On Sunday, Turkey’s ruling AKP party surpassed expectations and regained its majority in the country’s parliament. But the elections have been marred by violence and suppression of the media, and Turkey has been dealing with external problems along its Syrian border as refugees continue to flood into the country to escape the civil war.
Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, says Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an was the big winner in the country he’s led in several capacities since taking office in 2003. More liberal Turks had hoped Erdo?an would be voted out, and after his transition to the presidency in 2014 there’s an underlying fear that Turkey hasn’t truly made a shift to democracy.
“On the other hand, the threat of instability, and that Turkey could lose their economic edge because there's no good opposition party, and that it could fall into fragmentation, is really what drove this,” Landis said. “There has just been a giant bomb set off by ISIS killing 100 Kurds at a Kurdish rally. And that, I think, sent a shiver down everybody's spine, and Erdo?an ran on security and stability.”
And Landis said that strategy paid sweeping dividends. Voter turnout was incredibly high, but women and the pro-Kurdish HDP lost seats.
“Taraf, the left-wing paper, called it the ‘chaos plan,’ Landis said. By sowing chaos, Erdo?an would make people come back to him as the only person who can get a clear majority,” Landis said. “Hürriyet, the other major newspaper, said this is a ‘victory of fear.’ And that’s really the big worry, is where is Turkey headed in all this, and when does Erdo?an step down?”
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