In the 1999 elections, having failed to cross the ten percent threshold to win seats in parliament, Mr Baykal resigned. But it is still delusional: parties don’t to recognise it even when the public have had enough of them. This near-blind degree of loyalty makes it somewhat easier to understand why Turkish parties tend not to blame their leaders for electoral failure. During a recent parliamentary debate on smoking bans, one Nationalist Action Party (MHP) MP spoke passionately about the charismatic style with which his leader, Devlet Bahçeli, could hold and smoke a cigarette. Party leaders are effectively sanctified in the country – most party conventions, for instance, will feature large portraits of both Atatürk and the present leader – and they are a rallying point for genuine enthusiasm and unwavering loyalty. To bring back a former, supposedly succesful leader is a delusional byword for political recovery in Turkey. She was not a good leader, and now her old rump party wants her back. She was genuinely surprised, upon Mr Erbakan’s resignation, not to be asked to form the next government. She stood silent as her senior partner spurned the west and made highly publicised visits to Iran and Libya.
During the campaign, she had declared Mr Erbkaban “a smuggler of heroin” and herself “the safeguard of secularism”, but after six months and a hefty libel fee the two leaders were in a “power rotating” scheme whereby Mr Erbakan would be prime minister first, and Mrs Çiller would follow in a year-and-a-half. It was a shock to Turkey’s secular establishment for the overtly religious RP to do so well what shocked them more was Mrs Çiller joining them in coalition. Her first election, in 1995, saw her lose to Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party (RP). Under her, the party won a successively smaller share of the vote, finally failing to cross the electoral threshold in 2002. Mrs Çiller was a staggeringly ineffective leader. She wouldn’t be one to talk of the banking crisis of the early 1990s, her alleged corrupt practices (including tenders that favoured her wealthy businessman husband), or the fact that she never won a election. Or that the military’s funding was stepped up to combat the mounting PKK threat. If you asked her what her greatest achievement in office was, she would probably tell you it was that Turkey entered a Customs Union with the European Union under her watch. Her victory was credited largely to Turkey’s media, including the fledgling private television channels, which made much of the idea of a first woman prime minister. She wasn’t particularly high-ranking – a mere state minister, certainly not senior in the cabinet – and she contested her party’s leadership against such heavyweights as İsmet Sezgin and Köksal Toptan. Mrs Çiller assumed the vacant post of prime minister in 1993, after Süleyman Demirel moved up to the presidency. Regression appears to be what is happening to the Democrat Party (DP), which is trying to bring back its former leader and last prime minister, Tansu Çiller. Stagnation is the case with the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which recently re-elected its directionless leader, unopposed, in an appalling example of democracy (see my outdated entry on the CHP for some back story). When things go wrong, the prevailing mood is one of either stagnation or regression. The instinct in Turkey is precisely the opposite. “We’re not popular, we’ll probably lose the next election, it’s not working out for us,” they mutter behind closed doors, before adding: “Off with his head and bring in a new one.” Or something to that effect. Part of the government in Britain, where I appear to be invariably based at the moment, seems obsessed with dispensing with its prime minister after less than a year in the job. Why, oh why, could anyone possibly think that this is a good idea?