Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been Prime Minister since 2003, and unless something goes incredibly wrong, he is going to be Prime Minister after the election too.
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| Image from Wikimedia |
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| Image from gadanalam.com |
This post ended up getting long, so I've put in a jump: read on to find out what those guys would say their most important difference is.
To give any fuller description, we have to talk about this guy:
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| Image from European Culture Magazine |
When he was defining Turkish political thought Ataturk used six principles, now referred to as the six arrows. I would describe them as Republicanism, Democracy, Secularism, Modernisation, Nationalism and Statism.
Those six arrows are on the party logo of the Republican party (the CHP, in Turkish), and you can see them behind Kilicdaroglu up there.
Incidentally, when they said "Secularism" and "Modernisation", they weren't joking. From then through to now, wearing a fez or hijab in government buildings or universities has been banned as a violation of church-state separation.
Most of those arrows are universally agreed; the real dividing one is secularism. (Actually, Nationalism is as well, but we'll worry about that in a later post because the big two parties are both lukewarm on it). Historically the The Republican party has been red-hot on secularism. Both the courts and the army have the ability to kick people out of office if they're considered to be violating it.
The army have used this as an excuse to throw their weight around more than once, most recently in 1997. The army delivered an ultimatum to the government, who backed down and resigned without bloodshed; this has consequently been called the postmodern coup. However, it seems to have caused a major backlash.
Recep Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul at the time, and got a lifetime ban from politics for his involvement in Islamist politics. This ban didn't really take, as you can tell. Erdogan went on to found the Justice and Development part (called the AKP). The AKP has sailed close to the wind at times, but they seem to have convinced the courts, military and (mostly) the electorate that they're on the right side of the law. To be frank, in large part that might be because the AKP has been so overwhelmingly successful.
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| 2007 Election results from Wikimedia |
On the other hand, 95% of Turkey's population say they believe in God, and 91% say religion is important to them (the equivalent figures in the UK are 38% and 29%). Despite that, when the AKP first named its nominee for the appointed Presidency, there were protests with a million people in the streets.
At this point, I was originally just going to call this post done because a) it's getting pretty long and b) I haven't really done enough reading on the Nationalists and Kurds (I'm saving it for a note that I mentally refer to as Turkey and the Empire Strikes Back). But then, I saw this:
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| Screencapture from BBC News |
The party in question is the MHP, the Nationalist party; they're bouncing at around 10%. From what I've managed to glean so far, they like things like marching, weird racial theories, and uniforms with silver skulls on them. As it turns out, they also like doing things in hotels that you wouldn't want Twitter to find out about.
One thing I will give them is they have a pretty good logo:
I'd say it's on a par with the Republican arrows, and certainly a long way ahead of the AKP logo:
I dunno, the MHP logo just reminds me of pacman
ReplyDeleteWacca wacca wacca.
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