Erdogan and AK Party return to helm in Turkey

Following a failed government-forming process, Turkey’s worst-ever terrorist attack and the return to war with militant Kurds, how is it Turkey’s AK Party pulled off such a surprising – and convincing – win in Sunday’s parliamentary election?

A partial answer may be found in the nondescript town of Sarikamis in the highlands of eastern Anatolia. The nearby border with Armenia has been closed since 1993, meaning Sarikamis can count on little commerce by way of passing trade.

Unperturbed, the AK Party government has worked its magic there. Among goose farms and free-ranging cattle, workers at a huge construction site are building a commemoration for the centenary of the battle of Sarikamis, when 80,000 Ottoman Turkish troops froze to death during the first World War. The repaving of a nearby highway gives jobs to local engineers, truck drivers, quarry employees and labourers too.

Regional prosperity

But it hasn’t only been recent employment opportunities that drew Turks to ticking “AK Party” on election day. Since the emergence of the party in 2002, Sarikamis has developed a popular ski resort, built five-star hotels and cut out summer trekking routes in the surrounding mountains. Winter sports enthusiasts will start flying in from

Istanbul

and elsewhere later this month when a low-budget airline opens a direct flight for the winter season.

There are thousands of villages, towns and cities around Turkey like Sarikamis that previous governments paid little attention to. When Recep Tayyip Erdogan came along, first as the mayor of Istanbul during the 1990s, he and the AK Party he later co-founded captured the country's imagination with an outward rhetoric that spoke to the millions of conservative Turks in cities around Anatolia.

In government, the AK Party reined in the once-powerful military, which had been prone to launching coups, and checked rampant inflation and economic mismanagement.

Perhaps the most obvious result of the government's attention to Sarikamis is that on Sunday the AK Party won back the province from the Kurdish-rooted Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, in a startling counter to the June general election that had left Turkey with a hung parliament.

In the eyes of Europe, Turkey under the patronage of the now president Erdogan has fallen off the democracy cart. In recent years, the AK Party government has purged its security forces, police and judiciary of independent elements. It has chased down, taken over and jailed its opponents in the media, and blocked access to websites that host material contrary to its stance, such as YouTube and Twitter.

When dozens of Kurdish youth activists were killed in a suspected Islamic State-linked bombing in a southeastern city last July, the government, having lost its parliamentary majority to the Kurdish-orientated HDP the previous month, chose to begin air strikes against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Government officials and AK Party ministers accused the HDP of damaging the country and defending terrorism even as ultranationalist mobs destroyed HDP party offices in various cities.

Decade of stability

But the AK Party courts few votes in Europe. For many Turks, the memories linger of the disastrous coalition governments of the 1990s that were swept away by the party’s guile in 2002. For the past decade, Turks have enjoyed an unprecedented level of political and economic stability and by winning 49 per cent of the popular vote last Sunday – a 9 per cent increase on five months ago – AK Party-led stability appears to be what many hold dearest.

Human rights and democracy advocates, however, are alarmed. Some blame the government for inflaming unrest and divisions with nationalist Kurds by besieging Kurdish towns in September or for a failure to provide adequate security at the October 10th peace rally in Ankara that saw 102 peace activists slaughtered by suicide bombers just three weeks before the election.

Analyst Cale Salih believes that despite the AK Party winning back its parliamentary majority, the conflict with Kurdish militias linked to the PKK may continue. Already, four people have died in post-election violence in the southeast.

“Although many suspect that Turkey’s renewed offensive against the PKK over the summer was partly/largely driven by the AK Party’s election strategy, at this point it has become much more complicated than that,” she said. “Many factors that could significantly worsen the conflict are now at play.”

But for Turks living away from the direct violence in the southeast, life is as much about paying bills as national security, something the AK Party has played a significant role in.

"People care if they are getting aid for the government and getting jobs," said economist Emre Deliveli, who says he remains concerned by the politicisation of Turkey's economic structures. "The question is whether central bank governor Erdem Basci and others continue in those key positions and make the tough calls, or if they will be replaced with people closer to Erdogan."