Turkey s Local Elections: A Verdict on Erdoğan?

Transcription

1 Q&A Turkey s Local Elections: A Verdict on Erdoğan? Fadi Hakura Associate Fellow, Europe Programme, Chatham House Turker Hamzaoğlu Senior Economist, Bank of America Merrill Lynch Sir David Reddaway British Ambassador to Turkey ( ) Chair: Baroness Hussein-Ece Vice Chair, All Party Parliamentary Group on Turkey 1 April 2014 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/ speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions, but the ultimate responsibility for accuracy lies with this document s author(s). The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery.

2 Baroness Hussein-Ece: Thank you very much, and thank you to all the speakers. Now I m going to open it up for Q&A. I would ask you to stay in your place, as I said, and the microphone will come to you. Question 1: Apropos the decision of whether Erdoğan would go for the prime minister or president, I understand, I think, if he wanted to give the executive authority to the presidential office as opposed to the prime minister, this would need would it not a two-thirds majority in parliament to take that through? Again, going to your point maybe that he may not have enough to do that, but the other hand [question] is what impact would Gül s criticism of his method of controlling the social media have? Because Gül owes his position to Erdoğan. He went specially to make sure that, to get a second chance, to make sure he could put him in as president. Is this a rift between the two now, that has become apparent as a result of this? I ll take the election. Regarding the new constitution, Prime Minister Erdoğan had the original plan to change, to bring in a new constitution in Turkey, to introduce a presidential system of government, i.e. a very, very powerful presidency at the expense of parliament and prime minister. I think he did not have the requisite majority. Now I think what his plan might be is that he might, I think, want to run for the presidency in August of this year. But there is one policy move he did announce but he hasn t fully filled. That is he might want to change the election system in Turkey. He proposed that in September last year. One of the elements was to change the election system in Turkey from the current system to a new one that would allow the ruling party to achieve the necessary majority in parliament to pass a new constitution without consensus, without agreeing it with the opposition, with a lower percentage of the vote. So far he has not followed through on that policy suggestion, but if he does do that, then it may allow him, allow his party, once the general election takes place - which has to take place by June next year - to achieve the majority in parliament [and] with a lower percentage of the vote to be able to pass a new constitution. But there is one wrinkle in this plan: if the election law is changed today, it can only apply one year later. That s the only wrinkle in this plan. So 2

3 that s one thing to watch out. Will Prime Minister Erdoğan change the election system? That might indicate when the next general elections take place. Regarding the Gül, Erdoğan criticism, I think President Gül has a six-and-a half-year track record. He has approved every controversial law passed by Prime Minister Erdoğan. This idea that there s a friction between them or there s a disagreement between them I think does not seem to hold water, if you look at the coordination that has taken place between Prime Minister Erdoğan and President Gül. Question 2: Thank you, Fadi, for peering into why AK Party won. Could you say something about the Gülen vote? Because it seems like there wasn t really much of a Gülen vote to count on. Second one is to Turker, could you say something about big business and where you think, how you think they re going to respond? I mean, there are all the clashes with TÜSİAD (Turkish Industry and Business Association), and so on. Turker Hamzaoğlu: I think for them as well, most of the business community, for them the political uncertainty is the key thing, because since last year there is this political risk for the companies as well. It s becoming random, because once you just sideline the rule of law, the whole system becomes a little bit unpredictable. Last year, if you just - I m an economist; I don t want to get into other sides of the equation. But when I look at the budget, I see close to one per cent of the GDP was collected from tax finance, for example, from [the] ministry of finance. So this is very significant in terms of how the system can bend one way or to another. But for the business, I think the key thing is not the corporates but just the general public. Do they feel comfortable about the future? Do they carry on spending? As I say, this is still a domestic-driven economy. For them, for the companies, they have seen quite a lot of ups and downs. For them, it s just for the next two or three years, I guess down the way, whether the public is going to be comfortable in going to go back to the business as usual or not. Other than that, I think that political risk is still out there for some time. Prior to the elections, we heard estimates that the Gülen vote could be between three to five per cent of Turkish voters. I think that did not seem to 3

4 pan out in these elections. Why did Prime Minister Erdoğan go down from 50 per cent that he achieved in 2011 general elections now to around 45 per cent? I think it s to do with the economy. The economy has started to slow down. It started to deteriorate, but it s still [in] stagnation. So the full impact of this deterioration is still not fully felt with vast majority of Turks. But that explains to me why the numbers went from 50 to 45, rather than for reasons of the corruption allegations or media freedoms. I think his vote, Prime Minister Erdoğan s vote, is primarily determined by the economy rather than by corruption, media freedoms or other issues. Question 3: I d like to push a bit further the point just mentioned there about the foreign investment and the rule of law. I m wondering if you could expand a little bit more on the implications of that? Secondly, maybe also touch upon the Kurdish issue a little bit more. Erdoğan seems to have been getting a lot of votes on the side from the Kurds in Turkey with the Kurdish initiative. How long is that sustainable? If that breaks down, what will the impact of that be in the forthcoming elections? Turker Hamzaoğlu: Turkey doesn t receive that much FDI in relative terms, anyway. In a good year, they have been receiving some one per cent of GDP. So already low, I should say. Going forward, there s no reason why this should increase, given the current changes. For the current ones, the little bit alarming bit is there has been some negative noise regarding the established ones in Turkey trying to actually move out of the country, or revisiting their expansion plans. We all boil this down to a single thing. I think all the other is the rest, like foreign direct investment, you have to have a predictable regulatory environment. For the time being, I think when this dust settles down, we re going to see whether it left any watermark on the institutions and this regulatory environment. But maybe this is the early days. This is one of my key concerns, because now in a way, loyalty becomes ahead of competency. So this is a big change for the institutions in Turkey. Then of course [there is] the rule of law and separation of powers. Ironically, during this Gülen Erdoğan feud, it looks like the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) seems to have, not an alliance, but seems to have an 4

5 understanding with Prime Minister Erdoğan. We ve seen that with the letters from Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader, his letters from prison indicated some kind of understanding at least between them on that. That s explained by the fact that the PKK does view the Gülen movement as a threat - Gülen movement s social and education activities as a threat in the south eastern part of Turkey, where the Kurdish nationalists are predominant. Going forward, I don t think it looks like Prime Minister Erdoğan will deliver any of the concessions, or the minimum concessions or minimum demands that the PKK Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey want. Not on language, not on schools, not on culture, not on autonomy. Definitely not on autonomy. So what that seems to me to suggest is that in the future, we may see a breakdown of the relationship and perhaps violence may resume in Turkey by the PKK against the Turkish state - probably after the elections, after the presidential, even after the general elections. Sir David Reddaway: If I could just add on that one, I think all those risks that Fadi mentions are there. This is a very complicated and difficult process. But I think we have to give credit to the effort to find a political solution to an issue which security measures couldn t resolve. I think Prime Minister Erdoğan will take the election result now as an endorsement of that policy. Certainly I think for outside friends of Turkey, we would encourage the process. We do encourage the process. I think quite a lot has already been achieved. Some of the demands are difficult, you re absolutely right. But quite a lot has already been done. Bits of Turkey are unrecognisable, elements of the political atmosphere [are] unrecognisable from a few years ago. We have to welcome that and support it, but the risks are there. Can I just add one more point on the election figures, because I m just not sure, Fadi, that - I don t know that you can compare general and local as the barometer of success, or failure. I think you have to compare general, general, general, and local, local, local, because different factors come into play. Even though this one was rather a referendum on Erdoğan, I think the safer measure of success is to compare like with like. That s true, but since Erdoğan was running in elections, he s dominated one election after another. If you go across Istanbul municipality for example, 5

6 you ll find his picture plastered even more than the mayor of Istanbul. The same in Ankara, the same in other municipalities across Turkey. I think Prime Minister Erdoğan has dominated politics so much in Turkey that he s turned every election in a sense as a referendum on his leadership, rather than focusing on local issues as was normally the case in Turkey. Question 4: I ve got a question for the ambassador, for Sir David. For the ex-ambassador, honorary ambassador, shall we say then? It s more about UK policy in Turkey. The public approach of Britain to Turkey, especially since last year when you were still in office during the Gezi protests, and now with Twitter being banned and YouTube, it s been very, very mild. We re talking about expressions of concern. We re talking about encouraging Turkey to lift the ban, pointing vaguely towards the European Union. Is it not the fact that Britain has got very serious trade and defence interests in Turkey? You want to preserve those. You don t want to offend Erdoğan. So you re keeping quite quiet, much more quiet than America, for instance. And also, for the panel generally, would you like to comment on the allegations of electoral fraud in Sunday s election? Sir David Reddaway: Clearly we do have big interests at stake in Turkey, whether political, economic, and so on. I think we re in a different position than the United States, and you re right, the United States is more open in some of its comments than we are. But the steady list of comments is there and there is very regular discussion in the meetings we have with senior Turkish ministers, officials, prime minister, president, about exactly the concerns you mention. I think you have to take a judgement on what is more likely to achieve results, and that could be different if you re one country or another country. So there is a regular dialogue on these concerns as well as major interests in play, partly because if we want to see Turkey advance in the way we do, resolving the sort of concerns that you ve described is integral to that process. Now the rule of law architecture, for example, is fundamentally important. This is one of the reasons why we want to open an accession process; the negotiating chapters that deal with the sort of issues that have been in the spotlight recently. 6

7 I think on the issue of electoral fraud, we re seeing a lot of allegations and counter-allegations between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the opposition parties. It seems to be focused on Ankara. There we know that the results were extremely close between the incumbent ruling party mayor, Melih Gökçek, and the Republican People s Party (CHP) candidate, Mansur Yavas. There are allegations, for example, in [of] electricity being suddenly shut down during the vote counting process or that the senior ministers have met with the election officials, and so on. But, at this stage, we cannot really give a definitive comment because we really don t know what happened. Question 5: May I sort of try to widen the discussion? I remember a slogan by Kemal Atatürk: [in Turkish]. Forgive my Turkish. It means: Peace at home. Peace in the world. Now Erdoğan has been very divisive at home, a very polarizing prime minister, although yes, he still gets the majority. But what I m really going for is his foreign policy, especially vis-à-vis Syria - shooting down a Syrian plane. Now that has been called a provocation. I mean, is it at all possible that Erdoğan is aiming for [a] military confrontation with Syria? I don t think Atatürk would be pleased. Sir David Reddaway I think you can be confident that Turkey would not want to engage in a military operation on its own against Syria, or indeed anyone else. I think many in Turkey were frustrated by the earlier decision by various other countries not to take punitive action over the use of chemical weapons. At the same time, Turkey obviously has a very clear national interest in seeing some form of resolution to the crisis in Syria, both because of the distortion of trade and because of the massive influx of Syrians into Turkey. So I would say that the Turkish prime minister would be robust in defending his national borders and I don t know whether that particular jet was in one place or another. There are disputes over that. But I would not reckon that you would see Turkey launching war against Syria in anything other than a large alliance. At the moment, I don t see any sign of that large alliance forming. 7

8 Question 6: The UKTI (UK Trade and Investment) and BIS (Bank for International Settlements) are still quite aggressively touting Turkey as a place that British companies should still be doing business and the OECD is predicting growth almost double to what you re suggesting it might be. First of all, I d like to ask you: who do you think is right and who do you think is wrong on the growth figures? I d be interested in that answer, but more importantly: what risks are there to British business, given that the government are now saying Turkey is a place to be and still the fastest growing economy in Europe? Turker Hamzaoğlu: I can say that I m always right on my growth forecasts. That was a straightforward answer. I have to admit, I m a little bit out of consensus on this, because there are things that have been working in Turkey for the last, let s say, 10 years, 20 years. But then when you put it in a big picture and then try to phase it out into the future, there are some difficulties. I mean, I don t think at this level of income Turkey is ready to get out of manufacturing and into services sectors, as they did since 2008 because money was so cheap. So if you kind of rewind it a little bit and think that this was a basic resource exporter country, and then by the 1980s the realization of trade moved into low-value manufacturing, started with maybe textiles, clothing and then moved into durables, electronics. Then came the customs union. It was a good boost for automotive makers. Then you kind of ask yourself: What s next? From autos and consumer durables, they re kind of now losing market share, in what segment or which sector are they going to jump into so that they keep moving up the productivity ladder? I don t see that happening for the time being. Baroness Hussein-Ece: We haven t got a lot of time, and I do want to get a lot of people in. I m not going to bring anyone else in on that. Question 7: I just want to go back to the question on the fraud in the elections. A lot of people have alleged that it was one of the most fraudulent elections since 1946 and there has been an ask [request] for a recount in Ankara and Istanbul. I was an election observer in Istanbul myself, so I just got back and I 8

9 was actually horrified along with thousands of other volunteers at what we witnessed. I saw various waxed election sacks open and reopened with pieces of paper at the election destination. I had to at one point sit on the election records with a torch in my hand because of electricity black-out potential while I was doing the count. I played a very critical role in the election count and registering and making sure that people had the right papers for voting, and yet not a single person asked for my ID. So I just turned up, walked in and stood at the ballot box and said I was a volunteer. Yet I was a critical person taking the vote count. In terms of how open these elections are, this is Istanbul, I have serious concerns. I would say that what s happened in the last few years - we ve seen a lot of politicization of independent regulatory bodies in Turkey and politicization of the civil service and the legal system. If you look at the market regulatory bodies, which regulate different sectors of the economy such as the energy regulator, etc., we ve seen, for example, when Prime Minister Erdoğan began to criticize Koç Group, which is the largest private conglomerate business in Turkey, for his cooperation in the Gezi Park protests - because he opened his hotel to the Gezi Park protestors, Prime Minister Erdoğan is not too happy about that. Suddenly we saw market regulatory bodies beginning investigations of his various companies, because he s heavily in the energy sector. So the energy market regulator began investigations of his companies, various companies. We ve seen similar tax investigations of the Doğan Group, a major media company in Turkey. We ve seen now with the Kaynak Holding, which is a business group close to the Gülen, has also seen some investigations. So perhaps there has been, perhaps this politicization has gone into the election commission that has carried out this election. That s possible. Question 8: I d like to ask David a bit more about the EU s attitude to Turkey. You ll remember in the 1990s, the EU said to Slovakia when it was run by Mečiar that if you don t change your ways, you re not fulfilling the conversions criteria, the Copenhagen criteria, we re not going to let you join. You were talking just now about opening two new chapters for Erdoğan. I just wonder at what point the EU should say: Sorry, to the Turkish government, You re moving very firmly away from fulfilling the Copenhagen criteria, and 9

10 unless you come back, the deal is off and there s no point in pursuing these negotiations. Baroness Hussein-Ece: Before you come in, there was one other question that was in my mind that hasn t come up, the whole EU question. Now these chapters have been closed since 2009 when Turkey was actually on the right path, as it were, for reforming. It was ready for reform, and both chapters have been kept firmlyclosed since Don t you think the EU has some responsibility on these matters? The fact that these democratic reforms haven t been Question 8: My answer to that is yes, I think the EU has behaved disgracefully to Turkey over the years. Baroness Hussein-Ece: Well, they ve kept these chapters on judiciary, human rights, closed. So they had no benchmark to reach. Question 8: I think what would be peculiar now is to say: We froze these chapters when actually they were doing the right things. Now that Erdoğan is currently doing the wrong things, we re willing to open these chapters after all. It seems to me that the EU ought to use some leverage and say to this country, which we think wants to join, that, on present course, you re not going to get there. I mean, maybe they ll never get there anyway. Sir David Reddaway: I think the important thing is to draw the distinction between the accession process and the eventual decision on accession. To our mind, there is a value for Turkey and for the EU in continuing the accession process and at the end of it, if Turkey ticks all the boxes, then Turkey takes a decision and the EU takes a decision. And it s quite clear there are different views within the EU on Turkey now, and very likely when we reach that point. But the Turkey we re talking about today is not the Turkey who will present itself for membership. There will have to have been very significant changes. Our view is that we ve lost leverage by appearing to reduce the chances of 10

11 Turkey becoming an EU member and therefore when the prime minister of Turkey looks at political decisions, and someone says to him: Oh, that will damage our EU accession process, that is less influential if he doesn t think that the process is going anywhere anyway. Equally, our view as a country that wants to work with Turkey in the international community is that if we can find a way of strengthening performance on precisely the areas of weakness that are causing us concern, it s desirable to do it. There are still plenty of other chapters that are not opened. There s still a decision at the end of the process. So it s not actually selling out the principle of membership with a requirement of the rules. It s just saying - if we want to have more influence and see change in Turkey in areas that everyone thinks require change, then we ought to open those particular chapters. It s a debate, as you know, John. Question 9: A couple of points. One is that two weeks ago, the Lord Mayor had her visit out to Istanbul and there were three days. One was on infrastructural investment, what Britain could do there. Next one was on the whole idea of financial services, the financial hub of Istanbul. And the third one, I suppose because of her, was the law. But those are the areas that were being pushed at the time. While we were there, I had dinner with a very old friend of mine who s one of the founders of the AK Party and I was asked by Michael Moore, your successor, to find out if there are any fissures within the [AK] party. So I asked him the question of: was there anybody in Erdoğan s entourage who could tell him that he had got spinach in his teeth? You know the expression. And he said, yes, every so often Erdoğan called him in and he didn t like his opinions and shouted at him. He said: Well I m sorry, you invited me in, not the other way around. But it is quite clear that there are lots of people within the party who are not happy with the rather presidential way he s running the party, which they founded, he didn t. Turker Hamzaoğlu: I think that most of that infrastructure boost is playing out. Right now if you go to Istanbul, it feels like Dubai in You can understand how that shift has happened, with all that budget spending from interest rates to infrastructure. But I think we just had the heydays, is what I m saying. 11

12 Sir David Reddaway: Just on the political point, show me a political party that doesn t have fissures of some sort. But I would not say that the political culture in the AKP (AK Party) is one that encourages intensive research of spinach. Personal loyalty is very highly regarded. I would say that AKP is not really a party. Turkish politics is personality based. It has been like that for 50 years. It s increasingly like that today. If you take Erdoğan from the AKP, its popularity would plummet. AKP is really Erdoğan, Erdoğan is the AKP. They are interchangeable. Question 10: Earlier, I believe it was Sir David, you mentioned that there were both strong reasons why Erdoğan would choose the presidential route or he would choose a fourth term as prime minister. Absent the constitutional change, which doesn t appear to be possible in advance of the August elections, what is the appeal to Erdoğan of trying to go the presidential route? Bearing in mind all the risks and the previous moves of other strong prime ministers who have gone there and lost power. Sir David Reddaway: I would say that if he can ensure that he has powers to make the job the number one job in substance, as well as in presentation, there s always an appeal to being number one. I mean, he is number one politically in Turkey anyway, but to be number one and president is another notch in the sort of historical chain of achievements. If you look at Prime Minister Erdoğan s general election campaign in 2011, his slogan was Objective Why? He wants to be still president of Turkey in 2023, in the first centenary of the Turkish Republic to rival Atatürk. He campaigned very heavily on that, and that s why his slogan in 2011 was Objective

13 Turker Hamzaoğlu: In Turkey people define the institutions. So there s a large grey area. He can act as a de facto executive president when he comes into office. So I think the other is just details for him. Baroness Hussein-Ece: Thank you very much. Can I say thank you everybody who s participated and come along here? I think in an hour we ve covered a lot of ground in a fascinating country that is still we have to remind ourselves a young democracy, just 90 years old. It s had four coups in 40 years and still has a power to really fascinate us and we don t know, still, what s coming around the corner for whatever we may speculate here. It s certainly an important country and the one that we are aligned with and watching very, very closely. I take a keen interest in, I speak personally, but of course I m sure you re all here because you share my interest as well. I d like you to all show your appreciation to the panel for all the points that they ve answered. I think they ve spoken very well, very authoritatively on a whole range of issues that have been thrown at them. I ask you to show your appreciation to the panel. 13