Considering the Turkish electoral geography, these elections have not changed anything. The country is still split into three parts, and none of the three rival political forces has managed to go beyond its established electoral area. The internal tension in Turkey has been sustained, and the related conflicts, either concealed or explicit, can be expected to continue.
The recent combined presidential/parliamentary elections in Turkey have demonstrated, on the one hand, the accumulation of power around Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The current president was elected for a new term in a confident and generally expected way, having gathered about 52% of votes. The constitutional amendments agreed after the 2017 referendum (which, among other things, had the prime minister post abolished and the status of “executive president” introduced) have significantly strengthened his authority and his influence on decision-making processes. Erdogan’s opponents, both within the country and abroad, are already using the term “sultan” with regard to the newly elected president.
On the other hand, the recent elections have once again demonstrated that the country is split into three parts. Istanbul and the coastal areas of the Aegean and the western Mediterranean have again rejected Erdogan in favor of the post-Kemalist and pro-Western candidate Muharrem İnce (who gained about 30%). Kurdish areas in the southeast of Turkey voted for a local leader, Selahattin Demirtaş, who was allowed to run for the office despite his imprisonment (8%). Thus, considering the Turkish electoral geography, these elections have not changed anything. The country is still split into three parts, and none of the three rival political forces has managed to go beyond its established electoral area. The internal tension in Turkey has been sustained, and the related conflicts, either concealed or explicit, can be expected to continue.
As for the Kurds, one can easily understand that it would be strange to expect any other outcome. One can recall the acute and yet unsettled ethnic issues, the Syrian civil war, with transparently anti-Kurdish involvement of the Turkish troops there, which sharply exacerbated the named issue in Turkey, the arrests of Kurdish leaders, the reciprocal accusations in “aiding terrorists,” “terrorist propaganda,” and human rights violations. All of this made Kurdish-Turkish confrontation insolvable at the moment. It should be noted that the situation contradicts Erdogan’s first years in power, when he made contradictory yet palpable steps to expand the rights of Kurds in Turkey and reduce persecutions against them by the security forces. Then the Syrian context crossed all these steps out.
Regarding the pro-Western “Kemalist” opposition to Erdogan, things are much more complicated. First, its inability to negotiate with one another and to set broader goals at the stage of nominating candidates seem to be a clear miscalculation. The project of nominating the only candidate, Abdullah Gül, failed due to internal contradictions within the opposition. It seems that Abdullah Gül, the former president of the country and Erdogan's former companion, could have efficiently competed with him not only in the coastal region, but also in Erdogan’s electoral domain in the central areas. That way, the opposition could have gained more votes and the second round of elections. But even having rejected Gül as a candidate, the pro-Western opposition did not unite: presidential ambitions were voiced by several persons, and as many Turkish experts note, Muharrem İnce was far from being the best candidate for the post. First, he was not fully supported in the coastal area, and second, his extremely sharp and uncompromising anti-Erdoganian position made his chances within Erdogan’s domain practically non-existing. At the same time, the tiredness of Erdogan in the internal regions of Turkey, despite the conservatism and nationalism of its population, was giving a real chance to candidates meeting their expectations at least in some point. As a result, Muharrem İnce scored the demographically predictable 30% in the coastal part of the country, and the elections were held according to the scenario sketched earlier.
Unlike the opposition, president Erdogan used coalition tools very effectively in the campaign. Making an agreement with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which decided not to run its candidate for the presidential elections in 2018, was undoubtedly one of his successes. It was precisely the coalition with MHP, named “People's Alliance”, that allowed him to win the first round. At the previous presidential elections in 2014, MHP was in the opposition, and its representative Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu was the only candidate from the nationalist and pro-Western coalition, who gathered 38% votes, 8% more than the current result of the purely pro-Western opposition.
The nomination of an obvious “spoiler,” Meral Akşener, a former member of parliament who broke with MHP several month before the elections in order to create her own pocket party “Good Party”, is an even greater success of Erdogan’s pre-election tactics. Contrary to all opposition calls to join the coalition, she ran for the office and gathered 7% of votes – which is roughly the number Muharram Inge needed for the result of the former opposition’s leader at the previous elections. At the same time, Akşener’s candidacy was evidently a farce, because she joined the coalition with other parties in the parliamentary elections held the same day. At the same time, “Good Party” had 9% of votes as part of the opposition coalition, i.e. 2% more than its leader as a candidate for presidency.
However, as a whole, , the results of the parliamentary elections, with regard to coalitions, go in line with those of presidential election: parties of the pro-Erdogan coalition “People’s Alliance” had 53% votes, the opposition’s coalition “Nation Alliance” – around 33%, the Kurdish party – 11%.
Considering the impact these elections made on foreign policy and some first external reactions, these factors are to strengthen the current political position of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. On the one hand, there are some eloquently harsh critics on the part of the European media, where labels like “sultan” of “dictator” are frequent. Only a few European leaders welcomed his victory. On the other hand, it was no less demonstrative act to supply Turkey with the newest American jets a few days before the elections. Pundits say that the act demonstrated Donald Trump’s attitude towards supporting Erdogan, and gave him votes of Turkish businesses, which do not want to break with the US. Trump’s move has opened another front of US-EU confrontation –this time in Turkey. The symbolic significance of the telephone conversation Vladimir Putin had with Erdogan after the elections should not be underestimated either.
What are the prospects for the future? One could predict that the Turkey-EU relations will further deteriorate, Trump will distance himself from Europe in rejecting Erdogan, and the dialogue between Russia and Turkey, including some broader Eurasian perspectives, will continue.
