In the five months since the last set of parliamentary elections in Turkey failed to produce a clear winner, the country has been severely shaken by terrorist attacks and become more deeply polarized than before.
In an atmosphere of increasing fear and instability, Turks returned to the ballot box Sunday. But the outcome is forecast to be similarly inconclusive.
The vote in June brought a stunning end to more than 12 years of dominance in parliament by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP. The party kept its majority but failed to keep enough seats for single-party rule.
Efforts to form a governing coalition failed, and a new election was called. Erdogan’s party is apparently hoping enough voters will have changed their minds since June to give it back its majority.
Voting ended at 5 p.m.
Attack in capital killed around 100
Opinion polls, however, suggest such a revival is far from guaranteed.
“It seems unlikely that Erdogan’s preference to roll the electoral dice instead of allowing the AKP to enter into a power-sharing coalition will be rewarded,” Bulent Aliriza, a Turkey expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote before the vote. “Consequently, the political uncertainty, growing social divisions and insecurity which has characterized the period between the two elections seems set to continue.”
The most brutal blow to Turkey’s body politic during the period came three weeks ago when two suicide bombers killed around 100 people at a peace rally in the heart of the capital, Ankara.
The deadliest terrorist attack in modern Turkish history targeted a demonstration calling for an end to fighting between the government and Kurdish militants.
Rather than shocking people into a unified stance, the horrific bombings only seemed to exacerbate bitter divisions. Erdogan has blamed a bizarre combination of ISIS militants, Kurdish rebels and Syrian intelligence for carrying out the attack,according to Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency.
Complex web of security challenges
His finger-pointing highlights the multifaceted security challenges Turkey now faces.
The Syrian civil war, which has sent more than a million refugees spilling onto Turkish soil, continues to rage. Turkey has long called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to go and has traded fire with his forces on occasion.
But the Turkish government has also joined the U.S.-led coalition in the fight against the Islamic extremist group ISIS, one of Assad’s foes. Turkey has allowed the United States to use its bases to launch airstrikes and carried out bombing raids of its own against ISIS positions in Syria.
At the same time, Turkish authorities’ long-running conflict with Kurdish militants reignited over the summer after a fragile ceasefire collapsed.
The Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, accused the Turkish government of colluding in a suicide bombing that killed more than 30 people who were organizing an aid delivery to Kobani, a town inside Syria that Kurdish fighters took from ISIS earlier this year. Authorities blamed ISIS militants for the attack.
The PKK, which has fought against the Turkish state for decades, killed two police officers in retaliation over the bombing, setting off a new spiral of violence. Turkey began bombing PKK positions in northern Iraq and inside its own borders.
Rise of pro-Kurdish party
Street-to-street fighting has turned swathes of southeastern Turkey into battle zones.
In an effort to clamp down on the different groups the government considers to be terrorist organizations, massive security sweeps take place on a regular basis across Turkey, with large numbers of people detained.
The inconclusive June election was the first time that the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, ran as a party and entered parliament. It did better than many people expected, winning 80 seats and depriving Erdogan’s party of its majority.
“Since then, Erdogan has portrayed HDP as allies of the PKK — hence, co-perpetrators of the violence that has flared up in Turkey,” in the hope of winning back lost voters, wrote Sinan Ekim and Kemal Kirisci in a recent analysis for the Brookings Institution.
“How can Turkey overcome this polarization? It’s difficult to say,” they wrote. “What is certain is that distancing Turkey from the brink of a civil war will be one of the greatest challenges for the country’s next administration.”