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From the Editor
High Stakes in a High-Risk Era
A nation facing economic and security dilemmas turns to the electoral process, allowing voters to deliver a mandate for leadership and policy direction. By all indications, the result will be a right-leaning government favoring a tough militaristic stance and a unilateralist approach to foreign policy. Because of the pivotal role the country plays in a looming Mideast war, the rest of the world hangs on the outcome.
The scenario, from November’s elections in the United States, also describes the political imbroglio engulfing Israel. Together with recent elections in Turkey—another U.S. ally beset by economic and security woes with a front-row seat in any Iraq war—they suggest the extent of what’s now at stake at the polls.
November’s GOP wins may stem less from deep support for President Bush than from the absence of persuasive alternatives in the face of formidable front-burner challenges, as well as confusion about such fundamental policy questions as the appropriate global role of the United States. Rather than a consensus of confidence, it appears to be a consensus rooted in fear.
In Israel, a consensus of fear smothered the previously robust political culture during the past two and a half years of intense Palestinian-Israeli violence. It yielded an unwieldy left-right coalition government, which finally fell in November with the departure of Labor ministers from Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “national-unity” cabinet. Labor’s leaders now seek to regain their bona fides among party faithful in the run-up to January elections. But after muting their beliefs for so long, it’s questionable whether anyone to Sharon’s left can reclaim a voice in the national debate.
In contrast, in the secular state that Ataturk built to move his Muslim country into the modern world, Turks staged an electoral revolution, giving enough votes to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to allow it to form a strong single-party majority.
What’s revolutionary about the result is that AKP developed from the now-outlawed Islamist Welfare party. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, AKP’s leader, long espoused the infusion of Islam into public life, even serving prison time for publicly expressing that position.
AKP rode in on a wave of popular disgust with an entrenched political class that had kept the country mired in corruption, economically stalled, and on the margins of acceptability in its quest for entry in the European Union. While AKP takes a pro-Western stance, and Erdogan has repudiated his earlier Islamist views, championing E.U. candidacy and vowing to protect the secular state, the party’s triumph raises questions about Turkey’s future course.
At a time when extremist versions of political Islam dominate the West’s attention, the trajectory of a moderate Islamic party governing a democracy will be closely studied. Israeli analysts have noted parallels between the Turkish case and that of Israel, where religious parties have drawn considerable support from nonreligious Jews who found Labor and Likud unresponsive to their concerns. Israel’s interest in Turkey’s direction is more than academic: The two countries have forged close economic and strategic ties during the past decade.
Whether or not the next theater for the U.S.-led war on terror turns out to be Turkey’s neighbor, Iraq, the virtual certainty of anti-terror operations in other predominantly Muslim lands ensures that the new Turkish government will be under internal and external pressure to sort out its allegiances.
