For the past five years, I have explained to any person who would listen to me that Turkey is more democratic than the United States. Most of the time, my words were met with blank stares and non-comprehension, but lately I have been getting more understanding. Correspondingly, yesterday’s election should have been a rude awakening for any person who believed that the Turkish populace could still be cowed by threats from Turkey’s Kemalist establishment or from alarmist international commentators.

The inescapable reality of the AK (Justice and Development) Party’s landslide victory is that it was not a surprise, no matter what the international press may say, and no matter how many people attended the recent Turkish political rallies that attracted so much domestic and international attention. The 45-plus percent vote tally for the AK Party had been well-predicted by independent researchers and poll-takers. The prominent Turkish sociologist Can Paker (president of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, known as TESEV), for example, had predicted over the previous months that the AK Party would receive up to 45 percent of the vote; the final tally put them at 46.6 percent.

From a socio-economic standpoint it is difficult to overestimate the importance of this election’s results, because it indicates that Turkey’s bourgeoisie, as civilian politicians, have begun to take over the reins of power with full consent of the populace, as is the case in most other industrialized, democratic nations. This makes Turkey the first overwhelmingly Muslim country to experience such a transition. Consequently, this vote has importance for the entire Islamic world because it is the first time that a truly bourgeois party has garnered so much support in a Muslim country. Turkey is leading the Islamic world as an example of independent industrialization, political stability, and development, all important aspects of a modern democratic society.

The AK Party received a much larger share of the vote in this election than in 2002, but their number of parliamentary seats will be about fifteen lower (340) because one more party passed the ten percent barrier for parliamentary representation. However, the AKP clearly have a mandate since voter turnout was 84 percent (5 percent higher than in 2002) and the party increased its share of the votes by around 12 percent (in 2002 they received 34 percent). Garnering nearly half of the votes is an overwhelming result in a parliamentary system such as Turkey’s, where dozens of parties compete in elections. The number of female Members of Parliament (MPs) also doubled.

In addition to embodying the social changes happening in Turkey, the polls were also a resounding rejection of ideas propagated by the old-guard secular nationalist parties, like the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the National Action Party (MHP), and the Democrat Party (DP). For the past months, the leaders of these parties hammered on fear-mongering messages like Turkey’s secularism being under threat, Turkey being sold to the US and EU, the AK Party being responsible for PKK violence, etc. Instead, the voters showed round support for the AK Party’s economic and political policies. Support for the AK Party’s attempts to lead Turkey into the EU must also be inferred.

This election also constituted a further rejection (begun in the 2002 election) of traditional Turkish populist electioneering, which consisted of candidates making wild election promises, or passing out freebies during the campaign, in order to garner votes. The most notorious example of such electioneering is Cem Uzan (from the infamous telecommunications and banking family; his father and brother are on the lam from various fraud investigations). In the last election he got eight percent of the vote by passing out free food at his campaign rallies and by naming his organization the Genc (Youth) Party in order to target younger Turkish voters . In this election season he made the news by making ridiculous, even silly promises to reduce the cost of farm-use diesel fuel to one Turkish lira per liter, or to institute a 100 percent rise in the price at which the goverment buys hazelnuts from farmers. Yesterday the electorate showed him to the metaphorical door as he managed only a paltry three percent.

Moreover, this was also a resounding defeat for the AK Party’s international critics, such as the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin, who just ten days ago wrote another doom-and-gloom “analysis” of Turkey’s politics, warning that the AK Party is the biggest threat to Turkey’s secular state, not the Turkish military(http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.26477/pub_detail.asp). Interestingly, Rubin’s ideas closely parallel those of the mainstream Turkish nationalist, “secular” parties mentioned above. But whereas those nationalist Turkish parties are struggling to retain their interests and power, naysaying pundits such as Rubin are guided more by their own political biases than by sound knowledge of Turkish politics or society.

For example, international reports often speak of a “division” in Turkey’s citizenry; this election showed that the division is much more asserted than proven. As someone who has lived continually in Istanbul for the past eight years, I sense no real “division” in Turkish society, other than the hard-line (and minority) Kemalist elite, slowly losing their grip on power and the nation’s consciousness, and thus using sensitive issues in order to provoke reactions in the citizenry. This is not a division in any sort of concrete way, but rather an attempt to preserve class advantages.

International journalists’ lack of real understanding of Turkish society gives rise to repetition in the international press coverage of the country. A common theme is that the AK Party is “Islamist” (for typical, somewhat fear-mongering examples, see: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19893188/ , or http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-turkelect23jul23,0,4301585.story?coll=la-home-center , or http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/world/europe/23turkey.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp ). In fact, “Islamist” can no longer accurately describe the AK Party, and the international press will have to learn that the AK Party draws support from the entire spectrum of the Turkish population. Just last week, for example, a leading Turkish-Armenian journalist, Etyen Mahchupyan, called for Turkish-Armenians to vote for the AK Party. Furthermore, the percentage of the Turkish population which believes that Turkey’s government should be based on religious law does not even reach ten percent (see the English summary of TESEV’s research at: http://www.tesev.org.tr/etkinlik/Final%20Rapordin_toplum.pdf). If the AK Party is an “Islamist” party, where did the other 36 percent of their votes come from? Finally, the militantly Islamist Saadet (Felicity) Party would have gotten much more than 2.3 percent of the vote if the average Turkish voter was motivated politically by his or her religious beliefs.

Poor journalism is not caused solely by ignorance, however, and there is an important media lesson for Americans in the Turkish election. Despite the fact that most major Turkish TV stations are in the hands of a tiny number of media companies, and that most of those channels ran information for the past three months that can best be described as “tilted” towards the old-guard, nationalist parties like the Republican People’s Party, the National Action Party, and the Democrat Party, the AK Party still won an overwhelming percentage of the vote. In retrospect, the Democrat Party and Cem Uzan’s Youth Party (GP) deserved nowhere near the attention that the media gave to their leaders since the election results indicate that those parties have essentially no support. So where did that attention come from from? Most Turkish media companies (but not Turkish industrial companies) are dominated by individuals who are closely aligned with old-guard Kemalist ideology and the sectors of Turkish society, the military, the bureaucrats, and the intellectuals, who support that ideology.

However, Turkish people do have alternatives for information. On Turkey’s cable and satellite-TV services are a number of channels that, although not large, provide alternative sources of information. Some are religious, such as the well-known Channel 7, but some are not. In the past months I found myself turning more and more to those “other” channels, even the religious ones, in order to find alternative viewpoints. In the aftermath of the election last night, Can Paker, who openly identifies himself as a social democrat, was first on Channel 7, and then on some other channels that cannot be termed “Kemalist.” In other words, Turkish media is alive and well despite the predominance of one viewpoint on many of the most-watched channels.

A case study could be performed on one channel, KanalTurk, and its election propaganda. KanalTurk is ostensibly a “leftist” channel (they routinely show documentaries about Hugo Chavez, Allende, or other pro-left, anti-American pieces) and was the primary sponsor of the first political rally in Izmir, nearly three months ago. The nature of the channel is fascinating and typical of the shady relationships in Turkish media. KanalTurk was founded by a career journalist, named Tuncay Ozkan, who somehow came up with fifteen million USD to found this station (how he obtained this money from an otherwise non-descript journalistic career has not been clarified). The founder of the station also hosts a weekly political commentary program which features a prominent leftist journalist and a retired Turkish general. Don’ t be surprised, because this is actually normal: some sectors of the Turkish left, like the extreme Maoists, have traditionally been allied with the Turkish military for nationalistic reasons.

As the election neared, KanalTurk began to take more and more extreme positions, showing full speeches from the leader of the fascistic National Action Party and even broadcasting lengthy reportage with the leader of the fringe-Islamist Saadet Party, Necmettin Erbakan, an individual who has used anti-Semitic rhetoric throughout his lengthy political career. In other words, KanalTurk is “leftist” in name only, just as the Republican People’s Party is “leftist” in name only.

The trap for international journalists and commentators is that, if they do not know the details of Turkey’s political and media life, they will end up with analyses that hardly reflect the reality of Turkish society. The result is the shallow analyses of the Turkish election beamed around the world on BBC or CNN, or published by the AP, the NY Times, or the LA Times. In other words, what is displayed on the TV screen does not necessarily represent the reality of a nation’s politics. Turkey’s citizens, who are aware of the problems in the Turkish media, were not duped.

A final, more general message also emerged from yesterday’s Turkish election. Turkey is a developing country which has seen much upheaval, of both the political and economic sort, in the past 80 years. However, in the end Turkey is on the right path, developing rapidly, and deciding its own future independently through electoral processes which are more transparent than those used in the U.S. In general, developing countries need to be allowed to find their own paths to development, even if those paths may seem different or vaguely threatening to those who are not familiar with the developing countries’ societies. That means that developing countries need advice not diktats, respect and dialogue not condescension, from the “Northern” industrialized countries. Turkey is showing what amazing progress can be achieved when a developing country is given the necessary support on its path to development and democracy.

– A.B. McConnel is completing an MA in History, focusing on Republican Turkish history and Turkish-American relations, at Sabanci University in Istanbul. He has lived in Istanbul since 1999.

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