TURKISH OPPOSITION RIDES NATIONALIST WAVE IN ELECTIONS

Anatolian Times, Turkey
July 18 2007

A politician brandishes a noose and calls for a jailed Kurdish leader
to be hanged; another accuses the prime minister of being a coward for
not invading Iraq, a third says the premier is the biggest obstacle
to Turkey’s anti-terror effort.

With the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) leading the
opinion polls for legislative elections Sunday, opposition parties
are lashing out at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s failure to
quell renewed bloodshed by separatist Kurdish rebels in the southeast.

The secularist army, often at odds with the AKP’s Islamist roots, has
upped pressure on Erdogan with public appeals for an incursion into
neighbouring Iraq, where the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK),
listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international
community, takes refuge.

Funerals of soldiers killed by the PKK have turned from usually solemn
ceremonies into anti-AKP protests during which ministers are booed
and the government tagged "murderers."

"The terrorism problem is right at the heart of the elections,"
political scientist Fuat Keyman said.

Public anger boiled over in May when a suspected PKK militant blew
himself up in Ankara, killing nine people.

"The opposition is exploiting the people’s security fears. The problem
of terror, the slain soldiers have become political material, which
is not healthy at all," commented Mehmet Ozcan of the Ankara-based
think tank USAK.

The opposition finds fertile ground in a society where nationalism is
already on the rise, analysts say, pointing at Turkish exasperation
with US inaction against PKK bases in Iraq and strong opposition in
Europe to mainly Muslim Turkey’s bid for EU membership.

The main beneficiary of rising nationalist sentiment will be the
far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which is expected to go
over the 10-percent national threshold and return to parliament after
a five-year absence, polling expert Hakan Bayrakci told the Internet
newspaper Forum.

"The MHP will pass the threshold thanks to the rise of terrorism,"
he said. "Otherwise, it would have had a very hard time" getting
into parliament.

While the MHP’s nationalist campaign is no surprise, the main
opposition Republican People Party’s (CHP) endorsement of a similar
agenda has stunned many and left a big void in the centre-left of
Turkish politics.

The CHP, expected to be the second force in parliament after the AKP,
"drifted away from its social-democrat identity. It is hard now to
even call it a democratic party," Keyman said.

The traditional voice of pro-Western, secular Turks, the CHP is now
opposed to EU reforms to expand free speech and minority rights and
leads calls for an incursion into northern Iraq.

The opposition’s reliance on "exaggerated and populist" nationalism
reflects its failure to offer efficient economic policies to rival the
AKP, whose four and a half years in power have resulted in economic
stability and strong growth, Keyman said.

The prospect of no centre-left voice in the new parliament gave rise
to an unprecedented grassroots movement that nominated an outspoken
human rights defender, Baskin Oran, as an independent candidate
from Istanbul.

Oran, a respected international relations professor and a close
associate of slain ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, says he is
campaigning for the rights of "all the oppressed and alienated" —
from Kurds and non-Muslim minorities to the unemployed and homosexuals.

He focuses on expanding Kurdish rights as a means of ending the
insurgency in the southeast.

"Nationalism harms the nation most, because it triggers
counter-nationalism," one of his campaign slogans says.