Coronavirus sees political polarisation in Turkey deepen

As Turkey’s normalisation phase began gradually on 1 June after cautious measures and advances in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, the political landscape has been giving signs of an ever-more deepening polarisation and friction as rumours of snap elections heat up.

Erdogan's AKP (Justice and Development Party) has denied any snap presidential and parliamentary elections were on the horizon and said they will be held as scheduled, in 2023, but spats with the opposition have led to speculation that the government could call them early – before economic difficulties worsen and a rise in the opposition’s popularity makes defeat in three years’ time more likely.

At the heart of these speculations is the recent dispute between the opposition and the government over fundraising campaigns and a struggle to consolidate power at a time when the economy is being battered by the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Tension between the government and the opposition flared up during the last two months, as the pandemic peaked in the country. While the two camps fought to aid the population, Turkey's already embattled economy shrank still further due to coronavirus.

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Opposition mayors investigated for fund-raising

Opposition-run municipalities across Turkey launched fundraising campaigns from which residents in need could seek financial help. These moves eventually led the Interior Ministry to launch investigations against Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavas and Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, both from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

Elsewhere, state-run Vakifbank froze the donation accounts of the Istanbul and Ankara metropolitan municipalities. And the CHP-run metropolitan municipality of the southern province of Mersin said their distribution of free bread to residents in need had been banned.

The government accused them of conducting work autonomously from them, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying they were creating a "state within a state" in an address to the public on 1 April. Subsequently his party’s officials repeatedly claimed that collecting aid separately was against the law and denied any politically-motivated move behind the government's actions. They have requested that the municipalities work in coordination with the government in other initiatives.

The economic aid package introduced by the government in the wake of Turkey's COVID-19 outbreak makes up 5 percent of GDP, according to Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak. Some have asked whether this is enough, especially when compared to other countries like Germany, where the share of the relief package is more than 24 percent of GDP, a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report showed. Municipalities, especially in Istanbul and Ankara, the two largest cities in the country, have relentlessly continued to run their aid campaigns and managed to raise substantial funds. Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavas urged wealthier residents to help poorer citizens by paying off their debts to local grocers. The campaign, called "goodness is contagious", soon went national.

Yavas said they don’t exactly know how much of the debts were paid but they’re guessing, according to the information they received, that most of them were. He suggested that there were already 165,000 people in need of financial help in the 6 million-populated capital Ankara before the pandemic, but their numbers surged to 280,000 during the pandemic. A further 72,000 who sought help from the municipality in different forms having lost their jobs or incomes due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Yavas also temporarily deployed tailors, who had stopped work when the outbreak began confining people to their homes, to Ankara in order to produce masks for the public. Similarly, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu's "pay it forward" campaign, which he launched to help those with outstanding utility bills, amassed around 15 million Turkish lira (U.S.$2.1 million), a week after it kicked off early May.

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Surges and declines in politician popularity

Various opinion polls have suggested that during the pandemic the popularity of and trust in politicians has shifted, with Health Minister Fahrettin Koca topping public approval ratings, scoring even higher than President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For those on the opposition, Yavas doubled his popularity and a slight increase in support for Imamoglu has also been observed.

Both mayors, from the CHP and representing the party’s smaller opposition nationalist party ally, won Turkey’s two biggest cities in elections last year. It was the first time in 25 years that Erdogan's AKP and its predecessors had not been in charge of these economic powerhouses. Imamoglu’s initial victory in March 2019 was not accepted by the AKP, which cited irregularities in vote-counting. But Imamoglu won again three months later in an election re-run, with an even bigger majority.

Their growing popularity during the pandemic means they are now seen as potential rivals to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But this does not necessarily mean that their political alliance is gaining the kind of recognition to match the mayors’ personal rise in popularity.

The election rumour

Several recent polls suggesting the AKP could be losing popularity have contributed to speculation that a snap election could be called before AKP support plunges too dramatically. But the government denied early election speculations and presidential communications director Fahrettin Altun said in a tweet that such fake and fraudulent claims were aimed at "taking society down a certain route."

A prominent political analyst and editor-in-chief of one of the few independent media outlets Medyascope, Rusen Cakir stressed that there was no doubt over the decline in potential votes for the AKP, but added that these were not necessarily shifting to the opposition. Instead, the bulk of them remain undecided, and most are former AKP supporters, he said. In one of his recent video analyses, he claimed – albeit without much certainty – that the possibility of snap elections was likely, but that only time would tell.

"What we know is that a serious economic crisis is in the offing. Or to be more accurate: the crisis already existed and is simply deepening now. It will not be easy for the government to manage the imminent issues, and the more I think about it, the more I believe a snap election is possible," Cakir said.By contrast, Bekir Agirdir, another political analyst and managing director of Konda, which has conducted accurate opinion election polls in the past, argues that the possibility of an early election is slim and Erdogan will want to stay in government as long as he can under the current legislation. He argues that the government would only opt for an early election were it unable to govern anymore.

"I imagine AKP thinking goes something like this: yes, our votes are dwindling, but they are not going to the opposition yet…Under the given conditions, we need to invest in 'negative identification', maintaining a strong discourse of criminalisation against the opposition," Agirdir concluded.

Indeed, one recent move by parliament, which is controlled by an AKP majority, has been to strip one CHP and two Kurdish-oriented Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) parliamentary delegates of their MP status, based on accusations and charges of "espionage" and "terrorism".

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Itching for a fight

Against this backdrop, even more controversial issues are looming on the horizon in Turkish politics, such as the government seeking to change the election system for the administrations of the country's bar associations.

The draft legislation on proportional representation would effectively allow for alternative bar associations, thereby decreasing the voting weight of the largest associations, such as those in Ankara and Istanbul, which have been openly critical of AKP policy on numerous occasions.

The government is also working on transferring the CHP’s shares in Is Bankasi bank – bequeathed to the party by modern Turkey's founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk before his death in 1938 – to the state treasury.

Another ongoing controversy is the government’s ambition to convert Istanbul's famous Hagia Sophia landmark, currently a museum, into a mosque, in line with the conservative religious views of AKP voters. Opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the CHP has warned against such an initiative by the government, accusing the AKP of intentionally seeking to polarise and provoke.

Despite the tough times the world is going through due to coronavirus, polarisation – one of the main characteristics of Turkish politics – would seem to be very much alive and kicking. Bringing it under control may well be harder than containing the pandemic.

Ayse Karabat

© Qantara.de 2020