Sibel Oktay, University of Illinois at Springfield, sibelo@uis.edu
This is part of the MENA Politics Newsletter, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2020. Download the PDF of this piece here.
The June 2015 parliamentary election was nothing short of a watershed moment for Turkish politics. The incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since its ascent to power in 2002. Surprising many, the defeat quickly brought back talks of an old tradition that had shaped the country’s politics for decades preceding AKP: coalition governments. Today, many consider the recent alignment between the AKP and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) a governing coalition; however, evidence from Turkish foreign policy shows that this is not an accurate description.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s disdain for coalition politics is well known. “We know that Turkey loses under coalition rule,” he said in the wake of his party’s electoral loss as he alluded to the unstable and short-lived string of coalition governments throughout the 1990s. “Coalition is not a project,” Erdogan warned, “it is a nightmare.”[i] Further to the AKP’s right on the political spectrum, the MHP was similarly unenthusiastic about the possibility of governing together with the AKP. That same night, MHP leader Devlet Bahceli signaled firmly that they would rather have an early election than participate in a coalition with the AKP.[ii] Little did Bahceli know that in the November election later that year his party would first be decimated in the parliament and then eventually splintered, and that a partnership with the AKP would save his party’s fortunes.
The AKP-MHP partnership has become the new status quo in Turkish politics since then. In 2017, the MHP openly supported the constitutional referendum that introduced presidentialism and gave President Erdogan sweeping powers with little legislative oversight. In subsequent national and local elections, the two parties ran on joint ballots, dubbing their ticket the “People’s Alliance” (Cumhur Ittifaki).[iii] Today, the two parties are frequently considered coalition partners.[iv] Furthermore, some argue that the AKP maintains its dominance in Turkish politics only because of MHP, as it provides Erdogan and his party with the necessary votes in the parliament. In effect, they argue, Bahceli and his party hold the reins to Erdogan’s rule.[v]
These observations misunderstand the nature of the AKP-MHP relationship. For one, the AKP and MHP are not coalition partners from a technical standpoint: the MHP and Bahceli remain fully outside the governing apparatus with no official control. Second and more importantly, their de facto relationship also defies the coalition dynamics that we otherwise expect to see. European minority cabinets, for instance, routinely engage in coalition politics to build legislative majorities with parties that do not formally participate in government.[vi] In countries like Denmark where minority rule is observed frequently, these parties become ad hoc junior coalition partners that effectively enjoy veto power.[vii] This is not the case in Turkey, either.
The true nature of this relationship is evident particularly in the foreign policy domain. As a long pedigree of scholarship and my forthcoming book on coalition politics and foreign policy-making show, junior parties usually enjoy considerable influence over foreign policy through various mechanisms in coalition settings. Had the AKP-MHP partnership been a coalition (either de jure or de facto), then the MHP as the junior party would have enjoyed greater leverage in the foreign policy domain. The party could have engaged in two strategies, specifically. First, it could engage in logrolling to attain side-payments by yielding to the AKP’s foreign policy agenda to get other concessions in return. Second, it could engage in hijacking and turn its hawkish preferences into government policy. Neither of these mechanisms works for the MHP.
In the remainder of this essay, I will provide an overview of the research on coalition foreign policy and how the MHP lacks these two key levers to shape current Turkish foreign policy towards China’s treatment of the Uighur community in Xinjiang, which, at least until recently, had been a central foreign policy agenda item for the party.[viii]
Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy
Multiparty governments are observed frequently in Europe as well as in different parts of the world including India, Canada, and Australia. While the formation, termination, and the public policy outcomes of coalition governments have been studied for a long time,[ix] how coalitions behave in the foreign policy domain received little attention until more recently. In a number of influential contributions, scholars of foreign policy dissected coalitions to theorize how these actors make decisions, the circumstances under which their decision-making is curtailed or facilitated, and the behavioral outcomes of these processes.[x]
A central component of the research on coalition foreign policy concerns the role of junior partners. Junior partners, sometimes called critical, or pivotal, junior partners, are defined in this literature as parties that are indispensable to the survival of the government.[xi] Several researchers have concluded that critical junior partners in coalitions often enjoy a disproportionate influence over foreign policy-making.[xii] Since they hold the necessary number of parliamentary seats to keep the government afloat, junior partners in minimum-winning coalitions can sway policy-making in the direction that they prefer. This is known as the ‘blackmailing’ or ‘hijacking’ potential of the junior partner. Junior party hijacking is observed frequently in foreign policy. For instance, these parties end up increasing the coalition’s likelihood of conflict initiation, especially when they are positioned further to the right of the government along the ideological spectrum.[xiii] In short, research shows that hawkish junior partners can turn their governments into hawks.
The second way in which junior coalition partners participate in foreign policy decision-making is through logrolling. This mechanism broadly captures ‘voting alliances’ in the parliament: parties vote for each other’s proposals in order to receive future side-payments in the form of office or policy.[xiv] In coalitions, logrolling is observed when a junior partner concedes to the policy preferences of the senior partner in return for policy concessions or cabinet portfolios. For instance, a junior partner (D66) in the incoming Dutch coalition yielded to the senior partner’s (the Christian Democrats) preference to join the U.S.-led war coalition in Iraq in 2003 in return for cabinet portfolios.[xv] Similarly, the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had to make policy concessions to the United Torah, his junior coalition partner, in order to secure their support for the Gaza withdrawal in 2005.[xvi] Through logrolling, in other words, junior parties not only shape foreign policy, but they also get what they want in return, be it in the form of policy or office seats.
The AKP-MHP Partnership in Foreign Policy
The ‘hijacking’ and ‘logrolling’ mechanisms therefore constitute important levers for junior partners to participate in the foreign policy process. They should also help us make sense of Turkish foreign policy under the “People’s Alliance.” To what extent do we observe these mechanisms at play in Turkish foreign policy decision-making and outcomes? Does the MHP take advantage of these strategies to influence foreign policy?
To answer these questions, I turn to a recent foreign policy debate in Turkey: the country’s response to the treatment of the Uighurs in China. We know that far-right junior parties may tend to stay muted if the foreign policy issue falls outside their scope.[xvii] I choose this episode precisely because it is central to the MHP’s otherwise meagre foreign policy platform. As Hintz explains in her book on foreign policy and identity politics in Turkey, the MHP champions Pan-Turkic Nationalism and is a natural advocate of the Uighur community, which has ethnic ties to the Turks.[xviii] As opposed to other foreign policy issues such as relations with the United States or the European Union, the Uighur community falls squarely under the MHP’s umbrella. This is a key foreign policy area where we should see MHP assert itself. It is also a low-stakes foreign policy issue compared to ongoing national security crises surrounding the war in Syria and its implications for relations with the U.S. and the EU.[xix] If the MHP’s position remains irrelevant even in this high-meaning-low-stakes context, in other words, the party should be far less visible in others.
China’s discriminatory behavior against the Uighurs in Xinjiang has received ample attention from the international community.[xx] In Turkey, the MHP has been an outspoken advocate of the Uighurs. In 2015, the youth wing of the party had held a mass demonstration in Istanbul and ended up beating a group of Korean tourists, mistaking them for Chinese.[xxi] The AKP, on the other hand, has remained rather muted. This is especially staggering considering in 2009 Erdogan had called the mass killings of Uighurs in Xinjiang a genocide.[xxii] Although foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu recently expressed Turkey’s concerns over China’s treatment of the Uighur community, he couched these remarks within a broader debate of human rights.[xxiii] A few months later in June 2019, the Turkish parliament struck down a motion to investigate China’s treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang with the AKP votes. Surprisingly, the MHP abstained.[xxiv] It is clear that the Uighur episode exposes the MHP’s inability to hijack the AKP’s foreign policy towards China or engage in some form of logrolling to keep it appeased. Even though this has been a salient issue for the party, it has been unable to either pull the AKP’s position toward overt criticism of China’s policies (hijacking) or concede to the AKP’s official position in exchange for other policy preferences (logrolling).
The Uighur episode is therefore an important demonstration of how the MHP’s partnership with AKP defeats the expectations of coalition foreign policy. The party wants Turkey to adopt a resolved response against the treatment of the Uighurs in China. To this day, however, this demand has not yet been met in any shape or form. The defeat of the parliamentary motion with AKP’s votes, with MHP abstaining, painfully reveals the MHP’s failure to influence Turkish foreign policy. The Pan-Turkic Nationalist vision of the MHP has similarly stopped short of influencing Turkish foreign policy toward the Tatars in Crimea following the Russian invasion. Moving forward, scholars of Turkish politics and foreign policy could explore these two cases in comparative perspective.
Conclusion
The AKP-MHP relationship is a strange one. Although Bahceli often fiercely defends Erdogan’s policies in Libya, Syria, and particularly the Turkish military’s excursions into northeastern Syria, his party has no leverage over less critical foreign policy issues, such as the treatment of Uighurs, that are in fact of key interest to their core constituency. Even though Turkey cannot afford to alienate China for economic reasons, this should neither stop the MHP from speaking out nor prevent the AKP from appeasing the MHP for domestic consumption.
To be sure, the political system in Turkey has morphed into a regime that is impossible to assess by the standards of advanced industrial democracies. Scholars have argued convincingly that the country now demonstrates all aspects of competitive authoritarianism in a super-presidential regime under the heavy hand of Erdogan.[xxv] Expecting coalition politics to play out as they do in European parliamentary systems might be a stretch. One could argue, in fact, that the peculiarity of the Turkish regime could help answer why the MHP continues to stay in this seemingly losing game. Erdogan and the AKP control the state and media apparatus with a tight grip that creates a heavily tilted playing field against opposition groups like the MHP. Further, we know that mainstream parties can quickly shift their policy positions and accommodate the issues of niche parties, thereby weakening the latter’s electoral fortunes.[xxvi] The AKP did just that in the summer of 2015, when its hard nationalistic turn following the collapse of the Kurdish peace process essentially made the MHP’s opposition void. These two dynamics have left little room for the MHP to assert itself as a credible veto player.
In sum, the AKP’s parliamentary majority depends on maintaining the MHP’s support, while MHP needs to stay close to AKP to escape another electoral carnage like the one in November 2015. So, for now, the MHP resembles a life vest. The party keeps the AKP afloat in the parliament while carving a much-needed role for itself, since this is preferable to collecting dirt and grime under the seat. Their alignment remains an electoral alliance for the time being, nothing more. As a scholar of coalition politics and foreign policy, I caution analysts and Turkey watchers against calling the AKP-MHP partnership a coalition. It doesn’t look like a coalition, and it certainly does not act like one, especially in the foreign policy domain.
Oktay Notes
[i] “Erdoğan: Koalisyon kâbustur,” (“Erdogan: Coalition is nightmare”) Al Jazeera, April 19, 2015. http://www.aljazeera.com.tr/haber/erdogan-koalisyon-kabustur
[ii] “Bahçeli koalisyona kapıları kapattı ‘erken seçim’ dedi,” (“Bahceli shut the door on the coalition, called for early election”) Cumhuriyet, June 8, 2015. http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/bahceli-koalisyona-kapilari-kapatti-erken-secim-dedi-294061
[iii] For an excellent overview, see Selim Koru, “In Turkey, Erdogan Is Still Calling All the Shots,” Foreign Policy, 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/29/in-turkey-erdogan-is-still-calling-all-the-shots-bahceli-mhp-akp/
[iv] Koru, “Shots.” See also Kemal Kirisci and Kutay Onayli, “In Turkey, Erdoğan and his AKP stumble,” Brookings Institute, April 2, 2019.https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/04/02/in-turkey-erdogan-and-his-akp-stumble/
Some political scientists use more nuanced language and call the AKP-MHP partnership an alliance or an electoral coalition, see Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, “Killing Competitive Authoritarianism Softly: The 2019 Local Elections in Turkey,” South European Society and Politics 24, no. 3 (2019): 317-342.
[v] Selim Sazak, “Erdogan’s Worst Enemy Is His Only Ally,” Foreign Policy, 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/09/erdogans-worst-enemy-is-his-only-ally-mhp-chp-akp-bahceli-istanbul-ankara-mayor-imamoglu/
See also Murat Yetkin, “Yorum: Bahçeli neden Erdoğan’dan çok Erdoğancı algısı yaratıyor?” (“Commentary: Why is Bahceli creating the impression of being more Erdoganist than Erdogan himself?”) DW.com, February 11, 2020. https://p.dw.com/p/3Xbu7?maca
[vi] Kaare Strøm, Wolfgang C. Müller, and Torbjörn Bergman (eds.) Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[vii] Christoffer Green-Pedersen, “Minority Governments and Party Politics: The Political and Institutional Background to the ‘Danish Miracle,” Journal of Public Policy 21, no.1 (2001): 53-70. George Tsebelis, “Decision making in political systems: Veto players in presidentialism, parliamentarism, multicameralism and multipartyism,” British Journal of Political Science 25, no. 3 (2001): 289-325.
[viii] The party’s most recent election manifesto that is available on their official website is from 2011. The document highlights that the MHP considers “relations with the Turkic communities around the world a foreign policy priority” and spends several paragraphs outlining the party’s vision towards an institutionalized relationship with Turkic communities in Central Asia and the Balkans. Source: MHP Election Manifesto 2011, p. 183. Retrieved from https://www.mhp.org.tr/usr_img/_mhp2007/kitaplar/MHP_2011_SecimBeyannamesi.pdf
MHP, among other Turkish nationalists, also calls the Xinjiang region ‘Eastern Turkistan’—a clear reference to the ancestral roots of Central Asian Turks.
[ix] See Strøm et al., 2008.
[x] For an overview of this research, see Sibel Oktay, “Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis, edited by Cameron Thies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 156-167.
[xi] Juliet Kaarbo, “Influencing Peace Junior Partners in Israeli Coalition Cabinets,” Cooperation and Conflict 31, no. 3 (1996a): 243-284. Juliet Kaarbo, “Power and influence in foreign policy decision making: The role of junior coalition partners in German and Israeli foreign policy,” International Studies Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1996b): 501-530.
[xii] See Kaarbo, 1996a, 1996b. See also Joe Clare, “Ideological Fractionalization and the International Conflict Behavior of Parliamentary Democracies,” International Studies Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2010): 965-987. Kai Oppermann and Klaus Brummer, “Patterns of junior partner influence on the foreign policy of coalition governments,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 16, no. 4 (2014): 555–571.
[xiii] Clare, 2010.
[xiv] P. Lanfranchi and R. Luethi, “Cohesion of party groups and interparty conflict in the Swiss parliament: Roll call voting in the national council,” in Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government, edited by Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, Richard S. Katz. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 118. Amie Kreppel and Simon Hix, “From ‘grand coalition’ to left-right confrontation: Explaining the shifting structure of party competition in the European parliament,” Comparative Political Studies 36 (2003): 75–96.
[xv] See Juliet Kaarbo, Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making: A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Policy Choices. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). I present an in-depth analysis of the Iraq decision in my book, Governing Abroad: Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy in Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).
[xvi] Sibel Oktay, “Chamber of Opportunities: Legislative Politics and Coalition Security Policy,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20, no. 1 (2018): 104-120.
[xvii] Fabrizio Coticchia and Jason W. Davidson, “The Limits of Radical Parties in Coalition Foreign Policy: Italy, Hijacking, and the Extremity Hypothesis,” Foreign Policy Analysis 14, no. 2 (2018): 149-168. Valerio Vignoli, “The barking dogs: junior coalition partners and military operations abroad in Italy,” Italian Political Science Review, (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2020.10. Bertjan Verbeek and Andrei Zaslove, “The impact of populist radical right parties on foreign policy: The Northern League as a junior coalition partner in the Berlusconi Governments,” European Political Science Review 7, no. 4 (2015): 525–546.
[xviii] Lisel Hintz, Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[xix] Indeed, Hintz notes that Pan-Turkic Nationalism is the least salient foreign policy identity in Turkey.
[xx] Lindsay Maizland, “China’s Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2019. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-repression-uighurs-xinjiang
[xxi] “China-Turkey relationship strained over Uighurs,” BBC News, July 9, 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-33440998
[xxii] “Turkish leader calls Xinjiang killings ‘genocide,” Reuters, July 10, 2009. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-china-sb/turkish-leader-calls-xinjiang-killings-genocide-idUSTRE56957D20090710
[xxiii] “Turkey urges China to protect religious freedom in Xinjiang,” Al Jazeera, February 25, 2019. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/turkey-urges-china-protect-religious-freedom-xinjiang-190225140944902.html
[xxiv] “Turkey’s ruling party votes down inquiry into China’s repression on Uighurs,” Ahval News, June 12, 2019. https://ahvalnews.com/turkey-uighurs/turkeys-ruling-party-votes-down-inquiry-chinas-repression-uighurs
[xxv] See Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, “Rising competitive authoritarianism in Turkey,” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 9 (2016): 1581-1606. See also Ekim Arbatli “Turkey’s New Path: The Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism,” Centre for Policy and Research of Turkey (Research Turkey) 3, no. 12 (2014): 76–92.
[xxvi] Bonnie Meguid, “Competition Between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party Strategy in Niche Party Success,” American Political Science Review 99, no 3.