"He" won again

May the results of the 2011 elections be auspicious. The changes in the vote charts, province by province and across Turkey as a whole, appear to have produced a picture that is highly meaningful in every respect. First of all, the AK Parti's emerging from this election having increased its votes for the second time while in power must be recorded as a record for Turkish political history. Probably this record has, as far as we know, either no example in the world or very few.

These elections are the eighth that Prime Minister Erdoğan has entered so far. Right after the last referendum on 12 September, which ended in a 58 percent "yes," our media ran series of articles titled "why does he always win?" After 1 mayoral race, 2 general elections, 2 local elections and 2 referendums, it is understood that with the result he obtained in this last election he has entered, Erdoğan will for some time continue to prompt questions about why he wins and to nag at minds.

Although it has raised its votes to a clear 50 percent, on the contrary, the number of deputies the AK Parti sends into the Assembly decreases with every election. This was not unexpected, but despite a vote share that could win a referendum alone, the AK Parti has also fallen behind a number with which it could even take a constitutional amendment alone to a referendum. In this picture, formed also under the influence of the recent changes in the numbers of deputies by province determined by the YSK, the AK Parti, which won the elections far more strongly, has moved away from the point of undertaking a constitutional amendment alone.

At first glance this may look like a situation that wounds the AK Parti's victory, but no one should have any doubt that good outcomes will come of this too. According to this result, the AK Parti will not give up on the constitution to be made, but will have to seek a compromise in the Assembly for it. A chance has perhaps arisen to see how faithful the CHP will remain to the constitutional vision it announced before the elections. From now on the sole addressee of public expectations on the constitutional amendment will not be the AK Parti; simultaneously the CHP and the BDP will be as well.

The first winner of these elections, without doubt and indisputably, is the AK Parti. It would not be wrong to say that the BDP displayed the expected performance and that the MHP was the second surprise winner of the election. For, despite the tape operations, the political psychology of the MHP's success, which confounded all the polls by at least a point or two, is worth dwelling on.

However, against all this, the CHP must be shown as the apparently sole loser of the election. The party, which has been in the position of main opposition to the AK Parti for three terms, despite all its latest attractions, indeed despite the many attractive offers it put forward in the elections, so to speak offers that "no mortal could refuse," could not bring its votes even to the expected minimum psychological threshold of 27 percent. We see that these elections registered a great failure for Kılıçdaroğlu in the first big test of his leadership.

One of the most important factors in this failure was that, despite all the "new CHP" discourses, it could not prove its credibility. It could not be credible because its first act as chairman was to throw itself into a lane in which it was not easy to explain why one should oppose in the referendum. In this stance there was nothing "new" for the CHP. The great performance it displayed in the referendum, which was an indisputably progressive move in the direction of Turkey's democratization, caused it to fall far behind on the scale of its democracy discourse.

A second point at which the new CHP lost its credibility was the Ergenekonist candidates it fielded. With the alliance it entered with Silivri, it did not notice that a claim of democracy or "newness" cannot be thought of together with it. The Turkish democratic history will undoubtedly assess in its own way the burden of sin of its disposition regarding the candidates standing trial for coup-making whom it put into the Assembly. In the end, on a political ground where in the foreseeable future the whole race appears to revolve around democracy, freedoms and human rights, it could not even show the possibility of being an alternative to the government.

The results of this election have opened a quite different horizon to correct the false anxiety that the map that emerged after the referendum had drawn some people into. It must soon have been understood that the bastions they imagined for themselves on the coastal strip are made of beach sand and how empty the unimaginable sociological analyses they undertook on that basis were.

A clearly visible result of the election, on which much should be dwelt later, is that the tribal structure in the Southeast has been exaggerated more than necessary in candidate selections until now. It must be noted especially that in Şanlıurfa the candidates determined outside the tribal structures pointed to a beneficial option against this false dependence.

These are results that will be evaluated at greater length; let us say this much for now, and wish once again that it be auspicious.