The 1908 Elections

The 1877–78 parliamentary elections had been held in accordance with the provisional electoral regulations that stipulated the election of deputies by administrative councils in the provinces. A new election law that had been drafted in the same Parliament but never ratified was taken as the basis of the 1908 elections. It stipulated two-stage balloting in which every tax-paying male Ottoman citizen above the age twenty-five was entitled to vote in a primary election to select secondary voters. Secondary voters, each elected by 500 to 750 primary voters, then voted to determine the member(s) of the Chamber in the numbers specified for a particular electoral district, the sancak. The law did not make special quota arrangements for the religious or sectarian communities. Each voter was to vote as an Ottoman citizen for deputies representing not a particular community but all Ottomans.^[65]

The Young Turks intended to depart from communal politics in favor of “party” politics. Yet in the first elections local prestige and CUP sponsorship proved to be more important than any political program.^[66] The CUP hoped to use its popularity and influence to assure the election of supporters from all religious and ethnic groups. The deputies who came to İstanbul in December 1908 were not all Unionists, but many had enjoyed CUP support during the elections, as the Committee’s endorsement often attended a candidate’s local standing. During the first elections the CUP’s program, which had been published toward the end of September 1908,^[67] was not made the basis of an election platform. Individual candidates issued personal declarations and ran on individual programs.^[68] The CUP drafted lists of endorsed candidates, but such endorsement served more to co-opt the leading candidates than help sympathizers get elected.

The socioeconomic composition of the new Chamber was similar to that of the 1877–78 Parliament, partly because the CUP support tended to coincide with local social prominence and partly because the two-stage balloting favored the election of notables. Even though franchise requirements were liberal in primary voting, patronage-based social and political relationships in the countryside usually resulted in the election of landowners. In the second stage, these electors exercised their choice for a candidate representing their social group. The contingent of secondary electors was also in most cases small enough to be easily manipulated by powerful candidates or government officials.

Article 72 of the constitution stipulated that deputies had to be “from the people” of the province they ran in, but neither the constitution nor the electoral law laid down specific residency requirements. Thus, while officials appointed from İstanbul and coming from outside the province could be elected by virtue of being current inhabitants of that province, individuals living in the capital or elsewhere could also be nominated and elected from provinces where they no longer resided but had family roots. Babanzade İsmail Hakkı defended the right of nonresidents to stand as candidates by writing in the columns of Tanin that electing provincial dunces as opposed to enlightened sons in big cities would be insulting Parliament.^[69] His Tanin associate Hüseyin Cahid displayed similar elitist outlook when he advocated weighted voting for graduates of higher schools, as in England.^[70] These attitudes toward representation, certainly not unique to the Ottoman political elite at the time, revealed a conception of government for the people that did not insist on a one-to-one parliamentary representation of different social groups.

The overrepresentation of Turkish deputies in the 1908 Parliament has been cited as indicating a bias in favor of an ethnic Turkish direction.^[71] Known cases of the CUP tampering with the electoral process (for instance, in İstanbul, to the detriment of the Greek community^[72]) lent credibility to claims of discrimination. The CUP engaged in a limited campaign to have its designated candidates elected but did not as a rule use coercive or illegal methods to assure this. However, there were many irregularities in the electoral process in the provinces, particularly in the Arab districts. In Mecca and Jidda, for instance, primary elections were bypassed, and a group of town notables was designated, presumably by the electoral committees, to serve as secondary voters. In Yemen, deputyships were set aside for the eight principal tribal communities, granting the province more representation than an apportionment based on population estimates would have.^[73] In many districts the elected candidates did not actually meet the constitutional requirements for deputyship.

The election in Karak in southern Syria provides examples of a number of the problems encountered in the Arab provinces. The winner in Karak, Shaykh Qadri, chose to defer to the runner-up, Tawfik al-Majali. Parliament rejected the deputyship of al-Majali, because the resignation of a deputy-elect would necessitate new elections; no local or electoral authority had the power to replace Qadri with the candidate who received the second largest number of votes. Al-Majali’s deputyship was endorsed after a deputy from Damascus, Shafiq al-Mu’ayyad, pleaded in the Chamber to apply the rules less stringently. He argued that Karak was a new administrative unit with a predominantly Beduin population, and that the actual winner, Qadri, was unqualified to sit in Parliament because he not only did not know Turkish but also was illiterate.^[74]