The resulting picture is one of confusion and impotence. All the opinion polls carried out over the past two years show that no party is capable of winning the elections by itself, and that even the emergence of a strong coalition government is unlikely. It amounts to a crisis of confidence and to despair.
FUAT ORÇUN:
S
INCE its crushing defeat at the municipal elections of 1989 (see
International Viewpoint,
166, June 26, 1989) Turkey's governing party, the ANAP (Party of the
Motherland — led by Turgut Özal) has never climbed higher than third place in the surveys on voting intention. But it continues to hold around two thirds of the seats in Parliament, with a level of electoral support estimated at about 15%. The
Party of the Just Way (DYP, centre right, led by the former prime minister Suleiman
Demirel) is slowly nibbling away at the
On the left, the small Party of the Democratic Left (DSP, dissident social democratic, led by former prime minister
Bulent Ecevit) is making inroads into the vote of the Social Democratic Populist
Party (SHP, led by Erdal Inönü, the heirs of the Social Democratic Party which existed before 1980).
According to an opinion poll carried out by the Gallup Institute on May 30, 1991, the DYP had 29% of the votes; the SHP
22%; the DSP 18%; the ANAP 14%; the
Islamic Party 8.5%; and the fascist party
High number of floating
Whereas there is a growing "polarization" between centre left and centre right, the most salient feature is the number of those undecided as to how to vote, which is more than 20%. This high proportion of floating voters has encouraged each of the four parties to attempt to revamp its appearance and better define its identity.
The most desperate case is that of the
ANAP, which has lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the population.
According to the polls, it would even have difficulty getting beyond the electoral threshold of 10% of the votes in the urban centres (the DSP and the SHP are ahead in the cities, and the DYP is only the third party in Istanbul). This shows that all illusions in the ANAP have been
Founded three years after the military coup, when the military offensive against "ideologies" was at its height, the ANAP claimed to embody within itself "national unity", bringing together from the four currents present in the precoup parliament (liberals, social democrats, Islamists, fascists).
Today, the principal founders of the ANAP recognize that its greatest weakness is its absence of a clearly defined A reactionary and nebulous
The ANAP is in practice a reactionary nebulous entity based on clientelism and the advantages of power. Its electoral base is limited to those newly enriched
During its last congress on June 15-16, 1991, the ANAP threw out its own chair replacing him with a former minister of foreign affairs, Mesut Yilmaz.
The victory of the latter has been presented in the press as the victory of the "liberal and moderate" wing of the party against the "Islamic conservatives" fact, the hard core of the Yilmaz team is essentially composed of former cadres
Consequently, rather than a change of orientation and strategy, the election of
Yilmaz is above all a revamping of image with the sole aim of winning the elections (scheduled for autumn 1992 at the latest), and of preserving Özal's position as head
For the latter remains the true leader of ANAP. As president of the republic, Ozal is officially "above parties" , but he continues to pull the strings behind the scenes. Özal has become accustomed to ruling as absolute master, with undivided power and without compromise.
He designated "formed" the government, without leaving any initiative to Akbulut, who became a puppet figure. Under Özal, Byzantinism, corruption and nepotism have attained
His very ambitious wife, Semra, recently got herself elected president of the biggest local branch of the ANAP, in Istanbul. Semra Özal represents the "modernist-westernist" side of the Ozal family, whereas the brothers of Ozal represent the Islamic and conservative wing.
One puppet replaced by
The discarding of Aklubut is, then, merely the replacement of one puppet by another who is less discredited.
Mesut Yilmaz was elected implicit support of Özal and the very militant support of his wife and her children. He has, however, little chance of avoiding the unavoidable; the fate which awaits the ANAP at the next elections.
Moreover, this time, Özal himself seems rather pessimistic about the future of his party; before the congress, he proposed that the son of Adnan Menderes (the charismatic leader of the Turkish right, hung by the military after the putsch of 1960), who is not even a member of ANAP, take the leadership to "try and put things right".
But the best result that he can hope for would be that the ANAP maintains enough deputies to be the junior partner in a coalition which would accept his retention as president of the republic.
Outside of a small layer of nouveaux riches who owe their success to Özal, nobody (not even the big bourgeoisie) is satisfied with the arbitrary policies of a regime which does not even seek a consensus with the principal forces of the sys1. The following article outlines the crisis of bourgeois politics in Turkey today. A subsequent article, to be published in the next issue of IV, will analyze the state of play within the Turkish workers' moyement. July 22, 1991 • #211 International Viewpoint
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
impotence
The signs of famine
TURKEY'S urban population was 43% in 1980, and it has climbed to 63% over the past ten years. According to the predictions of the
OECD, In 20 years 95% of the population of Turkey will live in the
TURKEY towns on the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts. In other words, the most fertile land from an agricultural point of view will be urba-
This rural exodus is not the product of a demand for industrial labourers but of a crisis in the countryside. The principal reason for the acceleration of the rush to the towns resides in the fact that agriculture, supported by the government throughout the first decades of the Republic, has been neglected over the last period
Under the pretext of the passage to a market economy, the agricultural sector has in reality been destroyed by the application of policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank.
AS [former prime minister Demirel puts it, whereas Turkey was one of the six or seven countries self-sufficient in food, from 1989 onwards, agricultural imports have surpassed exports. In other words, Turkey has become dependent from the point of view of food. Cattle rearing has experienced a great decline, Its share of the agricultural sector falling from 40% to 25%. The rate of growth of agricultural income (previously 3.5% on average), tell to 2.5% at the be then tell are 1% Professor are an an growth, then fell further to 2% (Professor Gülten Kazgan,
, Cumhurlyet, March 12, 1991).
Signals in Agriculture"
Liberal policies have flooded the market with imported tropical fruits because of international credits, but the country's capacity for traditional agricultural production has collapsed. The results of this dependency in food are easily imaginable. The poor have been condemned to become vegetarian, but the price increases for fresh vegetables limits their choice to potatoes and cracked
For some time, the TUSIAD, the employers' association, has been sounding the alarm and openly expressing its unhappiness. Everybody knows that a crumbling regime cannot take radical
It will be impossible to resist pressure on the wages front, especially in a pre- election period when inflation will not fall below its chronic rate of 70%.
For the moment, only the United States supports Ozal. They have not lost hope in the continuation in power of a figure who gave them more than they could have wished for during the war in the Gulf.
In fact, Ozal and his clique were already on the way out, but their pro-American policy during the Gulf crisis has enabled them to play for time, at the price of further damage to the social and economic life of the country.
Some taboos addressed by regime
Still seeking to gain time,
Özal has addressed some of the regime's taboos, notably the famous articles 141-2 and 163 of the Penal Code which forbid political activity on the basis of class or religion.
These articles, whose application was already becoming less rigorous, were suppressed stealthily after a lightning vote i
• parliamen
International Viewpoint #211 • July 22, 1991
The same was done with the ban on the use of the Kurdish language. A partial amnesty has also been decreed. But this wave of "liberalization" was accompanied by new repressive measures which will without doubt lead to nostalgia for
While the existence of the Kurds has been admitted and the Kurdish language authorized, demands for the national rights of the Kurds will be repressed still more severely than in the past.
Moreover, a new anti-terror law has been adopted. According to this law, those who, although having committed no crime, are members of a "terrorist" organization, or those who commit acts with terrorist goals without being a member of a "terrorist" organization, will receive the same penalties as the authors of organized
A fluid and arbitrary definition
The definition of "terrorist" is totally arbitrary and fluid: "those who hinder the indivisibility of the nation", "those who weaken the authority of the state", "those who wish to change the economic system", and so on. Every citizen is, then, a potential terrorist (Cumhuriyet, April 13, 1991).
Informers will be remunerated and the police will be protected in case of taken place, the police not hesitating to enter the dwellings of presumed "terrorists" to execute them in cold blood.
The amnesty has had some interesting results. Those condemned according to articles 141-142 and 163 have been freed, and others conditionally released.
"of the 3,316 political prisoners who were still in prison, 2,857 were of the left, 459 of the right. Some 409 of the rightist prisoners have been released and will be freed within another year.... whereas only 299 leftist detainees have been freed, and the 2,558 others are to be released within five to ten years" (Milliyet, June 26, 1991).
The anti-terror law has led to a revival of hunger strikes by detainees and their
After a period of unmitigated right wing rule that has lasted more than ten years, one might think that the party of the center left, the SHP, would be in a position to win the elections. And indeed, in 1989, the SHP swept nearly all the townhalls in
Inefficiency of social democratic management
But the inefficiency of social democratic management and allegations of corruption have undermined the SHP's credibility, and it has lost ground to the DSP whose apparatus is, however, still too weak to challenge for power.
Moreover, the SHP is experiencing great difficulty in shedding the moral and political heritage of the Republican Party of the People (CHP), the single and not particularly democratic party of the first
Its leadership remains too weak to deal with new developments. The programme of the right wing of the party attempts to outbid that of the orthodox right and is sapping the confidence of the popular
Even if this opposition is not victorious at the SHP's congress, scheduled for July 6-7, 1991, it could nonetheless obtain a blocking minority which will paralyze the party, already feeble enough.
The SHP also wants to revamp its image, but its search for a new identity Will not take it to the left, in line with the dynamic of the social opposition, but to the centre, towards a gentle transition. Even the leaders of Demirel's DYP accuse the social democrats of not fulfilling their role as a left opposition.
As a consequence, the DYP is obliged to partially assume this role, at the risk of alienating its rural and rightist traditional base. It is, then, the DYP, the genuine
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
"excesses" (including in cases of torture, since a special authorization from the min- ister of the interior will henceforth be nec- essary to pursue such cases in the judicial Moreover, since the introduction of this law, several summary executions have