Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) achieved a painful victory in the parliamentary election when it acquired 41 per cent of the votes, an eight point fall from the 2011 result. It lost the parliamentary majority that it enjoyed in previous elections.
The AKP confounded observers with its failure to obtain the expected majority, especially since the election took place approximately one year after Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the first direct presidential election in Turkey with a landslide victory. The latest result also challenged the opposition’s accusations that the AKP fixes elections, an indirect accusation that the ruling party has a monopoly on election results. Such accusations were proved to be false.
It is common knowledge that the AKP has a network of relations with many economic centres and media outlets, in addition to its ability to maintain control of the government and the presidency for many years. For this reason, the AKP’s zone of influence could have affected the election greatly if the party wanted to do things to the standards of the opposition. And yet, the results proved that the Turkish electoral process is quite transparent and compares well with many of the world’s biggest democracies; in short, Turkey’s democracy is truly democratic. For that reason, no party and no leader, even of Erdogan’s calibre, can hijack elections.
Far from what many analysts have said in aiming to explain these latest election results and their effects on Turkey and the region as a whole, it is clear that many of the accusations thrown at Islamist governments are held in common; they are used as an excuse by authoritarian regimes to come to or stay in power under the false pretext of “one-time elections”.
Many secular and leftist factions have justified their anti-democratic stance against Islamist groups with the belief that the latter should not be able to run in elections on the basis that they, it is alleged, abuse their power. These are the same pretexts that are used to put a civil face on military rule. In fact, these claims are similar to the ones used by Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to justify the military coup against the first democratically elected Egyptian president. The regime in Cairo claims that it wanted to take the steps up to a transparent and non-violent democracy.
The democratic experiments in the region, though – especially after the Arab Spring – have proven to be anything but democratic. Ennahda movement in Tunisia lost the last legislative elections despite winning the majority in the first elections following the revolution; it was forced to give up its right to rule even though it held the majority. Now the experience looks like it is being repeated in Turkey, where the Islamist party has lost its absolute majority despite having governed by majority rule for a number of years.
The case is hardly different in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood was expected to lose the democratic elections after the military put on a civil façade. The country has been undergoing a cycle of chaos, with tyranny and oppression after the military waged a coup d’état against President Mohamed Morsi. It would have been possible to save the country from a great deal of the bloodshed and chaos that it has endured since the coup in 2013 had Morsi’s Islamist government and the country been allowed to continue on the democratic path.
There are some who argue that there are certain experiences which lead to the opposite result, such as Hamas’s experience in Palestine; it won the elections convincingly but an international boycott forced the movement to give up its right to govern across all of the occupied Palestinian territories. However, the truth is that the armed resistance role that Hamas has adopted would not have been so prominent had Fatah not done everything in its power to prevent the democratically-elected party from exercising its right to govern by making false claims about the state of Palestinian security, and the Fatah bureaucracy’s refusal to cooperate with Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh. These factors ignore the negative effects that such actions have on the Palestinian national project as a whole. Fatah has contributed indirectly to the siege affecting the Palestinian people in Gaza as a form of collective punishment – illegal under international law – for choosing Hamas during the 2006 elections.
The outcome of the Turkish and Tunisian elections, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood’s experience in Egypt, all prove that the Islamists have not taken a seat above the law and that they will not be taking those important steps upwards. It is those who stand in opposition to Islamist parties who cannot cope with the outcome of democracy if Islamist groups actually win and have the people’s mandate to govern.
Translated from Arabi21, 8 June, 2015.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.