Barin Kayaoglu is an independent political analyst and consultant in Washington, D.C. He writes and comments for U.S. and international media outlets and he recently finished his doctorate in history at the University of Virginia. You can follow him on www.barinkayaoglu.com, Twitter (@barinkayaoglu), and Facebook (Barin Kayaoglu).

Yesterday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), in office since 2002, suffered its first electoral defeat. Although the AKP is likely to remain relevant in the Turkish political scene for the foreseeable future, the danger of Erdogan accumulating more power and establishing a volatile and autocratic regime has passed.

To counter his enemies, Erdogan had emphasized the need to create an all-powerful presidency—similar to that of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. To that end he had asked the Turkish electorate to give the AKP 330 parliamentary seats to rewrite the constitution.


They refused. AKP will get 258 MPs (18 seats short of a bare majority).

Few Turkey analysts ( including this author) expected the AKP defeat. After all, the ruling party won the local elections in March 2014 and then, five months later, catapulted Erdogan from the prime ministry to the presidency. Neither billions in corruption-and-kickback allegations against Erdogan and several AKP ministers nor Turkey’s role as a jihadist highway to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq stuck to “Teflon Tayyip.” Although it was unlikely that the AKP would get the 330 seats it needed to amend the constitution, most opinion polls before the election showed the ruling party retaining a slim majority in parliament.

So why did the AKP fall short? The answer is, quite simply, Erdogan himself.

For several years the Turkish president has used a divisive rhetoric—ultra-religious and ultra-nationalistic—to hedge his party’s religious and nationalist base. He called the protestors who rose up against his government in June 2013 “marauders.” Erdogan accused not only the United States and Israel (the “interest rate lobby”) but also Syria, Iran, Russia, Britain and France of backing the protestors. He claimed that “Jewish” and “Armenian” lobbies, together with their partners at home, were conspiring against the “New Turkey” that he was trying to create.

While Erdogan promised to build a revived Ottoman Empire on a global scale, the president’s new vision turned out to be little more than a cult of personality around him. In one of his first moves as president, Erdogan abandoned the presidential residence in Ankara and relocated to a mega-palace with 1000 rooms that cost anywhere between $600 million to $1.2 billion. The Erdogan family’s displays of conspicuous wealth combined with its patriarch’s lust for more power.

Erdogan belied little interest in leaving the headlines to the nominally more powerful prime minister. In the run-up to the election, contrary to tradition and the Turkish constitution, Erdogan ran his own campaign on behalf of his “former” party and appeared at rallies with his successor, AKP Chairman and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. The Turkish president turned an election in which he was not even a candidate into a referendum on his personality and his office.

That strategy backfired. Disillusioned with the uncertain economy and Erdogan’s policies—too divisive and autocratic even for the traditionally authoritarian Turks—about 2 to 3 percent of AKP constituents voted for the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), a conservative party.

Even without those losses, the AKP would have won a majority if it weren’t for the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)—the smallest opposition group. Turkey has the highest electoral threshold in the world—a party that fails to tally more than 10 percent nationally does not win any deputies. For years pro-Kurdish parties had contested elections as independents because they could never receive more than 6 or 7 percent of the vote.

Yesterday, HDP took a big risk. The party fielded its own lists and appealed to religiously conservative Kurds as well as other minorities, Turkish liberals and leftists. The gamble paid off: HDP won 13 percent of the popular vote and 80 MPs. Had they failed, the AKP would have received most of HDP’s seats because it is the only other competitive party in southeast Turkey, where half of Turkish Kurds live.

So what happens now?

After nearly 13 years of AKP’s single-party rule, Turkey will experience coalition government once again—though which parties can stomach working together is the million-lira question. AKP has burned bridges with all of its opponents. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), which was the party of first Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and is the main opposition group today, sees the AKP as a threat to the secular legacy of Turkey’s founding father. To boot, CHP Chairman Kemal Kilicdaroglu has engaged in too many personal feuds with Erdogan and Davutoglu to form a government with their party.

An AKP-HDP coalition, though unlikely, is a possibility. HDP Co-Chairman Selahattin Demirtas started and led his campaign with one simple promise to Erdogan: “We will not let you become [a Putin-like] president.” If the AKP and HDP can ignore Erdogan’s wishes for a Putin-style presidency (or Erdogan gets the message and abandons his dream) , the two parties could conclude the peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which battled the Turkish state for independence and autonomy from 1984 until 2013. A peace accord with the Kurds would resolve Turkey’s greatest political and societal headache.

A more likely outcome is an AKP-MHP coalition. Despite the MHP campaigning against Erdogan’s and the AKP’s corruption, the AKP is relatively close to the MHP on social issues and thus would have an easier time turning over a few of the critical ministries to its new coalition partner—including Interior Affairs (more similar to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security than the Department of the Interior), Foreign Affairs, Finance or Defense. MHP, for its part, would put a full stop to the “peace process” with the PKK because it has opposed any form of negotiated settlement with the Kurds for two decades.

The least likely—but best-case—possibility is the three opposition parties forming a caretaker government. A CHP-HDP or CHP-MHP minority cabinet, with support from the other party, could enact necessary reforms to purge the Turkish state of the AKP’s partisan cadres. Perhaps the caretakers even could restart the accession negotiations with the European Union.

But even such an outcome would not solve Turkey’s immediate problems. The economic stability that AKP’s single-party government provided—no matter how tentative—was an important part of Turkey’s above-average growth rates for the past twelve years. Successful coalition negotiations take weeks (if not months) and the uncertainty surrounding the process could undermine Turkey’s fragile economy. One worrying sign was the Turkish lira falling to a record low against the U.S. dollar today. Plus the country’s current account deficit is again on the rise. And how badly the AKP bungled state finances to pay for election spending remains to be seen.

No matter what sort of government emerges from Ankara’s political labyrinths, another big question is whether Turkey can attune its foreign policy to U.S. priorities in the Middle East and North Africa. The Bush and Obama administrations had hoped that Turkey would play an assertive but responsible role in its neighborhood as a major ally of the United States and a rising Muslim power.

Those hopes were highest during the Arab Spring in 2011. Many commentators pushed the idea at the time that Turkey, with its Muslim-majority population, democratic institutions and free market economy could guide its neighbors through troubled times.

Unfortunately for the region and the rest of the world, events did not unfold like that—mostly because Erdogan pursued foolish policies. To his enemies list, which included only Israel in early 2011, the Turkish president added Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran. To Washington’s and NATO allies’ chagrin, Erdogan signaled his intention to buy an expensive missile defense system from China and got cozier with Vladimir Putin, despite Russian misbehavior in Ukraine.

Although not much has yet happened since the results of the election were announced yesterday, Turkey now has a chance to pull itself out of its Erdogan-inflicted mess: The man who caused considerable consternation to his country and its allies for the past few years received his first electoral defeat. For Recep Tayyip Erdogan to lose an election which he turned into a referendum about his powers is a clear sign that Turkish people do not want an emperor.

June 7 was a great day to be Turkish and a Turkophile.