Pakistani political parties have much to learn from Turkey’s AKP

Salman Rafi Sheikh

A year ago when supporters of ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan attacked military facilities in Lahore and Rawalpindi to protest his arrest, it seemed possible that the country might turn the page on decades of military-dominated politics.

Instead, military control now looks stronger than ever. Even though Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) won the most seats in February’s national election, it has been shut out of power in favor of parties preferred by the army.

PTI supporters have continued to mount occasional protests and to rally online since Khan’s arrest, but these moves have had little impact: Khan remains in prison and the party’s allegations of vote rigging remain largely unaddressed.

The military has been able to marginalize the PTI in large part because the party is not a mass-based movement capable of mounting a sustained challenge to the military’s role in politics.

In this sense, the PTI is no different than other major Pakistani parties. Each is essentially a dynastic, elitist organization controlled by a small group of families.

Although candidates representing these parties are able to attract votes at election time, most Pakistani voters do not really identify with a particular party.

Rather, they look to individual local candidates they believe will be able to get things done for them. In fact, successful Pakistani politicians frequently change parties, underscoring how politics here is more about patron-client relationships than about ideology or political movements.

As such, when Pakistani parties organize protests, those who take to the streets are not party cadres but mobilized members of patronage networks. In many cases, this mobilization involves money or other material benefits.

Since these protesters do not necessarily identify personally with the party’s cause, they have little interest in participating in a sustained campaign and can disappear when the authorities respond forcefully since they know there is no party machinery to back them up.

Because parties lack mass roots, a reliance on the military for support at election time can become an easy choice. When the PTI won its first national election in 2018, this was in large part because the military tilted the playing field to its advantage.

Problems with this system come when a party falls out with the military because the army always finds it easy to replace one set of elites with another. This is what happened to Khan and the PTI two years ago. The coalition that replaced the PTI then passed laws further entrenching military domination of the state.

What can parties do to get out of this quagmire? A fundamental shift to a new form of grassroots politics would enable them to rely on the masses rather than the military to win elections and to resist army interference in politics.

This recipe has worked elsewhere. Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, was able to halt a 2016 coup attempt precisely because of its ability to mobilize its vast network of supporters.

Supporters of Tayyip Erdogan climb on tanks in Istanbul in July 2016 after the surrender of soldiers involved in a coup attempt.   © Reuters

The AKP has more than 11 million registered members, making it the largest party in Turkey. Of these, about 2 million are activists who, for example, lead weekly neighborhood meetings. Since 2001, the party has developed district-based and neighborhood committees linked to a centrally administered communications network.

In Ankara, one district head was able to bring out more than 100,000 party cadres within a few minutes of the first news of the coup attempt by using the AKP’s communication system, social media and text messages.

The crowds on the streets swelled after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a defiant speech vowing to resist and defeat the coup plot. As a result, army tanks in Ankara were immobilized by the fast-growing mobs.

There is a great deal that Pakistani parties could learn from the AKP’s example in terms of creating party structures capable of mounting resistance against military interference.

In 2006, the two largest political parties of the time, the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, agreed to the Charter of Democracy in which they each pledged not to rely on the military to win elections. Party leaders said then that this would help establish civilian supremacy in government.

The parties proved unable to live up to their promise in large part due to their failure to develop mass-based structures. Doing so would have required the parties’ controlling families to yield authority to internal party democracy and to cultivate activists, especially among the youth, to take up party roles at provincial, district, city and local levels.

Unless Pakistani parties are able to mobilize masses of committed supporters as the AKP does, political stability will remain a dream. This in turn will be bad news for economic stability. At some point though, the impoverished masses could turn against Pakistani’s elitist parties en masse.

source : asia.nikkei