Are you ready for some (more) inconclusive elections?

Tomorrow is the big day, when Turkey’s voters will go out to the polls to most likely, uh, repeat what happened back in June, when nobody won a parliamentary majority. Brookings’ Markaz blog runs through the four possible outcomes of tomorrow’s vote:

One of three scenarios is likely to emerge in the wake of the vote:

• First, there could be a coalition government involving the AKP with either the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) or ultra-nationalist the Nationalist Action Party (MHP);

• Second, rumors indicate that a group of MHP members of parliament may defect to the AKP, thereby empowering it to obtain the 276 seats necessary to form a single-party government;

• Third, another election could be scheduled for late March or April.

• (There is actually a forth [sic] possibility, according to a pro-government newspaper, that would bring a decisive win for the AKP with an estimated 47 percent of the votes. We don’t think that’s likely.)

With all due respect to Turkey’s pro-government media, the poll cited there in that last point is a pretty big outlier compared to the rest of the pre-election polling, but I think I’m slightly less willing to just write it off than the Brookings folks seem to be. Maybe that terrorist attack in Ankara earlier this month scared enough MHP voters to get them to vote for AKP just out of a desire for political stability. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility.

I don’t want to pre-analyze things and anyway it’s almost time to start handing out candy, but here are a couple of thoughts. If AKP does win a sole majority, then that clarifies things for Turkey’s political situation quite a bit but it will be interesting to see who the big losers are among the other three parties. But if it doesn’t win a sole majority, as seems more likely, then things could get really interesting in the bad way. If a few MHP members go over to AKP, that would settle things easily, but it would also presumably pull AKP even farther to the right, which could be bad news for the Kurds and for the anti-ISIS coalition in Syria. The coalition alternative carries a lot of risk for everybody, from Tayyip Erdoğan (who might have to allow corruption investigations against his political allies to go forward, since that was one of the demands the parties had in order to form a coalition after the last election) to whichever party joins AKP in the coalition (Turkey’s economy is sputtering, and any party in the government moving forward could potentially take a hit because of it), to Turkey in general (its history with coalition governments is not the greatest). Re-running the election for a third time would a) be pretty ridiculous and b) raises the uncomfortable possibility that Erdoğan will try to put his thumb on the scales (say, by preventing people in the Kurdish part of the country from voting).

Turkey is in an extraordinarily precarious position, between its weakening economy and the fact that it’s on the brink of a full-on war with its own Kurdish population, a war that’s tied to the total breakdown in order in the country that sits on the other side of its very long southern border. These elections, conclusive or not, are going to say a great deal about the short-term future of both Turkey and its neighbors and allies. I’ll have more to say after the election (Monday!) about the results and about what’s been happening in Turkey more generally. Until then, Happy Halloween!

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