‘An election with many losers and only one winner, Erdoğan’

At present, observers note, the AKP, which won 315 seats out of 550, will be able to govern alone, but will have to find allies to change the constitution and create the presidential regime that Erdoğan desires.

“Now is the time to adopt a civil constitution", writes the pro-government newspaper Sabah, which has the front page headline ‘A ballot-box revolution’. It highlights that the current constitution, while amended several times, is still the one adopted after the military coup of 1980. The columnist Yavuz Donat says that –

the AKP has been in power for the fourth term in a row, a new record. But what matters is that Turkey has succeeded in organising these elections in spite of so many provocations.

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“1 November will go down in our political history” proclaims Yeni Şafak , a daily close to the AKP, which hails the “magnificent victory” of the President’s party, around which –

Turkey unified to resist internal and external threats. By winning this resounding victory, the AKP is once again the only party in power. And it is improving its results in all the country’s regions, taking votes from the CHP [social-democrat and Kemalist], the MHP [nationalist right], and the HDP [pro-Kurd].

For the Kemalist opposition daily Cumhuriyet, “fear has won out”. In the inside pages, commentator Orhan Bursalı calls on Erdoğan to put an end to his strategy of stoking tensions which led to his party’s victory –

If the opinion polls were broadly wrong, they were right on at least one point: security is the number one worry among voters! All other problems were relegated to secondary concerns. [...] Will the AKP continue with its repressive and authoritarian politics after the elections? Let us hope that this will not be the case. Erdoğan must renounce his militarist agenda. His greatest fear is losing power and, today, he no longer has reason to worry. It is certainly not economic issues that will push the AKP to adopt even more authoritarian policies.

Writing for Hürriyet, Mehmet Yilmaz claims that it was “an election with a lot of losers and only one winner, Erdoğan.” In particular, the columnist on the secular daily writes that –

the pro-Kurd HDP just scraped over the electoral threshold [of 10%]. One reason why is that it has not understood that the votes it won last time were “borrowed”, and that the attacks made by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have turned many towns in the southeast of the country into war zones. The HDP has not clearly taken a stance against these acts. In short, it has not able to free itself from the under the military guardianship of the PKK. [As for Erdoğan], he will perhaps not be able to create a presidential system, but we can definitively say that he will transform what we have now into a tacit semi-presidential system. There is one sole lesson to draw from this election: Turkey is drifting towards a single-person dictatorship. And the people have the government they deserve.

“Alone in power”, headlines the opposition newspaper Zaman, whose columnist Mümtaz'er Türköne says that “what was missing in this election was legitimacy” Türköne made reference to the occupation, three days before the vote, of two television channels which, like Zaman, are close to the brotherhood of the imam in exile Fatullah Gülen, once a supporter of Erdoğan and now his most bitter opponent. For Türköne,

we cannot say that these elections took place in a just, transparent and democratic environment.