Erdoğan Leads Turkey to the Precipice
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[N.B.: The Australian's title is
"Would-be dictator Erdogan leading Turkey to the precipice" and
its version uses Australian spelling]
The Republic of Turkey is undergoing possibly its greatest crisis
since the founding of the state nearly a century ago. Present trends
suggest worse to come as a long-time Western ally evolves into a hostile
dictatorship.
The crisis results primarily from the ambitions of one very capable
and sinister individual, Turkey's 61-year old president, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan. A career politician who previously served four years as the
mayor of Turkey's megacity, Istanbul, and then eleven years as the
country's prime minister, he forwards two goals hitherto unknown in the
republic: dictatorship and full application of the Shari'a, Islam's law
code.
During his first eight years of power, 2003-11, Erdoğan ruled with
such finesse that one could only suspect these two aspirations; proof
remained elusive. This author, for example, wrote an article
in 2005 that weighed the contradictory evidence for and against
Erdoğan being an Islamist. A combination of playing by the rules, caution
in the Islamic arena, and economic success won Erdoğan's party, Justice
and Development (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP), increasing percentages
of the vote in parliamentary elections, going from 34 percent in
2002, to 46 percent in 2007, to 50 percent in 2011.
That 2011 election victory, his third in succession, gave Erdoğan the
confidence finally to remove the armed forces from politics, where they
had long served as Turkey's ultimate power broker. Ironically, this
change ended the increasing democratization of prior decades for his
fully taking charge allowed Erdoğan to develop an oversized ego, to bare
his fangs, flex his despotic muscles, and openly seek his twin objectives
of tyranny and Shari'a.
Indeed, Erdoğan made his power felt in every domain after 2011. Banks
provided loans to the businessmen who kicked back funds to the AKP.
Hostile media found themselves subject to vast fines or physical assault.
Ordinary citizens who criticized the leader found themselves facing
lawsuits, fines, and jail. Politicians in competing parties faced dirty
tricks. Like a latter-day sultan, Erdoğan openly flouted the law and
intervened at will when and where he wished, inserting himself into legal
proceedings, meddling in local decisions, and interfering with police
investigations. For example, he responded to compelling raw evidence of his
own and his family's corruption by simply closing down the inquiry.
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The Doğan group,
publisher of Hürriyet (pictured here) was hit wth a US$2.5 billion fine
in 2009.
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The Islamic order also took shape. School instruction became more
Islamic even as Islamic schools proliferated, with the number of students
in the latter jumping from 60,000 to 1,600,000, a 27-fold increase.
Erdoğan instructed women to stay home and breed, demanding three children
apiece from them. Burqas proliferated and hijabs became legal headgear in
government buildings. Alcohol became harder to find and higher priced.
More broadly, Erdoğan harked back to the piety of the Ottoman Empire
(1299-1922), eroded the secular republic founded in 1923 by Kemal
Atatürk, and positioned himself as the anti-Atatürk.
Erdoğan also faced some serious problems after 2011. The China-like
economic growth slowed down and debt
spiraled upwards. A disastrously inept Syria policy contributed to
the rise of the Islamic State, the emergence of a hostile Kurdish
autonomous area, and millions of unwelcome refugees flooding into Turkey.
Foreign relations soured with nearly the entire neighborhood: Tehran,
Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Athens, the (Greek) Republic of
Cyprus, and even (Turkish) northern Cyprus. Ties also went south with
Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. Good relations were limited to Doha,
Kuala Lumpur, and – until recently, as shown by the many
indications of Turkish state support for the Islamic State – Raqqa.
Erdoğan has pugnaciously responded to this predicament by
stating, "I do not mind isolation in the world" and even to
suggest that other leaders were "jealous" of him. But he fools
no one. The old AKP slogan of "Zero problems with neighbors"
has dangerously turned into "Only problems with neighbors."
If Erdoğan's base loves his strongman qualities and stands by him, his
aggressive actions and policy failures cost him support, as major blocs
of voters rejected him, especially Kurds (an ethnic minority), Alevis (a
religious community spun off from Islam), and seculars. The AKP's vote
dropped accordingly from 50 percent in 2011 to 41 percent in the June
2015 elections, a reduction that meant its losing a long-standing
majority in parliament and the numbers to govern on its own.
The poor showing in June 2015 blocked Erdoğan from legitimately
gaining his dream powers as executive president. But being the politician
who stated long ago, when mayor of Istanbul, that democracy is like a
trolley, "You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you
step off," he predictably did not let something as petty as election
results get in his way. Instead, he immediately began scheming to get
around them.
He opted for a pair of tactics: First, he rejected power sharing with
other parties and called another election for Nov. 1; in effect, he
offered Turks another chance to vote as he wanted them to. Second, after
years of negotiating with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên
Kurdistanê, or PKK), Turkey's leading Kurdish violent insurgent group,
he renewed war on it. In doing so, he hoped to win over supporters of the
anti-Kurd ethnic Turkish nationalist party, Nationalist Action
(Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, or MHP).
These tactics appear to be futile; polls
show the AKP losing as many Kurds as it gains Turkish nationalists,
and so likely to fare in November about the same as it did in June. But the
tactics are highly consequential, tearing apart the body politic,
creating tensions and prompting violence. The current round began in July
with the bombing of peace marchers leaving 33 dead, followed by PKK
retaliation against representatives of the state, a Kurdish town placed
under siege, and twin bombings in the capital Ankara (widely considered
ultimately attributable
to Erdoğan) which killed 105 peaceful protestors. And yet two weeks
remain before voting day ...
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Polls of Turkish
voters since the June 7, 2015 elections.
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In other words, Erdoğan's obsession to win a parliamentary majority is
doing fundamental damage to the country, damage that takes it to the
precipice of civil war.
What makes the situation slightly absurd is that, whatever the results
of the Nov. 1 election, Erdoğan will doggedly continue his campaign to
become dictator. If he cannot do so legitimately, he will do so
illegitimately. Repeating what I wrote just before the June
election, "how many seats the AKP wins hardly matters. Erdoğan
will barrel, bulldoze, and steamroll his way ahead, ignoring traditional
and legal niceties with or without changes to the constitution. Sure,
having fully legitimate powers would add a pretty bauble to his résumé,
but he's already the tyrant and Turkey's course is set."
Assuming the AKP does not win the votes necessary to make Erdoğan a
legal strongman, how might he manage this illegally? The past year, since
he became president, offers a hint: Erdoğan has bleached the
once-powerful prime minister's office of its authority. In all
likelihood, he will extend this process to the rest of the Turkish
government by setting up an alternative bureaucracy in his huge, new
presidential palace, with operatives there controlling the ministries of
state. An apparently unchanged formalistic structure will take orders
from the palace autocrats.
Likewise, the parliament will remain untouched in appearance but
voided of true decision making. Civil society will also find itself under
palatial control as, exploiting his financial and legal levers, Erdoğan
shuts down publicly dissenting voices in the judiciary, the media, the
academy, and the arts. In all likelihood, private dissent will next be
proscribed, leaving Padishah Recep I master of all he surveys.
What will he do with this authority? In part, he will exult in it, in
the unbridled range of his ego and his writ. Beyond that, he will use
this might to advance his Islamist agenda by harking back to the Ottoman
imperial legacy, further undoing the Atatürk revolution, and imposing
Sunni Islamic laws and customs. Just as autocracy came to Turkey in
tranches, so will Shari'a be implemented piecemeal over time. The
processes already underway – Islamic content in schools, women urged to
stay home, alcohol disappearing – will continue and accelerate.
Assuming that Erdoğan's mystery
diseases stay under control, this Islamist idyll contains just one
flaw: foreign relations, the most likely cause of its demise. Unlike a
fellow dictator like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who had the good fortune
to rule in the placid confines of South America, Erdoğan is surrounded by
the world's most crisis-ridden region. His domestic success increases the
chances of an ego-driven blunder that diminishes or ends his rule. Tense
relations with Iran and Russia over the fighting in Syria offer one
temptation, as the seemingly purposeful
Russian penetrations of Turkish airspace highlight; or with Israel
over Jerusalem or Gaza; or with Cyprus over the newly discovered gas
fields.
(With this prospect presumably in mind, Erdoğan's son Bilal recently
relocated to Bologna, Italy, supposedly to work on a Ph.D. thesis; a
whistleblower plausibly claims Bilal from there will manage the
family's vast fortune.)
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Father Recep and son
Bilal Erdoğan.
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When the Erdoğan era expires, the country will be much more divided
than when it began in March 2003 between Turk and Kurd, Sunni and Alevi,
pious and secular Sunnis, and rich and poor. It will contain millions of
difficult to assimilate Syrian refugees and Kurdish areas declared
independent of the state. It will be isolated internationally. It will
contain a hollowed-out government structure. It will have lost the
tradition of legal impartiality.
Erdoğan's larger accomplishment will have been to reverse Atatürk's
Westernizing policies. Whereas Atatürk and several generations of leaders
wanted Turkey to be in Europe, Erdoğan brought it thunderingly back to
the Middle East and to the tyranny, corruption, female subjugation, and
other hallmarks of a region in crisis. As Turks struggle over the years
to undo this damage, they will have ample opportunity to ponder the many
evils bequeathed them by Erdoğan.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the
Middle East Forum. © 2015 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
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