Limited victory in Turkey

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has achieved a clear electoral victory, which gives him a parliamentary majority and the option of a third mandate. The polls once again reflect confidence in this moderate Islamist, under whose administration the Turkish economy has tripled. But his margin for maneuver has been limited, as he was denied the landslide majority he needed (more than 330 seats out of a total of 550) in order to push through parliament a constitutional change in the direction of a presidential state, without having to negotiate with the opposition.

It seems obvious that the Turkish electorate has not entirely turned its back on the warnings of the principal opposition party, the secular, social-democratic CHP, concerning Erdogan's hidden intentions to keep himself in power and to erode the prized principle of the secular character of the Turkish state. Nor have the voters failed to notice the unfair play that has characterized this electoral campaign ? with the principal suspect of promoting these dirty methods being, precisely, Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), the only one that has not been smeared in the scandal involving sex tapes.

The political formations most heavily damaged by these videos have, indeed, been the CHP (its leader, Deniz Baykal, had to step aside in favor of the renovation candidate Kemal Kilickaroglu, in the middle of the campaign) and the ultra-nationalist MHP, which, not having attained 10 percent of the votes, would seem to be excluded from the parliament, fundamentally to the benefit of the AKP. The electoral results of both the opposition parties, the country's second- and third-ranking political forces respectively, ensure a certain limitation of powers for Erdogan which will set obstacles in the way of the implementation of those hidden aims, which the MHP claims the prime minister has long been nurturing.

One of Erdogan's first tasks will be to clarify what his intentions are in this respect, and to undertake new reforms capable of unblocking the negotiations for joining the European Union, which the Islamist leader himself succeeded in initiating in 2005, and on which France and Germany, in particular, are deeply reticent.

The fact that, at the present time, 60 journalists remain in prison (more than in China) and that Layla Zana, a Kurdish nationalist, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for speaking in Kurdish in the parliamentary chamber, are not the best democratic credentials for a country that, in spite of the Turkish public's growing rejection of Brussels, still officially aspires to form part of the European Union.