Haven't you missed the boat?

Today was really just a formality. Almost a quarter century after Turgut Özal tore his loyalties away from Süleyman Demirel, the prime minister unseated by Turkey's 1980 coup, and formed a party of his own, a reconciliation is now official. Neither man was there to witness the reunion – Özal died in 1993, while the elderly Mr Demirel is in retirement – but a huge photograph of the two in thoughtful conversation looked down on delegates from both parties gathered to seal the deal. Today those delegates voted to abolish Özal’s Motherland (Anavatan) party and transfer all its assets to the Democrat Party (DP), successor to an outfit established by Mr Demirel.

Party leader Hüsamettin Cindoruk hailed it as a momentous event, the long-awaited reunion of the Turkish centre-right. The former claim might be true, but the latter is doubtful.

There was little love lost between Turgut Özal and Süleyman Demirel. Özal was a member of Mr Demirel’s Justice Party (AP) in the 1970s, and was catapulted into the transitional government established after the military coup of 12 September 1980. He was handed responsibility for reviving Turkey's shattered economy, a role that gave him broad recognition in a country suddenly bereft of civilian politicians. Özal benefited from this new-found profile, and from Mr Demirel’s ban from politics, to establish Motherland and soundly win the first post-coup election in 1983. He repeated the success in 1987. Many Demirelites still regard his defection as treason.

When his ban was lifted in 1987, Mr Demirel did not join his former deputy but took the helm of the True Path Party (DYP) and established himself in opposition. There was little policy difference to separate the two centre-right parties, so the divide became one over personalities. Far from serving together in government, they became occupied with slandering each other, and would often refuse to support the other’s policy simply because of who proposed it. It was a bitter separation that defined Turkish politics in the 1990s and helped turn conservative Turkish voters to more overtly religious parties. Anavatan never won another election after Mr Demirel’s return to politics; neither did the DYP after Mr Demirel became president. Both parties failed to cross the 10 percent electoral threshold in 2002 and became rump outsiders.

It is significant, of course, that these two parties have finally come together. But it has happened after so many missed opportunities: 1987, after Mr Demirel’s return; 1993, after Özal’s death; 2002, when both parties were curtly dismissed by voters; and particularly 2007, when a resurgent Motherland under Erkan Mumcu could have helped elect Turkey’s next president and thus dictated the terms of the merger. Mr Mumcu chose to boycott the presidential vote. His subsequent opinion polls were so low he didn’t even bother to contest the subsequent general election.

This new emboldened Democrat Party is far from unifying the centre-right. For one, it is spectacularly unpopular: SONAR opinion poll in today’s Cumhuriyet suggests less than two percent of Turks would vote for it. Perhaps more importantly, there are other parties that claim the centre-right crown. The governing AK party’s founder members include many former DYP and Motherland heavyweights. One of them, Abdullatif Sener, has since separated to form a non-descript party of his own, the Turkey Party. The centre-right is as crowded as ever before.

Speaking this afternoon, Mr Cindoruk made the populist move of slamming the AK party’s Kurdish policy. But interestingly, and in contrast to the opposition parties in parliament, he also called for the government to revive its plans for a new constitution, one that has not been drafted by the army. The question is whether he will keep to that line, and whether he anyone will hear him.

He's going

A statement on the Turkish president's website published late this evening has confirmed that Abdullah Gül will be going to Yerevan this Saturday.

"Beyond being a sporting fixture," the statement says, "this match presents us with important opportunities. Especially in these times, when regional developments are causing worry among the people of the Caucasus, it is believed that all sides should appraise this opportunity in the best possible manner. It is thought that a visit on the occasion of this match could contribute to developing a climate of friendship. It is with this understanding that the president has accepted the invitation."

And quite right too. Well done.

Read my entry on this from yesterday here.

Go and watch some football

Saturday marks the return of international football in Europe after an interval of almost three months, as 53 teams begin to compete for thirteen spaces at the next World Cup in 2010. Turkey is in Group 5, and it has long been clear that its single greatest opponent will be Spain, the reigning European champions. But it was another fixture that everyone noticed when the group was drawn last November: Turkey versus Armenia.

Turkey will play ten qualification matches over the course of the next twelve months, and the first and last of these will be against Armenia. In footballing terms, it shouldn't be much of a contest: Turkey is a very strong side, ranking 13th in the world, while Armenia trails at number 94. Expect the Turks to win; anything less than a draw would be a great upset.

But it isn't just about football that Turkey's media is talking about this week. Also being debated - fiercely at times - is whether or not President Abdullah Gül should accept an invitation from his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, to watch Saturday's game in Yerevan together.

To describe Armenians and Turks as "having a history" is to vastly downplay what they have been through. The two are intertwined - or were, until around a 150 years ago - having lived alongside each other within the Ottoman Empire. Armenians, as Christians, had a privileged minority status and held many an influential position in the Ottoman civil service, particularly in the Empire's latter years. In fact, it was sometimes difficult to describe them as a minority: in many parts of Anatolia that are now Eastern Turkey, for instance, the number of Armenians almost equalled the number of Turks. This was the case as recently as the beginning of the First World War.

Of course, something happened to change that, because the number of Armenians living in Turkey today wouldn't fill a small town. That something remains deeply controversial both in Turkey (as in January last year) and abroad (see here and here for background). And it isn't just claims of genocide that have led to today's tension between the two countries. Armenia and Azerbaijan, a close Turkish partner, are still technically at war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and Turkey closed its border with Armenia over the issue more than a decade ago.

With so many factors to consider, Mr Gül has yet to RSVP. A delegation from the Turkish foreign ministry is in Yerevan this week to invite Armenia to join Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's plans for a Caucasus Alliance, but they are also there to discuss the potential visit too, and Mr Gül has said his decision will be announced after the delegation reports back.

There has been plenty of opinion from inside Turkey as to whether he should go, with the opposition being, well, rather opposed. Atilla Kaya, deputy leader of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), said Armenia "does not recognise the territorial integrity of the Turkish Republic you represent. It also occupies another Turkic territory. I call on you not to go to Armenia." Main opposition leader Deniz Baykal agrees, saying Mr Gül should recognise Turkey's friend in the region is Baku, not Yerevan.

Neither is there much enthusiasm from the ruling AK party. At its parliamentary assembly on Monday, AK MPs voted not to send representatives to accompany Mr Gül, should he decide to go. It looks like it would be a very lonely visit.

If he did accept, Mr Gül's visit would be fleeting. There are no diplomatic relations between the two countries, which means that, far from an official welcoming ceremony at Yerevan's Zvartnots airport, Mr Gül would land, travel directly to the stadium, watch the match, and then leave. Any discussions with Mr Sargsyan - and surely they would be superficial - would occur during the match. The engines on Mr Gül's aircraft would not even be switched off in the interim (carbon footprint, anyone?). This visit would hardly open the border tomorrow.

But that is no reason to turn the invitation down and happily, there are some in Turkey who agree. The influential Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association, TUSİAD, has urged Mr Gül to accept, saying that in the present climate of tension elsewhere in the Caucasus, any opportunity to improve relations should be taken.

And quite right too. The Armenian president's invitation is an immense gesture and the perfect first meeting for further talks later on. It would not estrange Azerbaijan overnight, nor would it be a betrayal of the position Turkey took on the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. All the visit would demonstrate is that both sides are ready to talk. And seasoned observers know that alone would be a remarkable step forward.

A step back from the brink

They must be exhausted, and it is easy to understand why: the eleven judges who sit on the Constitutional Court only met on Monday to begin deliberating over the chief prosecutor's case to close the ruling AK party. Their decision was announced at six o'clock this evening, meaning that the judges squeezed a week-and-a-half's work into just three days. They met at 9.30am each morning, and did not adjourn for the night until 10.30pm. Even the most optimistic press reports were not predicting a result until Friday.

But it is a reflection of how pivotal this case had become for Turkey that the ruling came so quickly. Court chairman Haşim Kılıç looked visibly tired, bags swinging under his eyes, when he appeared in front of a horde of journalists at six o'clock his evening. He was then prompty bathed in white light as every camera flash in the room went off at once. He had to ask the reporters to stop taking his picture before reading out the decision: six judges - a majority - voted to close Turkey's ruling AK party, four voted to impose financial sanctions, and one voted to dismiss all charges.

Seven votes were needed for closure, a threshold which was not met. The results mean the Constutional Court has accepted, albeit not unanimously, to cut AK's funding. The ruling party will receive only half of its funding this year; the precise figure will be determined when the Budget for 2009 is accepted.

It was so agonisingly close. The deciding vote, if there was such a thing, was probably cast by Mr Kılıç himself, who revealed he was the only one who voted to dismiss the charges. It would have taken just a single judge voting the other way to have brought a decision to close, and put the country into the unprecedented position of bringing down an overwhelmingly popular governing party in an instant. But that is not what happened. The AK Party remains open, its politicians remain unbanned, and the Turkish lira even managed to climb a kuruş or two against the dollar this evening.

AK supporters were naturally delighted. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was greeted with footall chants when he emerged to make a statement at party HQ. He said the decision had lifted away a great uncertainty in Turkey, and reiterated his commitment to European values: "Our path is that towards the EU. There is no return."

He avoided commenting explicitly on the outcome because, as is standard procedure in such cases, the judges' reasons for their decision has not yet been published. But while it is true that their response to Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya's charges will make interesting reading, it is pretty clear what their decision says already: the AK party has been deemed to have behaved in an unsecular manner, but not to so violent a degree that it merits closure.

This is the best result any of us could have hoped for. The Court has demonstrated that Turkey's political system is not necessarily inflexible and compatible only with parties that are militantly secular. There is room for diversity here. At the same time, it has warned that such diversity can only go so far, and that the AK Party has seriously pushed the limits of the secular system. This is more than a slap on the wrists; it is a demand for the government to change its ways.

So what next for Mr Erdoğan's party? The ruling should hopefully subside some of the arrogance and complacence with which it has approached the business of government, particularly since its phenomenal electoral victory last summer. It is true that AK has a very powerful mandate, but it certainly does not have a universal one, and it would do well to remember that more often. Its approach to the recent headscarf debacle was a telling example: having secured the support of the opposition Nationalist Action Party, AK proceded to draft its own law without consulting secularist parties, non-governmental organisations or - heaven forbid - women, and passed it easily in parliament. The law was promptly annulled by the same Constitutional Court that today voted to keep the party open. In matters as controversial as the headscarf, AK must recognise that to govern does not necessarily mean to impose; it can also mean to consult.

That, however, is for the future. Tonight, Turkey takes a step back from the brink. Things could have been a lot worse.

More from me, more from Turkey

Thank you to everyone for the kind comments you left both on this blog and in my inbox. I spent the last few months writing a rather taxing research dissertation about Turkey's position on the Armenian genocide and had little time to keep anything else going. This is now complete and I am duly posting here once again. I do enjoy keeping this blog and intend to continue with a greater degree regularity in the future. But having not posted since February, that could mean anything...

Times have been turbulent in Turkish politics during my absence. The most striking development has been a case, by no less than the chief prosecutor, to close the ruling AK Party, on charges of not being secular enough. It calls for 71 members of the party, including prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül, to be banned from politics.

The AK Party's predecessors, Welfare and Virtue (RP and FP, respectively), were themselves closed down by the Constitutional Court in similar circumstances; the charge here is that AK is merely their continuation. But many have expressed disappointment at the prosecutor's case, as it appears to hinge largely on the public speeches made by those 71 implicated leaders and less on, for instance, evidence of non-secular AK legislation.

AK was the moderate half of a split that occurred following the FP's closure. The other half, which became the Felicity Party (SP), is pious, xenophobic and not very popular. It won just two percent of the vote in last year's election; AK won forty-six percent. It was the SP that was behind protests against Pope Benedict's visit in 2006, where "he's coming to resurrect Byzantium" was the bizarre rallying call. The SP has also organised similar protests denouncing such targets as Israel and the Danish cartoonists who depicted the Prophet Muhammad. Mr Erdoğan met the Pope, was only the second Turkish prime minister to visit Israel, and stayed sensibly quiet on the cartoon issue. You would think it would be the SP, not AK, that is targeted in an anti-secular lawsuit.

This leads commentators, including this blog, to conclude what everyone in Turkey already knows: that the chief prosecutor's case is about more than AK's overtly religious behaviour, of which there is scant evidence. The lawsuit reflects an ever-growing concern in Turkey that while AK might not be staunchly Islamist, it certainly is not staunchly secularist either.

In some areas of Turkey, fewer and fewer restaurants are granted licences to serve alcohol, and there has been recurent talk of creating "alcohol zones" in towns and cities and prohibiting licenced establishments outside of them. Many Turks also say more girls than before sport the Muslim headscarf and that this is noticeable in cities as western-orientated as Istanbul. There is little doubt that AK's six years in power has bolstered confidence among Turkish Muslims; many say the lawsuit is a reaction to that.


Photographs such as the above, of First Lady Hayrünnisa Gül and Queen Elizabeth at a state banquet in Ankara earlier this month, are a firm confirmation that times have changed in Turkey. The Queen last visited Turkey in 1971, not long after the country's second military intervention, when it would be unthinkable for the First Lady to have her head covered. It would have been unthinkable this time last year. But Mrs Gül accompanied the Queen throughout the four-day visit. Yes, things have changed.

Whether the lawsuit will be successful is unclear. AK originally planned to change a part of the constitution to render the case illegal, but the idea found little support among the opposition and has since been dropped. AK will now defend itself against the charges in court, but Mr Erdoğan is also rumoured to be arranging a successor party in case he loses. He has also been involved in a fiery and very public argument between the government and the judiciary. Those clashes will continue for sometime yet, both inside and outside the courtroom.

Why, oh why, could anyone possibly think that this is a good idea?

Part of the government in Britain, where I appear to be invariably based at the moment, seems obsessed with dispensing with its prime minister after less than a year in the job. "We're not popular, we'll probably lose the next election, it's not working out for us," they mutter behind closed doors, before adding: "Off with his head and bring in a new one." Or something to that effect.

The instinct in Turkey is precisely the opposite. When things go wrong, the prevailing mood is one of either stagnation or regression. Stagnation is the case with the Republican People's Party (CHP), which recently re-elected its directionless leader, unopposed, in an appalling example of democracy (see my outdated entry on the CHP for some back story). Regression appears to be what is happening to the Democrat Party (DP), which is trying to bring back its former leader and last prime minister, Tansu Çiller.

Mrs Çiller assumed the vacant post of prime minister in 1993, after Süleyman Demirel moved up to the presidency. She wasn't particularly high-ranking - a mere state minister, certainly not senior in the cabinet - and she contested her party's leadership against such heavyweights as İsmet Sezgin and Köksal Toptan. Her victory was credited largely to Turkey's media, including the fledgling private television channels, which made much of the idea of a first woman prime minister.

If you asked her what her greatest achievement in office was, she would probably tell you it was that Turkey entered a Customs Union with the European Union under her watch. Or that the military's funding was stepped up to combat the mounting PKK threat. She wouldn't be one to talk of the banking crisis of the early 1990s, her alleged corrupt practices (including tenders that favoured her wealthy businessman husband), or the fact that she never won a election.

Mrs Çiller was a staggeringly ineffective leader. Under her, the party won a successively smaller share of the vote, finally failing to cross the electoral threshold in 2002. Her first election, in 1995, saw her lose to Necmettin Erbakan's Welfare Party (RP). It was a shock to Turkey's secular establishment for the overtly religious RP to do so well; what shocked them more was Mrs Çiller joining them in coalition. During the campaign, she had declared Mr Erbkaban "a smuggler of heroin" and herself "the safeguard of secularism", but after six months and a hefty libel fee the two leaders were in a "power rotating" scheme whereby Mr Erbakan would be prime minister first, and Mrs Çiller would follow in a year-and-a-half.

She stood silent as her senior partner spurned the west and made highly publicised visits to Iran and Libya. She was genuinely surprised, upon Mr Erbakan's resignation, not to be asked to form the next government. She was not a good leader, and now her old rump party wants her back.

To bring back a former, supposedly succesful leader is a delusional byword for political recovery in Turkey. Party leaders are effectively sanctified in the country - most party conventions, for instance, will feature large portraits of both Atatürk and the present leader - and they are a rallying point for genuine enthusiasm and unwavering loyalty. During a recent parliamentary debate on smoking bans, one Nationalist Action Party (MHP) MP spoke passionately about the charismatic style with which his leader, Devlet Bahçeli, could hold and smoke a cigarette. He was probably not even planted.

This near-blind degree of loyalty makes it somewhat easier to understand why Turkish parties tend not to blame their leaders for electoral failure. But it is still delusional: parties don't to recognise it even when the public have had enough of them. In the 1999 elections, having failed to cross the ten percent threshold to win seats in parliament, Mr Baykal resigned. It was widely hailed as an act of political maturity, but he was back in just six months. Mr Bahçeli, Mrs Çiller and Motherland Party leader Mesut Yılmaz all made similar pledges when their parties failed to cross the threshold in 2002; with this latest offer to Mrs Çiller, all have now returned to politics.

Turks have a long tradition of sanctifying their leaders. Any tourist to Turkey will tell you Kemal Atatürk is an obvious example, but it applies to more recent leaders too: the late Bülent Ecevit ousted CHP leader and War of Independence veteran Ismet İnönü in 1973. İnönü had been leader for thirty-five years, and Ecevit was widely credited with ending what was effectively a theocracy. But that same cult of personality came to apply to Ecevit, and it would be twenty-nine years before he was toppled himself.

Few outside the DP will celebrate Mrs Çiller's return. It will do little for the party's electability, as its traditional centre-right base has long been subsumed by the ruling AK Party. But it does have wider implications for Turkish politics: a year ago, I wrote that AK's electoral victory, while welcome, urgently needed to be balanced by an effective opposition. With stagnation in the CHP and regression in the DP, it does not appear to be happening. And that is not good for Turkey.

In they march

This is the photo that is splashed across the front of nearly every Turkish newspaper this morning. Released on the Turkish Armed Forces website, it shows troops marching over the snowy border into Iraq. There are reported to be another ten thousand of them.

Newspapers outside Turkey have been covering it too. This morning's Independent called it "the new invasion of Iraq ... it threatens to destabilise the country's only peaceful region". It is indeed, as The Times says, Turkey's biggest incursion into the country for more than a decade. And as Radikal points out, the operation is taking place under "assurances" from Ankara and "understanding" from the rest of the world. No major political leader - not even the Iraqi president, himself a Kurd - has called this an illegal invasion.

Details of what is happening remain sketchy. The terrain is mountainous, temperatures are subzero, and the constant exchange of fire means there are no independent reporters in the region. All we have is what the Turkish army and sources close to the PKK tell us and, perhaps predictably, the information conflicts. The Turks say five of its troops have been killed in action, the PKK puts that figure at twenty. The Turks say they've killed 24 fighters, the PKK says it has no losses. Who to believe?

Alone in its opposition to the incursion was Birgün, which carried the headline "No! - to war, to conditions of war, to the noise of war". It says the land operation will "affect our side of the border more than it does the other. The powers of peace and democracy are wary for young lives and the spirirt of living among one another." There is, in this, a message that is conceded even by Turkish generals: Turkey's Kurdish problem cannot be solved purely by military means.

Murat Yetkin writes in today's Radikal that the time is right to take measures "other than military steps, to take political, legal and economic steps to combat those conditions that create the PKK." Iraqi president Jalal Talabani was invited yesterday to Ankara, he says, with this in mind. This diplomacy is perhaps more important than the strikes.

Turkey has so far been playing this effectively, and by the book. The current operation is expected to last a fortnight; there might be more to follow in the coming months. But it is vital not to lose perspective, and ensure that any solution is a lasting one. Diplomacy and reform is the way to do it.