Modern Turkey is socio-culturally a deeply divided and also politically polarized country. Recent scholarship on social inequalities and polarization is expanding, see Buğra (2018), Derin-Güre and Elveren (2014), Ferreira et al. (2011), Filiztekin (2015), and Rankin and Aytaç (2006) on social and economic inequalities in Turkey. Aydın Düzgit and Balta (2017), Esmer (2019), Kaya (2008), Kaya and Sunar (2015), Keyman (2014), O’Connor and Baser (2018), Somer (2019), and Tepe (2014) discuss polarization trends in recent Turkish politics. Such cleavages create challenges for the maintenance of a stable democratic rule. Additionally, recurrent conflicts debilitate the political system's ability to respond to and meet the masses’ expectations. However, the early commitment of the country's elites and masses to democratic rule in the aftermath of World War II continues, albeit with changes and transformations in the political regime, its constitutional foundations, party system, and mass political preferences. Our edited volume aims to further our understanding of the last elections for the presidency and representatives for the Turkish Grand National Assembly in June 2018.
Background to the 2018 elections
The cultural divide in the society is shaped along images of “Good Society.” One image of “good society” built around science, secular, rational thinking, and Westernization versus another built around tradition, Sunni Islam, and conservative values about family, social, and economic relationships. The kulturkampf caused by such diverse images of “good society” was eventually complicated by the emerging clashes of secular versus pious Sunnis, Alevi minority sect versus Sunni majority Muslims, Turkish and Kurdish ethnic nationalisms, rural versus urban lifestyles, which eventually came to a head-on clash in the metropolitan cities and their environs in the aftermath of urban migration of the 1950s through the 1990s (Chapter 8 by Ersin Kalaycıoğlu provides a more extensive background for the conceptual bases of the kulturkampf framework due to earlier contributions by Kalaycıoğlu 2012, Mardin 1973, and Yalman 1973). Finally, with the onslaught of industrialization, new social classes such as blue-collar labor, industrial and commercial interests, entrepreneurial and professional middle classes, the lumpenproletariat, and the like emerged from experiencing new opportunities and risks of upward social mobility. Therefore, Turkey shows all signs of a society deeply divided along the social cleavages outlined in Martin S. Lipset and Stein Rokkan's introduction to their influential edited volume Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives (1967). The deep-running cultural cleavages that further intensify such divides have often been missing in the examples that Lipset and Rokkan analyzed in Europe appear prominently in the shaping of the electoral scene in Turkey. Both horizontal and vertical social mobility rendered the cultural kulturkampf of the earlier times ever more complicated, deep, intense, and rife. Although such cleavages built around group loyalties appear diminishing in their influence for the developed western democracies, exceptional cases can be found in Northern Ireland as well as the Netherlands for much of the 20th century. Similar and often problematic experiences are most notably observed in the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, and Lebanon's newer democracies.
It is the turbulent cultural cauldron of Turkish society that produced so many hotly debated issues in the politics of the country. The style of dress women wear (see Çarkoğlu 2009, 2010, Göle 1996, Kalaycıoğlu 2005, Saktanber and Çorbacioğlu 2008 on the türban (women's headcover) debate in Turkey), the freedom of expression of the religious and ethnic communities possess (see Bayır 2016, Çelik, Bilali and Iqbal 2017, Günay and Yörük 2019, Gunter 2019, Karakaya-Stump 2018, Kılınç 2014, Marshall 2006, Walton 2017), have been widely studied. All of these factors together with rapid industrialization and urbanization contributed to the transformation of this deeply divided society. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) came to power following a severe economic crisis in 2001 and a devastating earthquake in the most industrialized provinces of Kocaeli and Istanbul (see Çarkoğlu 2002 on the first electoral victory of the AKP. Öniş 2015 provides a systematic periodization of AKP tenure in later years). Both of these events and developments around them had shaken the confidence of the people in the establishment, and a new party such as the AKP was given a modest level of support in 2002 general elections keeping only one other party, the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) above the critical 10% threshold. As such, the AKP controlled nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, TBMM) with about one-third of the popular votes.
In the following 16 years, AKP dominated the electoral scene in five general elections, two presidential, and three local elections. After 2002, AKP's support level continuously rose to about 46–49% securing a clear win in both the 2007 and 2011 elections. However, popular upheavals around the Gezi Park protests and then an inner clash within the party ranks in 2013 marked a turning point in AKP's tenure. With economic difficulties constraining the party's ability to maintain its support base, AKP lost about 10 percentage points of votes cast in its favor on June 7, 2015. The decline of electoral support despite active campaigning by the then first popularly elected president of the country Recep Tayyip Erdoğan resulted in AKP's loss of control of the majority of the seats in the TBMM alone. Erdoğan used the bottleneck in the Kurdish opening he had initiated a few years back that had helped him gain the Kurdish vote as an excuse to adopt a hardliner U-turn in AKP's Kurdish policy and called for a snap election in November 2015. Such a hawkish turn in its policy helped the AKP win the Turkish nationalist vote at the expense of the Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) and regain AKP's losses in June to capture the majority in the TBMM once again. The June to November 2015 period was marred by a significant number of terror attacks and losses of civilian lives rendering the election campaign ever more difficult for the opposition. From June to November 2015, we observed a significant flow of votes from AKP to first the Turkish and the Kurdish nationalist parties MHP and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP) but then back to AKP as a result of rising terror attacks and security concerns (see Aytaç and Çarkoğlu 2021 and Kalaycıoğlu 2018 on the June and November 2015 elections).
In less than nine months after the November 2015 elections, the rupture within the AKP appears to have led to an odd coalition with some segments of the Turkish military that attempted to overthrow the AKP government and the very AKP government itself. The bloody military intervention by a faction within the military was only averted after the loyalist armed forces effectively ousted the interventionists (see Çalışkan 2017, Esen and Gümüşçü 2017, Yavuz and Koç 2016 on the coup attempt). The aftermath of the intervention came with a strong purge under the framework of a state of emergency declaration that effectively restricts many fundamental democratic rights and freedoms. As a result, many started to question whether Turkey remains to be a democracy or not. Answers to this simple question are also divided in a highly polarized political setting of the country. While “the victims of the post-coup purge, leftists, secularists and Erdogan critics believe democracy here died some time ago as the president, shaken by challenges, expelled or sued opponents and fell back on a close circle of ultra-loyalists … the other half of the country … revere a man they believe has transformed Turkey for the better and is misunderstood by the outside world” (Lowen 2016). Such a division is likely to have shaped the outcome of the June 2018 elections as well.
Significance of the 2018 elections
The June 24, 2018 elections in Turkey were important for at least four reasons. Being the first general election after the April 16, 2017 constitutional referendum that instituted the legal backbone of the new presidential system in the country, these elections represent a historical turning point. Second, these elections were also held under new administrative rules that overrode the historical consensus reached before the 1950 general elections between the then ruling CHP and the main opposition party, the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP). The consensus reached at the time was to build an administrative body, the Supreme Election Council (Yüksek Seçim Kurulu, YSK), for running the administration of elections in the country. As such, the election administration was left to the control of high judges independent from the executive. By changing this age-old consensus about the administration of election by independent judges and rendering the incumbent government more responsible for the administration (safekeeping of voters’ registration, design of the ballots, the appointment of the polling station authorities, supervision of the campaign process, administration of the vote count and aggregation, etc.) of elections created grounds for weakened belief in the free and fair nature of elections and deteriorated the level playing field among the people and political parties. Together with the new presidential system constitutionally allowing the president to be an active participant in the election campaign as the head of his party, shifted the balance in favor of the incumbent party of the president. Third, the 2018 election was yet another election undertaken during times of economic hardship for the masses. Similar to June 2015 elections, expectations were not supportive of a sweeping electoral win for the incumbent AKP. Fourth, it ushered in the establishment of a new alliance system between parties that effectively abolished the 10% representational threshold for the parties within the alliance, limited the influence of factors like the economic difficulties deteriorating the electoral support of the incumbent AKP. As a result of shifting balances among the partisan groups of the right-wing electorate appears to have built a solid support base for the new alliance between the AKP and the MHP.
As such, the 2018 elections mark the beginning of an illiberal term in Turkish electoral politics with the absence of a level playing field during the campaign, non-autonomous administration of elections, and rising ideological polarization. Hence, we aim to provide a substantial empirical data-based evaluation of the developments that led to the outcome observed in these elections that will provide a reference point for future electoral developments, their evaluations, and consequent political incidents.
Results: a short summary
Elections for the newly empowered president as well as parliamentary seats were held together in this election for the very first time. Both elections resulted in respective surprises of their own. While President Erdoğan was expected by many to be the ultimate winner, his decisive win in the first round surprised many. The elections for the TBMM seats resulted in a decisive loss with about 42.5% of the vote for the incumbent AKP and a surprisingly strong showing for the MHP with 11.1% support. The splinters from the MHP ran under the Good Party ...
