Turkey and the Heart of Darkness

Earlier I showed you this map:

2007 election result from Wikipedia

For a quick refresher on who these people are:

AKP- the Justice and Development party: Prime Minister Erdogan's party, and the Muslim world's answer to Europe's "Chistian democrat" parties (which, for the record, are like our Conservatives except they spend more time worrying about social issues and less time worrying about welfare cheats).

CHP- the Republican Party. Originally super-hot on Secularism, but now wandering more towards mainstream Social Democracy (like Labour or the Socialists in Germany and France). Party of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the only person other than Erdogan who obviously has a chance of being PM in their life.

MHP- the Nationalist Action party. I'd say they're somewhere between UKIP and the BNP, but less cagey about their intentions.

The cyan on that map are "Independents": for now, just think of them as the Kurdish party.

Into the heart of darkness

I should say that the MHP represent a very real and very ugly stream in Turkish society. Like our nationalists, they have the sketchiest possible understanding of history and human decency. They also, like the EDL, like to demonstrate their patriotism by beating up people who look like they might be a minority.

The dark parts of Turkish culture really seem to have ramped up since the invasion of Iraq; general purpose anger (which is understandable) seems to have become mixed up with anti-West, anti-Israel, and anti-anyone-not-Turkish-enough sentiment. The most commercially successful outcome is Valley of the Wolves:

Image from Wikipedia

In many ways it's a standard good-guys vs. bad-guys action film, except that the bad guys are American soldiers, plus a Jew who steals organs from Muslims to sell on the apparently-bustling child-organ markets of New York and Tel Aviv. The Americans, meanwhile, are doing every bad thing they really did, every bad thing other people might have done, and overall stopping just short of goose-stepping and wearing swastikas.

Swastikas themselves are problematic, though: in what I take to be the equivalent of a teenager getting a tattoo of a skull, as the war progressed sales of Mein Kampf went through the roof, to a worldwide chorus of "wtf".

I'm not saying this is anything unique to Turkey. Our own million-selling papers aren't afraid of racist nationalism, or paranoid fantasy, or inciting violence against religious minorities. Just remember that those people are there, and they're important.

To be fair, the MHP aren't alone in having problems: the Republicans have links to certain very enthusiastic military people, the Kurdish parties are like Sinn Fein in that they know absolutely nothing about any bombs that may or may not have been detonated in town squares, and the demons of Islamist thought need no introduction. The difference, I would say, is that while everyone else tries to distance themselves from their own extremist wings, MHP celebrate theirs.

We'll go into the impact they're having on this election (which is both unexpected and possibly quite significant) in a post tomorrow. We'll also go into why Kurds run as Independents, and I can promise we'll also feature the words "d'Hondt allocation". Hold on to your hats.