Can the autocratic regime of a “single man” continue as if nothing has happened even after the 31 March 2024 [local election defeat] debacle he faced?
If “history repeats itself,” then unfortunately, yes, it could very well continue.
Erdoğan’s blustering during the recent AKP group meeting and the press conference following the Cabinet Meeting the night before stems from his confidence in the inevitability of this “repetition”…
Erdoğan clearly remembers the pattern of both the general and local elections set for 14-28 May and 31 March 2024, seeing them as almost a replay of the elections from 24 June 2018 and 31 March to 23 June 2019. Even though his political rivals might have forgotten, he recalls how he managed to maintain his “single man” regime, which was struggling after its narrow win in the 2018 elections under the AKP/People alliance, and how he managed to turn it into a “victory” again in May 2023.
Erdoğan’s charm lies in ensuring that while he is not bound by any law, his rivals voluntarily imprison themselves in a dictatorship parliament where political struggle is separated from social struggles by firewalls. The explanation for Erdoğan’s 2018 and 2023 general election “victories,” and the 2019 and 2023 local administration “defeats,” actually lies in how the tensions between the social and the political, and between the central and the local, are managed or fail to be managed.
As both experiences have clearly shown, Erdoğan’s “Achilles heel” is the politicisation of the social. Since 2009, Erdoğan has been losing all “peaceful” and “democratic” struggles in the metropolises and Kurdistan, where the social-historical demands of the Kurds and urban poor have become the defining factor, manifesting the politicisation of the social, while winning all political battles, except for 7 June 2015, which he now knows by heart.
What guides him today is the high ground he takes, as if the opposition lost the 31 March local elections, not him, and once he can trap his rivals within the current political framework, this groundwork will statistically lead to his dice rolling in his favour.
In his statement after the Cabinet Meeting the day before yesterday, “The discussions on returning to the parliamentary system with the elections of 14-28 May have been closed once again by our people, never to be reopened. Instead of wasting time on discussions of returning to the old system, I believe that dedicating time to further improving the current system would be much more beneficial for Turkey. Should such a step be taken, we would be pleased to contribute to this process based on our 6-year experience in practice,” Erdoğan was essentially inviting the opposition to surrender to the political parameters of dictatorship.
However, the defeats Erdoğan suffered in the 2019 and 2024 local elections were made possible by the exact opposite happening. Each of Erdoğan’s defeats was a product of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP) capacity to think beyond the arithmetic of the dictatorship parliament and its ability to implement these thoughts within the framework of “politicising the social.”
By elevating the calculation of politics from arithmetic to algebra, the HDP’s strategy to stop the institutionalisation of fascism in the 2019 local elections involved undermining the AKP’s local bases in the metropolises and liberating the usurped local administrations from trustees in Kurdistan. This strategy suddenly exposed the fragility and imbalance of the seemingly indestructible “Presidential Government System.”
Suddenly, local administrations in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Adana, Mersin, Antalya, Hatay, Eskişehir, Diyarbakır (Amed), Van (Wan), and Mardin (Mêrdîn), along with their controlled material and institutional resources, slipped from the regime’s grasp. As a result, an alternative to the Presidential regime naturally arose. From the ruins of the regime’s “operation to cause collapse” targeting the Kurdish opposition, the goal of a democratic and social republic based on democratically autonomous local governments naturally emerged.
HDP’s politics, by moving out of the castrated parliament of the Presidential regime to the local, socially breathing spaces, and to the arenas of face-to-face interactions where the regime lacked enough control over political engineering, confirmed once again in practice that opening a new front where AKP struggled to set the rules of the game was possible.
Unfortunately, due to reasons not solely of its own making, the HDP found it difficult to shift the struggle to this new political front and was not very effective or successful to the extent it managed to open this front. In Kurdistan, successive trustee coups devastated HDP’s legitimate bases, while in the metropolitan areas, the withdrawal of CHP-run municipalities curtailed the momentum to reconstitute local governments as new political arenas, effectively forcing politics back into an impotent parliament.
Despite the results of the 2019 local elections shaking the balance of power within the parliamentary and presidential grounds, the main opposition party, rather than surrounding politics from outside the parliament according to the new balance of power, kept distance from unconventional methods of struggle that the situation demanded.
Erdoğan’s stance, presented in yesterday’s AKP Group Meeting and the day before’s Cabinet Meeting, particularly relies on analysing the political battle logic followed by the CHP opposition during 2018-2023. Erdoğan trusts that the CHP will not move politics to the grounds where broad and extensive opposition, the real source of power outside the parliament, based on social opposition dynamics, can challenge the AKP’s structural and class-based reasons for failure.
Now, the critical question that the opposition needs to answer is this: Will they accept the political equation set by Erdoğan, or will they move their social equation onto the political plane?
Simply put, will the CHP -and of course the DEM Party- engage in surrounding the regime by loading politics onto grassroots political grounds, or will they allow themselves to be surrounded by the regime, including local administrations, by being confined to the parliament as they were on 31 March 2019?
Erdoğan’s hope lies in history repeating itself. However, the intelligence that defeated him on 31 March arose not from political institutions, but from politically mobilised social forces. Regardless of what politics says, the key to politics is now in the hands of society.
Ertuğrul Kürkçü is the current Honorary President of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and Honorary Associate of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). He spent 14 years as a prisoner between 1972-1986 for his political activism in Turkey. He is also member of Progressive International Council.
