Sarıgül's fight

On Friday morning Mustafa Sarıgül, darling of the non-CHP Turkish left, braved the cold Ankara weather to hand in a personal submission to the Constitutional Court. He was objecting to a new law that shakes up some parts of local government in Turkey - in particular, the bit of the law that strips Istanbul's Şişli district, where he is mayor, of its richest neighbourhoods.

Back to where we started

These are the elections Turkey must hold in the next thirty-six months:

• March 2014: local elections (most likely on the 30th, the final Sunday);
• August 2014: presidential election (31 August most likely for first round, with the second, if required, to follow a fortnight later);
• June 2015: parliamentary election (14 June most likely).

If the glacial work of a 16-member parliamentary committee charged with writing the country's new constitution ever bears fruit, there will be a referendum to vote on that as well. But the committee was due to report back at the end of 2012 and, well, it hasn't, so it's perhaps not worth holding your breath.

While that work continues, the political chattering classes are speculating over electoral scenarios: can the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) score a high profile win against the governing AK Party by, say, winning control of the Istanbul mayoralty? Is it even possible to weaken the AK Party's punctilious grip on power?

In 2009, the CHP came close to wresting Istanbul away from AK, following a slick campaign led by its candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The difference btween the two parties came to 7.5 percentage points, far narrower than any recent national result, and allowed Mr Kılıçdaroğlu to become the only credible contender for the national party's leadership later that year.

The party now needs a new candidate for Istanbul and the most obvious name is Mustafa Sarıgül, the maverick mayor of the city’s Şişli district and easily the country’s most recognisable local politician. The rumour is that Kadir Topbaş, the current AK mayor, is being lined up for a role in national politics. Up against a fresh-faced AK candidate, Mr Sarıgül could become Istanbul’s first left-wing mayor in 25 years.

For an assessment of the second question, that of the AK Party’s seemingly unending hold on elected office, kindly consider the rough chart below.

The above shows the June 2011 election result (on the far left) followed by quarterly averages of voting intention data from Genar, Konsensus, MetroPoll, Pollmark and Sonar.

Any half-decent pollster will tell you that a trend of similar results is more valuable than a single, potential outlier result in gauging the public mood. In that vein, it is worth ignoring the specific numbers indicated above and looking just at the gradients.

There are two recent trends are immediately noticeable:

1) After a bump early last year, AK Party support has declined to just below its record 2011 election result;

2) CHP support has shown an increase, but not one proportional to AK’s decline.

Importantly, this chart does not tell us how many Turkish people plan to vote, but don’t know who for. The figures are compiled from the polling companies’ headline results and it is standard Turkish practice to distribute undecided voters among the other parties proportionately. (*)

Bearing this in mind, what does this poll of polls suggest? That we are back to where we were in June 2011: the two polls conducted at the end of last year, if reflected in an election, would deliver a healthy AK majority above 300 seats, a 120-strong CHP opposition and a small Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) contingent of around 50.

So the AK Party juggernaut rolls forward. But how to boot it from government altogether, or at least reduce its majority and force it into a coalition?

There are two main schools of thought on this.

The first centres on the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The AK Party is built around his personality, the argument goes, and risks fragmentation or utter collapse once he steps down. The second is even simpler: the AK Party occupies the Turkish centre ground and other parties need to dislodge it to win power.

But waiting for Mr Erdoğan to go and seizing upon a power vacuum is a risky game. Far better for AK’s opponents to invest in the second approach.

The trouble is, whatever the opposition’s strategy might be, the polling averages show that it is not working.

* For more on what is standard practice and what is not in Turkish polling, read my post from June last year and Christy Quirk’s comment in particular.

Playing politics with council boundaries

'A minor fracas' is the best way to describe the fuss caused by Turkish MPs' decision to cut up one of Istanbul's most prominent council districts and combine it with its larger, northerly neighbour. The MPs were meeting in committee to  discuss a law to upgrade a number of Turkey's smaller cities to 'metropolitan city' status, but government members of the panel managed to sneak in an amendment to rejig the local political map of the country's largest city. As they stand, the law would see the northern part of Şişli merged into Sarıyer.

For a clearer understanding of what all the fuss is about, kindly consider this map of Istanbul's administrative districts and political colours of the mayor who won at the last election.

Although no district is labeled on this map, Şişli is easy to spot: in navy, it is the only one where the Democratic Left Party (DSP) was victorious. Nope, that's not two districts, but one district with an exclave. Have another map:

Şişli was cleft twain in 1987 when Kağıthane (yellow on the second map) was promoted to become a district of its own. Of the old district's rump, the southern partition remained the centre, containing council facilities and much of the city that had sprung up since the 1950s; the north, meanwhile, was home to three indistinct neighbourhoods: Ayazağa, Huzur and Maslak. It looks to me like it was a bizarre decision. After all, what use is your council if you have to travel through a whole other district to get to it?

So from an utterly apolitical perspective, combining Şişli northern exclave into Sarıyer makes some sense.

Of course, there is a political perspective and it has caused enough of a stink for Şişli's mayor, Mustafa Sarıgül, to drop everything and rush to Ankara for some urgent lobbying.

You see, the three neighbourhoods in the northern exclave have become rather wealthy since the ill-advised map drawing session of 1987. Ayazağa is the site to the new stadium for Galatasaray football club and Maslak has become an international business centre, home to banks and luxury apartments and their skyscrapers. Maslak is in fact poster-child for all those evening photographs of Istanbul taken in an unsuccessful attempt to make the town look like Manhattan. There is money to be made there and Mr Sarıgül would be a fool not to fight to keep it.

Ayazağa is larger than Maslak and Huzur combined, both in terms of area and population: there were 22,622 registered voters there at the last local election in 2009, as against 6622 in Huzur and just 1224 in Maslak.

In comments carried today by Hürriyet, Istanbul MP Celal Dinçer said last night's amendment was clearly political: voters in Ayazağa supported the AK Party over his centre-left CHP by almost a 4-1 margin and the CHP only won Sarıyer at the last election only by a narrow margin. The charge is clear: the AK Party wants to make sure they can capture Sarıyer at next year's council elections by shifting over loyal voters.

At the last election in the three contested Şişli neighbourhoods, the AK Party candidate to become mayor of Şişli won 6698 votes. His CHP rival won 1925. So Mr Dinçer's claimed AK margin is quite true. But he omits to mention the left vote in Şişli was split by the current mayor, who contested the election on the Democratic Left Party (DSP) ticket. Here is what actually happened:

It's also worth looking at the result in the neighbourhood of Ayazağa alone:

So Mustafa Sarıgül comfortably swept all three neighbourhoods, with a slight swing to the AK Party in Ayazağa. He certainly trounced his namesake running on the CHP ticket. He is a personality politician: 2009 was his third consecutive victory as mayor and he is remarkably popular in his district. Indeed, his ego was so inflated he dabbled in national politics - and lost - when he challenged the former CHP leader (more background on this from me here). Should he run again for mayor, he is likely to win.

As for Sarıyer, I would contend that the new districts would only help the CHP's cause unless there is a sea change between now and the next election. It's a view that appears to be shared by Sarıyer's CHP mayor Şükrü Genç, who said when asked about the boundary change:

"In local elections, you are judged not on your political position but on what you do, what you say you are going to do and how persuasive you are. The people of Sarıyer have known me well over the last three-and-a-half years. We discriminated no-one on the basis of politics, ethnicity or lifestyle. We targeted all over the 350,000 people who live here. That's why I don't think we will have a great problem at the elections."

Mr Genç also said that he had lobbied the Interior ministry for the very same change three years ago but was turned away.

Bear in mind this amendment has only come of the committee stage and needs to be approved by all MPs - and the president - before it becomes law. Will someone in the AK Party realise before then that this particular game of politics is not worth it?

The end of the CHP

We all know the Republican People's Party (CHP) has been somewhat split since the July's general election. We also know that Mustafa Sarıgül, mayor of Istanbul's Şişli district, has launched a campaign to topple the party's stubborn leader, Deniz Baykal, and has recruited a sizeable group to his cause. What we didn't know was the extent of the split in the CHP. Two separate meetings in Ankara yesterday helped us figure that one out.

September 9th is the anniversary of the CHP's foundation. Mr Baykal chose to mark this day, and no doubt reassert his dwindling influence, by visiting the tomb of his party's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. And so 170 thousand people from all across the country descended on the mausoleum in Ankara. They arrived with Turkish flags and posters of their founder, and chanted for enduring secularism. Mr Baykal wrote in the VIP guestbook that there were "attacks on the Republic from inside, not outside" and it had to be defended. All in all, it was rather like those Republican rallies that took place in the spring.

It just so happened that Mr Baykal's attempts to secure his seat coincided with another rally barely ten minutes down the road, in front of the CHP headquarters. This was the Sarıgül rally, with its desperately uncatchy slogan "Codeword: 999 S, destination: government". It turns out "999 S" refers to a Sarıgül rally on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month. Ho-hum. It was not the success Sarıgülists would tell you it was: attendance was ten thousand, a mere fifth of what was predicted; Mr Sarıgül was himself the only major figure present; and television news that evening gave more space to Mr Baykal's gig.

There are two conclusions that can be drawn from the day's events. The first is that Mr Baykal's leadership is in the ironic position of being both untenable and secure. He won yesterday: his was the bigger rally, his was the greater parade of influence. Mr Sarıgül does not command nearly as much support, even among Baykal antagonists, and that is partly because he is seen as insincere and unlikeable. In that sense, he differs little from Mr Baykal. For the moment, there is little hope of a change in CHP leadership.

The second conclusion is far more serious: the end is nigh for Atatürk's unreformed party. In his cumulative sixteen-or-so years as CHP leader, Deniz Baykal has entrenched Kemalist ideology, stamped out the high fliers and secured his position by fractioning the Turkish left. As Mr Sarıgül rightly pointed out yesterday, July's election was the seventh in a row that the CHP had lost - and that's without counting local elections. Mr Baykal has now presided over four of them.

Mr Baykal answers critics by saying they won a million more votes than last time; what he blindly ignores is that the governing AK party won six million additional votes. He ignores polls that say nearly three-quarters of CHP voters voted "in spite of the leader". He refuses to recognise that AK's phenomenal victory came through embracing every section of the Turkish people; Mr Baykal did not campaign east of Sivas.

But the issue here is more than mere electoral mathematics. It is now a question of what the CHP is for. There are two stark choices: should it continue to be Atatürk's party and defend his mantra to the death, or should it reclaim those social democratic roots and form a balance to the centre-right AK party? Turkey has changed, the two are no longer compatible. Mr Baykal does not recognise that. The phrase "out of touch" has never been more fitting.

It is with great sorrow that I predict the end of the CHP. This is not fatal for Turkish political opposition, as I had warned a couple of months ago, because Devlet Bahçeli's Nationalist Action Party has since cunningly slipped itself into that position. But it is fatal for the Turkish left wing, which has never been so fractioned and ineffective. Turkey is a naturally conservative country, but that doesn't mean it can do without a liberal voice. The trouble is that there is no easy solution.