Tomor­row is elec­tion day in Turkey and it’s com­ing down to the home stretch! The Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party (AKP) is likely to win about 30 per­cent of the vote, which would make them the senior part­ner in any coali­tion gov­ern­ment, assum­ing they don’t win out­right. The Repub­li­can People’s Party (CHP), founded by Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is polling at 15 to 20 per­cent. How­ever, Atatürk’s party is avowedly sec­u­lar, so it’s unlikely the two would part­ner up.
The sit­u­a­tion is mak­ing the mil­i­tary and other sec­u­lar Turks very, very ner­vous. In 1997, the AKP’s pre­de­ces­sor, the Wel­fare Party, was eased out by the mil­i­tary in what many have called a “soft coup.” But that option isn’t avail­able now. With the Euro­pean Union still dan­gling the car­rot of mem­ber­ship, the Turk­ish mil­i­tary can’t risk step­ping in and muck­ing about with elec­tions and democ­racy. But the pow­ers that be in Turkey also worry that a gov­ern­ment headed by an Islamist party wouldn’t be attrac­tive to Europe either, so Turkey is kind of caught in a bind.
Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing the sit­u­a­tion, Mil­liyet reported last week that Turkey’s top state pros­e­cu­tor, Sabih Kanadoglu, has filed for the clo­sure of the AKP, cit­ing defi­ance by the party’s leader, for­mer Istan­bul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan, to give up his party post. Erdo­gan was banned from par­tic­i­pat­ing in pol­i­tics after he read a poem “incit­ing reli­gious hatred” in a mosque in 1997 and served four months in jail. Though the case won’t be decided for months, if the party even­tu­ally is shut down its sup­port­ers would see their votes wasted. All this legal maneu­ver­ing has been an attempt by the mil­i­tary and sec­u­lar lead­er­ship to depress the vote on AKP, and as I was told when I was in Ankara, “Turkey is the grave­yard of polit­i­cal par­ties.“
(For what it’s worth Sabah reported that U.S. State Depart­ment spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States is opposed to ban­ning polit­i­cal par­ties. “The US sup­ports democ­racy and broad polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion in Turkey and else­where,” he is quoted as say­ing. “We oppose the ban­ning of polit­i­cal par­ties that are express­ing their views in a peace­ful and demo­c­ra­tic man­ner.”)
Though Erdo­gan is banned by law from serv­ing in a gov­ern­men­tal post — such as, oh, prime min­is­ter for exam­ple — the sus­pi­cion is that he will work behind the scenes run­ning the coun­try, prob­a­bly through a weak prime min­is­ter. There is also con­cern that his com­mit­ment to mod­er­a­tion and democ­racy is only skin deep. He was elected mayor of Istan­bul in 1994 and promptly banned alco­hol in the city’s restau­rants. He has close ties with for­mer Wel­fare Party prime min­is­ter Erbakan, who dined with ter­ror­ists and talked of pulling out of NATO. Per­haps most omi­nously, “You can­not be sec­u­lar and a Mus­lim at the same time,” Erdo­gan said in 1995.
But he’s been crafty in how he has answered ques­tions on how he would lib­er­al­ize laws con­cern­ing the pub­lic expres­sion of reli­gion. For exam­ple, it is cur­rently ille­gal for women to wear head­scarves in uni­ver­si­ties, schools and gov­ern­ment build­ings or at gov­ern­ment func­tions. This is a highly emo­tional issue in Turkey, with head­scarves being a potent sym­bol of polit­i­cal Islam. Erdo­gan has been care­ful to not iden­tify the AKP with this kind of con­tro­versy. Would his wife, an obser­vant Mus­lim, wear a head­scarf at gov­ern­ment func­tions? “I wouldn’t bring her,” he has said, neatly not answer­ing the ques­tion or assuag­ing Turk­ish women’s fears.
So what are the sce­nar­ios? Near as I can tell, they are as follows:

• The AKP wins deci­sively with enough seats in Par­lia­ment to form a gov­ern­ment with­out resort­ing to a part­ner. The mil­i­tary might inter­vene or it might not. If it doesn’t, look for the AKP to be kept on a short leash.
• The AKP wins a major­ity, but can­not form a gov­ern­ment, in which case they will part­ner up with — pos­si­bly — Deniz Baykal’s Devlet Bahceli’s Nation­al­ist Action Party (MHP). I think a coali­tion between the nation­al­ists and Islamists could be one of the worst com­bi­na­tions. “The result will def­i­nitely be another coali­tion, an anom­aly of very con­tra­dic­tory views,” said Prof. Deniz Ilgaz of Bogazi�i Uni­ver­sity when I emailed her about all of this.
• The myr­iad sec­u­lar par­ties in Par­lia­ment band together in a broad-​based coali­tion together to keep the AKP out of power. The result­ing gov­ern­ment would be weak and inef­fec­tual, and would pretty much cement the sta­tus quo. None of the prob­lems of Turkey would be addressed, and the mil­i­tary would remain the de facto ruler of the country.

So what will hap­pen and how might this affect the United States’ deter­mi­na­tion to open up some pre­ci­sion guided whoop-​ass on Iraq, a fel­low Mus­lim coun­try and for­merly a major trad­ing part­ner to Turkey? We’ll have the out­lines in a day. But one thing is cer­tain is that the polit­i­cal land­scape is about to change in unpre­dictable ways.