It is no longer "Nobody's business but the Turks!" They are going to be critical to us. From WSJ.com
CAMPAIGN 2002
'Muslim Democrats'
Moderate Islamists seek political office in Turkey.
BY ASLA AYDINTASBAS
Saturday, November 2, 2002 12:01 a.m.
ISTANBUL, Turkey--Egemen Bagis has a New York spring in his step. Understandable, since the Turkish-American citizen just moved back here after 17 years in the Big Apple to run for Parliament in Turkey's general elections tomorrow.
Campaigning for the Justice and Development party in a lower-middle-class quarter by the Bosporus, Mr. Bagis is friendly but rushed, in the way New Yorkers are. It's a sunny afternoon and he enters a fishmonger's to shake hands and quickly deliver his message. "I am running from your district and have brought you the greetings of Tayyip Erdogan," he says, referring to the party's banned Islamist-oriented leader--a former mayor of Istanbul, and still very popular. "You know as well as I do that Turkey can't bear four more years of rickety coalitions. Please don't force us into one. Bring us to power on our own."
The basic assumption in Mr. Bagis's plea--that the Justice and Development (or AK) party will finish in front at the ballot box and form the next government--seems indisputable, according to opinion polls here. A coalition of Islamists and conservatives, AK emerged last year from the reformist wing of the former Islamist Refah (or Welfare) Party, which ruled Turkey in 1996-97 but was forced out of power by the country's secularist military. The party's leaders have since discarded the "Islamist" label and have embraced many mainstream policies--including support for U.S. military action in Iraq, and for Turkey's entry into the European Union, both of which would have been anathema to the party in its old guise.
Yet an electoral victory for AK does not mean that Turks are opting for Islamist politics in defiance of the secular Kemalist state. Or that the extremism that has taken hold in other parts of the Muslim world has finally arrived in this pro-Western society. There is something else going on in Turkey, and it's worth a closer look.
When voters go to the polls, they will do so to register their frustration with economic mismanagement and the failings of mainstream parties. A relentless fiscal crisis has devastated Turkey's economy, and the austerity program prescribed by the IMF remains unpopular. The economy has shrunk by 9.4%, unemployment is high, and many small businesses face extinction. Most galling of all, some of the $15 billion received in IMF aid this year has been siphoned off by corrupt bank officials. So this is a protest vote in every sense of the word, and the likely beneficiary will be the AK party. Turks have not become more devout overnight; it's just that the other parties seem bankrupt, and that AK offers an alternative vision.
Turkey's political center remains fragmented--even cluttered--and the ruling coalition of center-right and -left has failed to provide any real solution. Attractive, then, is the AK party's unusual hybrid of Islamists and reformist conservatives, whose project is to reclaim the devastated "political center." That project, the party leaders say, will create a new and unprecedented global template for democratic Muslim politics, something like an Islamic version of the Christian Democrats of Europe, anchoring Turkey's religious conservatives more firmly to its secular democracy.
The AK party's secular component appears not to be mere window dressing. Erkan Mumcu, the enfant terrible of the Turkish right who left the mainstream Motherland party, recently joined AK. Why? "I am here to see if we can succeed with this experiment. Think of this as Turkish society creating its own democratic modernization--rejecting the top-down version from the bureaucracy." Mr. Mumcu, formerly a tourism minister, follows an unabashedly secular lifestyle. Perhaps the best indication of that is that his wife--like all of AK's 70 female candidates--does not wear a headscarf.
Founded by Ataturk in 1923, modern Turkey subscribes to a strict separation of mosque and state. The constitution prevents any public display of religion by parties and politicians, and designates the military as the guardian of secular democracy. Islamic symbols (such as headscarves) are not tolerated in Parliament, universities or government employment. Turkey's last two Islamist parties were prohibited on the grounds that they posed a threat to secular order; and AK's leader, Mr. Erdogan, is barred from politics because he once recited a poem with religious undertones at a public rally.
Only a quarter of the forecast 30% AK vote will come from a religious constituency. The rest represents a political cross-section, especially urban nationalists and conservatives. AK's success will depend largely on whether it can balance the demands of its religious base--such as the liberalization of headscarf restrictions--with the "clean governance" expectations of its new supporters. And its leaders must rule with the knowledge that 70% of Turks will not have voted for them. This should prove to be as great a check on Islamist temptation as the fear of a secularist military backlash.
The political establishment and many in the urban middle class fear that an AK victory could weaken secularism, and that the pious within the party will use the advantages of an open system to further a longer-term Islamist agenda. These concerns are valid but exaggerated. With so many people of secular lifestyle within its ranks, AK's chemistry is radically different from an Islamist organization. Its stated policies--our only legitimate way of measuring its goals--do not espouse extremist views.
Party leaders like Mr. Mumcu say they are trying to meet the more religious factions around a "democracy platform." It's a tricky experiment, but one worth a try in a country where tension over the role of religion in public discourse often polarizes society. Such a project--a reign of "Muslim Democrats"--may not sound pleasant to Turkey's Westernized elite or to the European Union bureaucrats always slightly edgy about Turkey's candidacy. But many Turks understand that for their country to move forward, there needs to be a new social contract that can accommodate the legitimate rights of religious constituencies while providing safeguards for the nonreligious.
Forging a new social contract between liberals and conservatives was exactly what Turkey's last great leader, Turgut Ozal, tried in the 1980s. The AK model is likely to be more conservative, and may ultimately try to modify Turkey's adamant secularism toward a less rigid interpretation of Kemalist prohibitions. But if the AK party is serious about becoming a new force of the center, its leadership should in good faith negotiate a new deal with the secular public and the country's military. The latter, it seems, is already signaling that it's willing to listen.
Ms. Aydintasbas is an adjunct fellow at the Western Policy Center in Washington. |
