THE TURKISH ELECTION
By Gwynne Dyer

AZG Armenian Daily #139
25/07/2007

Situation in Turkey

The best thing about the outcome of the Turkish election on Sunday
is that now the army can’t make a coup. It may still want to: it was
certainly making menacing noises about it recently. But after almost
half the voters (47 percent) backed the incumbent AK (Justice and
Development) party in Sunday’s election, the army simply cannot move
against it. A great many officers would just refuse to act against
the popular will in such a blatant way, and the army would never risk
a split in the officer corps.

The even better thing about this election is that Turks have decisively
rejected the false dichotomy between "political Islam" and "democracy"
that paralyses politics in so many Muslim countries. That matters,
because Turkey is a rapidly developing middle-income country of 75
million people that still has hopes of joining the European Union. (The
current obstructionism of leaders in France, Germany, Austria and a few
others countries is irrelevant, since they will probably all be gone
by the time a decision is taken in ten or twelve years’ time.) But the
election outcome is also important for other Muslim-majority countries.

Most foreign reporting of the Turkish election followed the script
provided by the main opposition parties, the Republican People’s
Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), in which they
were defending enlightened, secular democracy in Turkey and the AK
Party was just a front for ignorant hordes of rural Muslim fanatics
who wanted to shove shariat law down the nation’s throat. It was a
"test of Turkish secularism," they claimed –and if it was, then
secularism lost. But that isn’t what really happened at all.

The real struggle in Turkey was between the "republican elite" and
practically everybody else. The "republican elite" are a privileged
and well-educated class of people who have virtually monopolised
senior jobs in the military, the judiciary and the state bureaucracy
for several generations on the pretext that they must have control
in order to defend Ataturk’s secular reforms (in the 1920s!). But
these days, that is only a pretext for preserving their power:
secular democracy in Turkey is not in danger.

There are certainly fanatics in Turkey who would like to force all
their fellow-citizens to conform to their particular brand of religion
on pain of death. Every country has some of those, but they are as rare
in Turkey as they are in Spain — and while the ones in Turkey probably
do vote for the AKP, since it is the only party that openly espouses
"Islamic values," they are a tiny proportion of its supporters.

Indeed, it’s likely that quite a few of the people who voted for the AK
Party this time are not even believers. Although officially 99 percent
Muslim, Turkey has lots of unofficial non-believers, especially in the
big cities, and many of them would have been attracted by the party’s
impressive economic record (five unbroken years of high-speed growth),
by its unwavering commitment to membership in the European Union,
and above all by its determined attempts to LIBERALISE Turkey’s
legal system.

The AK Party has consistently used the need to make Turkish law conform
to EU norms as a justification for changing the law in ways that
expand individual rights. Of course, that also undermines the ability
of the "republican elite" to control the state from behind the scenes,
so they are fighting back by accusing the AK Party of being a Trojan
horse for religious fanatics who want to stop Turks from drinking
alcohol and force women into "Islamic" clothing. The AK Party denies
it, it has spent the last five years in power moving consistently in
the opposite direction, and most Turkish voters believe it.

The larger significance of the AK Party’s success in Turkey is that
it demonstrates that devout Muslims can co-exist with their less
devout fellow-citizens in a democratic constitutional order. All the
devout need in order to prosper is recognition of their equal rights,
not a monopoly of power and control over the personal behaviour of
the less devout and the non-believers.

In Muslim-majority countries where the secular holders of power and
the Islamist revolutionaries see one another as mortal enemies —
which is to say, in about half of the countries of the Muslim world —
peaceful democratic change, compromise and co-existence of the sort
that we can see in Turkey are regarded as impossible. It is war to
the death between the establishment and the fanatics, and there is
very little space between them for people who would quite like more
democracy and civil rights but don’t fancy living under shariat law
as interpreted by extremists.

Opening that space up is the most important political task these
countries face. The interesting thing about Turkey is that it has been
the Islamic activists, not the secularists, who did the hard work
that made it happen. But let’s be honest: even the AK Party would
have found it hard to open the Turkish system up if it had not had
the prospect of membership in the European Union as an inducement for
everybody to be reasonable and cooperative — and it’s unlikely that
the EU will be offering Egypt or Pakistan membership any time soon.