Hürriyet Daily News published an article by Semih Idiz headlined "The AKP has already lost the elections."
"Whatever the results of the March 30 elections, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) is very likely to end up in the minority. Not that it will come out last or anything. In fact it will probably come out on top. But it will not get the 50 percent it is relying on to be able to feel as strong and invincible as it once appeared to be," the article begins.
"The AKP will get something under 50 percent of the votes, and it is that which will make it the minority, even if it gets most of the votes as a party. Angry protests from AKP officials on hearing this, as they underline the fact that they won the elections, will also be pointless. That win will not alter the fact that they are no longer the majority," the author writes.
"The AKP has only itself to blame for this seemingly skewed understanding of the situation. It is, after all, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ministers who have gone on interminably about the 50 percent of the votes they got in the last elections. It is also they, with their simplistic “winner take all” understanding of democracy, who have been behaving as if this 50 percent makes them a majority and gives them the authority to do more or less whatever they like," the article reads.
"Having turned pluralistic democracy into a clear-cut “us and the rest” situation, the AKP will no longer be able to claim to be the “voice of the nation,” which of course it never was, when the collective vote of the other parties is over 50 percent," Idiz believes.
The same media outlet published an article by Murat Yetkin devoted to the same topic. According to the author, the coming local elections will be critical for Turkey.
"The local elections will be an indicator, like a huge public opinion poll for the coming two general elections. One of them is the presidential one in August 2014. The other one is the parliamentary elections in June 2015, with a possibility that the government could want it earlier, perhaps in 2014," the author writes.
"The March 30 local elections will be a major challenge for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan – on top of Parliamentary opposition – because of two reasons and regarding two cross sections of Turkish society," he believes.
"The Kurdish problem is another challenge. Erdoğan has started dialogue with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) through his intelligence chief Hakan Fidan. Sharing the same grassroots with the PKK, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in the Parliament is involved in the talks," the article reads.
"Let’s assume that all AK Parti voters from 2011 think that all the corruption allegations are the lies of those who want to topple Erdoğan and will vote for him again. Will it be possible for him to rule the country the way he has been ruling so far? That doesn’t seem to be very possible given the picture above," the author concludes.
