What Do Turkish Swing Voters Want?

Most informed observers in Turkey and abroad agree that both the country's current domestic agenda and foreign policy are, to a large extent, driven by the personal preoccupations of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. At home, he is preventing the formation of a coalition government and pushing for early elections, expecting the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to do better than last time. That would again allow the party to form an AKP government able and willing to implement the president's wishes. Across the border, Turkish forces are pounding Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) positions after a series of reckless terrorist attacks on police and army personnel. Erdoğan seems to hope the new round of fighting will strengthen his position as a strong national leader in times of trouble and will fatally harm the electoral prospects of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). In the event of early elections, if the Kurdish-origin party does not manage to pass the 10 percent electoral threshold because many of its new voters do not appreciate the party's ambiguous position vis-a-vis the PKK attacks, the AKP would almost automatically regain its majority in Parliament.
Albeit grudgingly, many analysts appear to agree that most probably Erdoğan's calculations make sense and his plans will be successful. But is that a correct assessment? And which voters will be more influenced by Erdoğan's strategic master plan: the AKP's core electorate, or, more importantly, the AKP swing voters who abandoned the party on June 7?
On Monday, the Gezici Research and Polling Company presented a new, nationwide survey based on interviews held a week earlier. The main findings indicate that Erdoğan getting his way may not be that obvious. Among 4,860 respondents, 70 percent (including 66 percent of recent AKP voters) expressed their preference for a coalition government. Most of them want AKP leaders to increase their efforts and consider Erdoğan to be the biggest hurdle to the emergence of such a desired coalition. In that sense, most agree with the complaint of Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu who accused Erdoğan this weekend of blocking an AKP-CHP coalition government that, according to Kiliçdaroğlu, acting Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu would be willing to support.
Clear majorities in the Gezici poll also believe the interim AKP government is creating a chaotic atmosphere to lure back nationalist voters in a possible snap election and want a new government to be more independent of the president when making decisions. In other words: most Turks seem to understand what Erdoğan and the AKP are up to and they don't like it at all.
AKP pundits immediately tried to render the Gezici findings harmless by claiming the company is staunchly anti-AKP and should therefore not be trusted. I do not want to go into the trustworthiness of this or other Turkish polling companies. What I do know is that Gezici was one of the first to make a correct prediction about the AKP setback and the HDP rise on June 7.
If Gezici is right again, it raises the question of which dynamic is going to be more powerful if and when an early election is inevitable. This is especially so among those crucial voters the AKP strategists are aiming at: nationalists who left the party to vote for the MHP, and conservative Kurds who trusted HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş more than Erdoğan and Davutoğlu.
Will Erdoğan and the AKP be rewarded for picking a fight with the PKK? Or will Erdoğan be punished for making a coalition government impossible and for his obvious attempt to wipe out the results of the June 7 at the first opportunity? If the MHP keeps refusing to join a coalition government and the PKK keeps killing Turkish citizens, the AKP may be successful in portraying MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli as an irresponsible politician and Erdoğan as the only strong man able to defend the national interest. In that case, nationalist swing voters will probably return to the AKP. But will it convince conservative Kurds to jump ship as well? I am not so sure. Many of them hate the PKK and are deeply unhappy with the new terror campaign. The same applies to many democrats and liberals who voted HDP to help it surpass the electoral threshold on June 7. At the same time, both groups seem unwilling to tumble to Erdoğan's games. A balanced HDP approach that would create some clear distance from the PKK campaign would also help Demirtaş keep most of the doubters on board. Several other mixed scenarios are possible as well in the upcoming weeks.
My conclusion: At the moment there are simply to many unknowns to be sure Erdoğan's set-up will work. Amidst all the speculation and skepticism, that is a comforting thought.

JOOST LAGENDIJK (Cihan/Today's Zaman)