By Walid Shoebat
When we look at the media covering the elections in Turkey what we see are useless headlines that Erdogan and the AKP Party is practically over. This despite that the AKP ruling party won three consecutive national elections over the past decade-plus—wins its fourth in a row, beating the second-place party by over fifteen percentage points. Despite all this, nearly every outside observer declares the result to be a disastrous loss for that Islamist party. Today after the elections are over, Prime Minister turned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still ensconced in his thousand-room palace, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will remain at his post, and the AKP is going to continue dominating the government as either a minority ruling party or as the lead party except that it will be in an extremely lopsided coalition. Despite that, when one examines the media, it acts as if the AKP’s political obituary is being written just because the AKP has gone from 49.8% of the vote to 40.8%. Erdoğan’s AKP is still – by far – Turkey’s most popular party. Can anyone deny this?
The question that few analysts fail to address is this: it is the parliament that counts, so how much power does the parliament have that Erdogan cannot control?
Answer: not much.
While denying Erdogan his presidential ambitions is a victory for secularists, over the past year, Erdogan has already:
1-accumulated powers normally reserved for the prime minister. Erdogan has already weakened the office of the prime minister and Turkey’s parliamentary system.
2-Erdogan can still chair cabinet meetings and has appointed a shadow cabinet of advisers operating out of the presidential office, and Turks now refer to “the Palace” as shorthand for Erdogan and the coterie surrounding him.
3-After this election, not much changed and the latest election results will only encourage this trend allowing Erdogan to continue his takeover of Turkey.
4-Now that the AKP is a minority government whose powers and mandate will be curtailed, or a coalition government in which the AKP must share power, the parliament will even be less able to protect its prerogatives from a power-hungry president Sultan wannabe Erdogan.
5-AKP’s internal term limits mean that an influential band of party lifers and heavyweights who were unable to stand for a fourth term will now move over to the Palace as part of Erdogan’s staff. That will only tilt the balance of power even more toward Erdogan and away from Davutoglu and the assembly.
6-While The AKP may no longer control a majority of the seats in the assembly, but with no effective opposition to keep it in check, it is Erdogan as usual. The HDP (Kurdish party) for example, is a strong symbolic opponent, but with only 12 percent of the vote and about 80 of the 550 seats in parliament, it is not in a position to stymie any of the government’s initiatives and Erdogan’s plans.
7-The main opposition party to the AKP is the People’s Republican Party (CHP). This party has proved to be relatively feckless, and it did not improve at all on its 2011 performance. This would mean that the Islamist AKP Party will now simply rely on legislators from other parties in order to advance Erdogan’s agenda. In reality, only the AKP agenda has a realistic chance of being advanced at all. The dominant party in a coalition government is still the party that runs the show.
8-The choice is between a “new Turkey” Erdogan’s Ottoman dream and a return to a history marked by short-lived coalition governments, economic instability and coups by a military. But when it comes to the military’s influence, it is Erdogan who has now reined in and controls the military.
Therefore, celebrating the AKP’s “loss” is simply media folly and analysts stupidity. The AKP is still Turkey’s ruling party and we still argue that Erdogan should not yet be eliminated as a potential Antichrist. If we examine the Bible and Erdogan’s party we would find that his history does match what was foretold by Daniel “And after the league is made with him he shall act deceitfully, for he shall come up and become strong with a small number of people.” (Daniel 11:23)
Historically, the AKP began from a small number of people, the Refah Welfare Party which was subsequently banned by the courts, which held that the party had an agenda to promote Islamic fundamentalism in the state. It initially started with a small number of people and received only 7% of the total vote in the 1987 parliamentary elections and thus had not even qualified for assembly seats. Then came the main electoral surprise in the 1991 balloting where nearly 17% of the electorate voted for it, enabling it to win sixty-two seats in the National Assembly. It was truly the incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a former member of the party who later renamed it to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) who catapulted the Islamist party to what it is today which still holds over 40 percent of the seats defeating all the other three. If the AKP now allies with the MHP, it would catapult a new combined party with a whopping 57%. This would truly be a victory for Erdogan who started with “a small number of people”.
