Turkish Presidential Election: August 10, 2014

[Famous Mortimer]

Is he really going to be PM and President?

I assumed he and Gul were going to switch places again.

Or perhaps the deputy PM who told women not to laugh will get a promotion.

[Famous Mortimer]

All the main opposition parties have nominated an Islamic flavored technocrat.

The Kurdish party has thrown its support behind an extremely socially liberal candidate who supports gay marriage.

[Famous Mortimer]

Couple of interesting facts about the map:

The one landlocked province that the opposition won was Eskişehir, home to two universities and a military base.

Erdoğan's worst province and the only one where he came in third was the Kurdish province of Dersim. Dersim is also the only province where Alevis outnumber Sunnis.

[Famous Mortimer]

I lurked in that blog of James in Turkey the other day. I feel somewhat disappointed because little has been said on my favourite candidate (Demirtas). The Kurdish opposition is clearly better than AKP and the Kemalists.

I don't know much about Turkish politics, but it seems to me that a CHP-HDP would make sense in the future.

The CHP, being Kemalist, opposes federalization or special autonomous status for any region. That's what prevents an alliance with the Kurds.

[Famous Mortimer]

Erdoğan was the mayor of Istanbul, after all.

[Famous Mortimer]

Question to those who know these things:

Why did the MHP back Ihsanoglu? Is Kemalism really that transparently a defense of elite groups that the fascists prefer it to Erdogan?

Also can anyone explain Demirtas' pattern in the west of the country? Urban areas?

1) The MHP is a secular party.

2) The MHP, for all its horrible history, is not really that ideological beyond being secular. In the late 90s/early 2000s, they took part in a coalition government with the Democratic Left Party, the party they were bombing in the 70s.

3) That coalition I spoke of, like the one that existed this year, was basically an anti-Islamist one. There is historical precedent.

4) The MHP is not that far removed from Kemalism themselves. They might be official Kemalist for all I know.

However, it should be pointed out that regardless Ihsanoglu did not run a Kemalist campaign. He was basically just "not Erdoğan".

[Famous Mortimer]

Also, what would a competitive opposition look like in today's environment?

More Islamic. It would also help if it could win Istanbul.

But, let's not neglect the extent to which AKP benefits from overseeing Turkey's strong economic performance.

Well they tried being more Islamic in this election and that didn't work.

I personally would try to go more left, that's my bias talking though.

The real answer might just be that the opposition can't win under any circumstances.

[Famous Mortimer]

Also, what would a competitive opposition look like in today's environment?

More Islamic. It would also help if it could win Istanbul.

But, let's not neglect the extent to which AKP benefits from overseeing Turkey's strong economic performance.

Well they tried being more Islamic in this election and that didn't work.

I personally would try to go more left, that's my bias talking though.

The real answer might just be that the opposition can't win under any circumstances.

Then they need to be more Islamic. Add the non-Kurd share of the third-party vote and you get a pretty good maximum of the vote the left-wing can win in current circumstances, assuming no-one at all switches away. The real answer is, probably, that it is hard to defeat a prime minister overseeing 5 - 6% average GDP growth.

Ideally the left would reach out to the Kurds as well. It's just not very likely.

[Famous Mortimer]

1961, 1973, 1977, and 1999 were the only elections the left ever came in first in Turkey. 1961, which was right after a coup, basically under duress, was their best result and that was only 36%.

Even before AK, centre-right, Islamic leaning parties almost always won in the 40s.

[Famous Mortimer]

Come to think of it, 73 and 99 were basically after coups as well.

[Famous Mortimer]

A majority of those Turks living in Germany that are still interested in Turkish politics seem to be rather fervent AKP supporters, but I think that there is no strong correlation between the opinion on Turkish and on German party politics (except for the radical left, of course.) Many Turkish guest workers and ex-guest workers see the SPD (or the Greens) as their natural political home in Germany, while they would never vote for its Turkish sister party, the CHP.

It is an interesting tendency, that one. The most extreme case here would be all those Irish immigrants who tended to vote Labour here but supported Fianna Fail back home

That's absolutely what I was thinking - and you can add the US Democrats to that list as well. The phrase "We are the masters now" comes to mind in explaining the difference between these sympathies. Though the position of the Jews isn't comparable to the Irish, since the modern settlement of the homeland came after the diaspora, they're the only other big diaspora I can think of in a similar situation. I would guess that the same thing applies to them, though national security seems like more of a uniting factor for Jews abroad, and maybe that matters more in the Israeli party system than economics or social topics. It all comes back to the golden rule that politics isn't about policy...

What does this have to do with Turkey?

He was comparing Jewish outside Israel to Turkish voters outside Turkey. It was perfectly reasonable. Why did it make you upset but you didn't get upset about the comparison to Indian voters? Come down off your cross.