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Turkey's "Political Earthquake": Significance for the United States and the Region

Before one comes to the false conclusion that Turkish voters have suddenly jumped on a fundamentalist Islamic bandwagon and abandoned the strict separation of religion and state enshrined in the Turkish constitution, it should be noted that the AKP received only 34.3 percent of all the votes cast. A major reason for its lopsided parliamentary victory is the peculiarly Turkish electoral system, which sets a very high 10 percent threshold for a party to enter parliament. (By way of contrast, the threshold for a seat in the Israeli Knesset is only 1.5 percent.) As for the more traditional Islamist Saadet (Felicity) party, recently founded by former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, it received only 2.5 percent of the national vote. As a consequence, Turkeys oldest and most controversial Islamist politician lost his parliamentary seat. In other words, more than 60 percent of Turkeys electorate voted for one of the 16 officially secular parties that contested the election. Moreover, Recep Tayip Erdogan, the former popular Islamist mayor of Istanbul who leads the AKP, worked strenuously during the election campaign to play down the partys Islamist roots. The party was formed as a breakaway group from the outlawed Islamic-leaning Virtue party. In the Novemhe landslide victory of the new Justice and Development party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or AKP) in the Turkish national elections on November 3, 2002, has been termed a political earthquake by many observers. The AKP, whose leaders had been associated with previously banned Islamic-rooted parties, won a stunning two-thirds majority of 363 seats of the total of 550 in the Grand National Assembly, Turkeys parliament. Totally swept out of parliament were the representatives of all three of the veteran political parties that had governed the country in a fractious coalition government in recent years as well as nearly all the opposition parties. The only other party to win representation in the new parliament was the staunchly secularist Republican Peoples party (CHP), led by Deniz Baykal, which won 178 seats. Individuals running as independents won the remaining nine seats. The AKP victory has profoundly shaken the complacent Turkish political establishment. It also has raised many questions among foreign observers as to the impact the new governments policies will have on Ankaras relations with the United States, on the prospects for Turkeys entry into the European Union (EU), on the resolution of the Cyprus dispute, on the future of Ankaras close strategic ties with Israel, and on the role of the Turkish Army in a possible confrontation with neighboring Iraq. T