Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a directive to his party following the general elections in June: “Yes, we received 50 percent of the votes, but another 50 percent did not vote for us. Let us also find out why they did not vote [for us.]”
Some criticized this statement. Admittedly, I also asked, “Have mercy, do they want 100 percent of the votes?” Or so I asked, but truthfully, I also wondered what the findings of this survey would be.
Prior to entering politics, Deputy Prime Minister Beşir Atalay used to work as a researcher. He founded a polling company that conducted research for the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, from the beginning.
Allow me to point out that this is not the sole company conducting research for the AKP. Atalay, however, is a heavyweight in the assessment and formation of research undertaken for his party. He shaped the direction of research conducted after the elections to a great degree, and the resulting conclusions were evaluated by a delegation he presided over.
We learned of the survey’s conclusions from Yahya Bostan’s news piece in daily Sabah on Monday. The conclusions of the survey conducted by Pollmark and Anar, which interviewed 28,723 people face to face, are quite interesting.
As far as I am concerned, the most important issue has to do with how the AKP-voting electorate defines itself. Accordingly, 27.1 percent of the AKP’s electorate define themselves as being “conservative.” Keeping in mind that the party defines itself as being “conservative democrat,” one can observe that only a third of the party’s electorate politically identifies with the party.
But let us hold on before we jump to any conclusions. The second largest mass within the AKP’s electorate are those who identify themselves as Turkish nationalists, at 24.4 percent. This crowd also identifies itself as being conservative. Political identification then increases by about another half.
What of the rest then? The third largest mass are those who describe themselves as being Kemalist, at 16.4 percent. Surprised? I am not surprised at all, in fact.
Some 7.2 percent of the AKP’s electorate defines themselves as social democrats; 5.9 percent as liberal democrats; 3 percent as neo-nationalists; and 1.4 percent as Kurdish nationalists.
Allow me to divulge one final interesting figure: 54 percent of AKP voters are women, and 46 percent are men!
These figures could yield a plethora of analyses, as I am sure party officials are already engaged in drawing such conclusions.
Here is what I have to say:
It is unfortunately a rarity to see parties in Turkey who analyze the results of such surveys and try to model their policies and narratives based on people’s attitudes toward them.
Instead, the majority keeps content with armchair political engineering and views other parties and voters through the framework of certain stereotypes.
If a party garners 50 percent of the votes, then that party constitutes an organism that has transcended ideologies, transformed itself into a mass party and naturally contains within itself all the political and social hues and shades of society.
Calling the AKP “reactionaries” or “conservatives” and reducing them down to a single adjective is to disregard and even insult those who voted for this party.
One wishes that the CHP would also conduct and draw lessons from such research.
*İsmet Berkan is a columnist for daily Hürriyet in which this article appeared on Tuesday. It was translated into English by the Daily News Staff.
