeni Şafak writes that support for the AKP seems to be around 44 percent at the start of the election campaign. That means an increase of three percentage points compared to the result on June 7. There are three main reasons for the AKP’s increase. First, the governmental vacuum that has reigned since June 7 has made those who care about stability to turn to the AKP. Second, one to two percentage points are made up of returning voters from the MHP, in reaction to the intransigency of MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli after the election, when he refused to consider a coalition [with the AKP] and stayed out of the [caretaker] government when the fight against PKK had started. The third factor is those who voted for the [Islamist] Felicity Party and The Party of Grand Unity (BBP) on June 7, and who are now concluding that “Our votes did not have any effect on the political equation. Let’s now make sure that we get a majority government.”

By Gareth H. Jenkins 

September 18th, 2015, The Turkey Analyst

The recent spate of violent protests by Turkish ultranationalists – including attempted lynchings of ethnic Kurds -- and the attacks by government supporters on the Hürriyet newspaper have reinforced already serious concerns about both the deepening fissures in Turkish society and the continuing weakening of the rule of law in the country.

By Gareth Jenkins (vol. 8, no. 13 of the Turkey Analyst) 

The Turkish general election of 7 June stripped the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of its parliamentary majority for the first time since November 2002 and dealt a devastating blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s hopes of replacing the country’s parliamentary system with an autocratic presidential one in which all political power was concentrated in his own hands. But, even though the election was an undoubted triumph for the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), it has also left the Kurdish nationalist movement facing a number of challenges.

By Halil Karaveli (vol. 8, no. 12 of the Turkey Analyst) 

The immediate effects of Turkey’s June 7 election was that the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) lost its majority and President Erdoğan was forced to put his plans for a presidential system on hold, at least for the moment. Yet the prospects for Turkish democracy are not necessarily any brighter today. The most likely outcome is a coalition between the AKP and the rightist Nationalist Action Party (MHP). That is the preferred outcome for “conservative” business interests, who challenge “secular” business interests and want to continue to use state power to get their hands on a bigger share of capital. Their interests ensure that the AKP will remain on its confrontational track; that is the principal dynamic behind Turkey’s drift toward authoritarian rule, and it is far from having been halted.