THE Turkish people have spoken with a rare clarity and acclaim at their November 2 general election, and the result of it is stunning. They have chosen to repose their trust in a party that begged their mandate on a platform of justice, with a promise of progress.

In what has turned out to be a massive landslide victory, the fledgling Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by the charismatic former Islamist mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pronounced as Erduan), has routed all of Turkey’s traditional political parties, save for only one. With 99 per cent of the 32 million votes counted at the time of this writing, AKP has polled 34.2 per cent of the popular vote, against 19.4 per cent for the runner-up Republican Party (CHP) founded by Ataturk.

It is, by no means, a minority vote that has propelled AKP to the pinnacle of political power. The total number of eligible voters in Turkey was 41 million. Which means that the voter turnout at the polls was 80 per cent, a figure rarely reached in even the most advanced democracies.

So complete was AKP’s hold over the voters’ imagination that except for CHP, none of the traditional parties has qualified to sit in the new parliament. Under the Turkish law, a political party must poll at least 10 per cent of the total votes cast in order to qualify for the parliament. This magical figure has eluded every orthodox party.

Former prime minister Tansu Ciller’s True Path party polled 9.6 per cent; another former prime minister, Masut Yilmaz’ Motherland Party polled only 5.1 per cent vote; while the incumbent prime minister Bulent Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party could barely secure a dismal 1.2 per cent vote. It was a total rout of the titans at the hands of a people who had long suffered their tyranny, injustice and arrogance.

The new Turkish parliament will be a unique body, in the sense that there will be only two parties sitting in it: the dominant AKP, with its share of 362 seats in a house of 542, while the remaining 180 seats will belong to the minority Republican Party.

But the parliament will also be unique in another sense. The leader of the majority party will not be sitting in the house, nor leading his party’s government as prime minister, for Erdogan is under a parliamentary ban imposed on him two years ago by Turkey’s frequently unjust and draconian constitutional court.

Erdogan was targeted by the court at the behest of Turkey’s powerful military establishment which has long been allergic to anything or anyone suspected of Islamic connections. Erdogan has long been in their sights because of his unmistakable Islamist roots. He is a protege of Necmeddin Erbakan, who became Turkey’s first — and so far the only — prime minister at the head of a pronouncedly Islamist, Refah, party in 1996. That election victory had also propelled one of his most remarkable disciples, Tayyip Erdogan, to the office of mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s premier city. But the protege’s fate at the hands of the generals fared no better than the mentor’s. Erbakan was removed from office within a year on charge of deviating from the Kemalist secular ideals. Erdogan was also dismissed as mayor on trumped-up corruption charges.

However, the persecution of the Islamists did not end with the fall of Erbakan. His Refah party was banned by the constitutional court, and he was declared unfit to lead another party. But he had other arrows in his quiver. His trusted lieutenant, Recai Kutan, formed a successor Islamist party, by the name of Fazilat (Virtue) which was also subsequently banned on a similar charge of deviation in late 2000. In the meantime, Erbakan was disqualified from politics for life for preaching hatred against the Kemalist secular creed.

His brightest disciple, Erdogan, was also banned from parliament for spreading religious hatred. He was found guilty of having recited at a public rally, several years ago, a poem by a legendary revolutionary Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmat, who happened to be a favourite of Ataturk. Which made many in Turkey wonder whether the Turkish generals would not find Ataturk himself in breach of secularist ideas if he were alive?

The Turkish generals thought they had rooted out the Islamist challenge for good by not only neutralizing the old guard, Erbakan, but also by throttling the Young Turk, Erdogan. Little did they realize in their blinkered bunkers in the military establishment that the younger revolutionary still had enough fire left in him to take the country by a storm at the right moment (We have seen shades of it in our own country, because the Turkish model has always been a tempting template to our Bonapartists. First, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged and now his daughter has been sent into political wilderness. But, with Erdogan rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Refah and Fazilat, one wonders who will have the last laugh in Pakistan).

I recall a conversation I had with Abdullah Gul, another favourite of Erbakan and also his close friend, on the eve of my departure from Turkey two years ago. Gul is now a hot favourite to win his party’s approval for becoming prime minister because of Erdogan’s disqualification. I asked Gul about his own plans for the future, because of the sword then hanging over the head of his party, Fazilat, and those of Erdogan who had been forced out of the political scene by the generals. It was then that I learned of their ambition to float a new party, without the baggage of the old Islamist guards too old to change their stripes.

There is no doubt that Erdogan has played his cards extremely well to make a one-year old party so powerful that it has beaten almost every known icon of Turkish politics. AKP is, truly, a one-man miracle. It is Erdogan’s charisma and mass appeal that has hit Turkey like an avalanche. But credit, in equal measure, must also be given to his political savvy. He realized that he or his party will have no future unless he distanced himself from his Islamist mentors, because without that, the hectoring generals will always be breathing down his neck, and find fault with his moorings.

So he presented a new face of the pupils nurtured in Erbakan’s nursery. AKP is well tethered to Turkey’s secular foundations. It is equally committed to taking Turkey into the European Union as a progressive state, almost one hundred per cent Muslim, without any pretensions or claims for being excessively religious.

Erdogan’s caution has paid him off well, and he is showing no sign of abandoning it in the euphoria of victory. His first words after the landslide were that his party “will not challenge the world.” And he has categorically reiterated his commitment to “common sense” politics. This is the sign of a mature and sensible man who has drawn the right lessons from his tortured past.

It is also true that Erdogan has capitalized on the failures and blunders of the three years of Bulent Ecevit with their economic mess and miasma of rampant corruption. The vote in AKP’s favour is both positive and negative. It is a sympathy vote for years of suffering and persecution of the Islamists and those deemed close to them. It is also a vote of no-confidence in Ecevit’s bungled leadership.

Erdogan’s political maturity and wisdom will be put to a more severe test in the days ahead in the choice of a man to become Turkey’s new prime minister as parliamentary leader of AKP. It will be virtually a litmus test of his political foresight and capacity to put Turkey above his self. The choice, according to analysts, narrows down to three contenders; Abdullah Gul, Vecdi Gonul and Abdul Kadir Aksu.

Of the three, Gul is by far the most promising. He is not only the youngest of the three but has great charm of personality. His political grounding is as sound as Erdogan’s. So is his populist standing. He will be a worthy representative of Erdogan in the government. Except that there is a catch in promoting him. There is no guarantee that he, with his driving ambition, will not sideline Erdogan from the party leadership. There is a precedent of this kind in recent Turkish politics. Masut Yilmas was groomed by Turgut Ozal to succeed him at the head of ANAP when Ozal became president of Turkey. Within no time, Yilmas showed the door to each Ozal protege in the party.

There will be no such fear of a ‘palace coup’ from either Gonul or Aksu. Both are experienced in government, and Gonul is known to be an old friend of Turkish President Necdet Sezer. The two should make an ideal combination. But, then, Turkish politics is about as unpredictable as politics anywhere in the world.

The writer is a former Pakistan ambassador to Turkey.

Nobody outside the Communist Party’s inner circles knows exactly what’s going to happen when the 16th Party Congress opens on Friday, 8 November.

This is supposed to be when the ‘third generation’ of leaders — those who fought for the revolution, and forty years later gave the orders to clear the pro-democracy protesters from Tienanmen Square by force — will finally hand over power, but these things are never certain in China until they actually happen.

Measured at purchasing power parity, China’s economy is already second only to the United States in the world, yet it remains an anachronistic dictatorship and its economy is still an awkward blend of the old state industries and the new entrepreneurs. It matters to everybody where a new leadership might take the country — and yet literally nobody knows.

Nobody knows even in China, because anyone seeking to rise in the oppressive gerontocracy that the Chinese Communist Party had become by the mid-1980s had to play their cards very close to their chest. Bland conformism, not bright new ideas, was the key to political survival, and even if the rumoured successors, Hu Jintao, Li Ruihuan and Wen Jiabao, were all closet reformers, they would never have dared to show their cards to each other. It means any change of leadership is a lottery, but since the Party Congress only meets every five years it probably cannot be postponed further.

There are those who hope that Hu is a secret Gorbachev, pointing out that the Russian reformer also had to hide his true goals until he had power, but the sole clue pointing in that direction is the fact that the elite Central Party School (which Hu heads) has a policy of inviting guest speakers of every intellectual persuasion. His conduct as Party boss in Tibet in 1988-92, when he unhesitatingly deployed troops to crush pro-independence demonstrators, points as persuasively in the other direction.

For several decades now the ‘elders’ of the Party, though formally retired from their posts, have kept a powerful collective grip on policy. The retirement of Jiang Zemin, Lin Peng and others of the ‘third generation’ of leaders may simply replenish the dwindling band of elders and reinforce their influence. It may not make all that much difference in the short run. The real question is what happens in the longer run.

The Party will move further away from its original doctrines at this Congress, admitting businessmen to membership (as ‘managerial workers’) and shifting the justification for its monopoly of power away from the familiar old Leninist/Maoist nonsense about the historic role of the ‘vanguard party’ to Jiang’s new and equally self-serving formula of the ‘Three Representations’. That is to say, the Party will continue to have the right to tell everybody else what to do so long as it represents the majority of the people’s interests, ensures that the economy grows, and advances Chinese culture.

This rich tripe, not one whit more convincing than the Divine Right of Kings, is being portrayed in China as the fruit of a hard-won battle against the more orthodox dogmas of the old hard left — which, if true, would say something profoundly discouraging about the state of debate within the Party. But it probably isn’t an accurate reflection of the true range of that debate.

Especially in the younger generation, the Party is really split along lines that are not so much ideological as tactical: how does the Party remain in power as the country modernises, and save its members from awkward questions about where their wealth came from? On one side are those who believe only a rigid refusal to share power can protect them (and therefore cling to the old Marxist ideology). On the other are those who believe that an early move to democracy led by the Party itself would guarantee its stranglehold on political power for another generation.

—Copyright

THE stage now appears to be set for transfer of power by the military government to the elected representatives of the people. However, whether this would also mean a credible measure of political stability cannot be said with any degree of certainty.

Meanwhile, in response to the proposals made by some political leaders and also because of “logistical reasons the session of the newly elected National Assembly has been postponed for about a week. The inauguration of the Assembly was scheduled for November 8.

The postponement of the parliament session might hamper the process of restoring democracy in the country. It would also be redolent of some bitter memories of the past when the then president and chief martial law administrator decided to put off the convening of the parliament which had been elected under his own scheme for transfer of power. Regardless of how the present postponement is explained, the people are bound to see in it an attempt to resile from the commitment to restore democracy within a given period of time.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan legitimized the takeover by Gen Pervez Musharraf in October 1999 for a specific period of three years. The general has on the whole honoured his commitments. He has demonstrated a much greater and more sobre awareness of the political environment than the military rulers of the past.

Although the elections were held without the customary excitement associated with such occasions, the people by and large voted with a sense of responsibility. They have elected a legislature which should be regarded as more literate, if not better educated, than the legislatures of the past. It also appears to be a more youthful assembly than those which Pakistan has seen previously and hopefully it should be able to conduct its business with a greater sense of responsibility than its predecessors.

Unfortunately, the election campaigns of the various parties were largely personality-oriented. Their rival claims for positions of power are also, therefore, largely personality-centric. However, this should not be allowed to stand in the way of the elected representatives assuming their responsibilities. If a consensus is needed on any contentious issues, they should work for it inside the parliament.

As no single political party has been able to have a clear majority to form a government a realistic approach to the future shape of things is needed. For more than two weeks three parties, each of which has secured a substantial number of seats, have been wrangling over their claims to form government at the centre. They have also been making frantic efforts to inflate the number of seats at their command, bargaining for the support of the smaller parties, at times even unmindful of their ideological orientation.

On the face of it, MMA and the PPP would seem to be strange bedfellows — the former mostly comprising conservative clerics and the latter professing to be radical and progressive.

Ideologically, there would appear to be a greater proximity and likemindedness between the PML (Q) and the PPP. A coalition of the two, who together command a comfortable majority in the newly elected parliament, would seem to ensure a greater measure of political stability. But, perhaps, in politics, as in love and war, anything would appear to be fair.