How
Erdogan's Victory Might Be Europe's Defeat
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
April 17, 2017
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 Over lunch in
Istanbul last week, a friend and I spoke about the upcoming Turkish
referendum. "Many European Turks are likely to vote 'yes,'" I
cautioned my friend, whom I knew was planning to vote 'no,' or against the
measure to grant
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan unlimited powers. A "yes"
vote, by contrast, would end the democratic parliamentary government
established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the republic, and in
the eyes of most Western leaders, establish Erdogan as the Muslim world's
newest dictator.
My friend was visibly angered. "Then let them, with all their
rights and freedoms, come here to live," she retorted. "How dare
they think that they can take these rights from us when we are the ones who
have to live with the result?"
The outcome of Sunday's referendum showed a Turkey split almost exactly in half, with 51 percent
"yes" and just under 49 percent voting "no."
Or did it?
It is too soon to make a full analysis of the vote results – which some
rights groups have already contested – but one thing was immediately made
clear: the vast majority of Turks living throughout Europe voted in support
of Erdogan's rule, even as the majority of those living in major Turkish
cities – Izmir, Ankara and Istanbul – voted against it. If only the votes of Turks living in
the country had been counted, would the results have been the same? Or
would they show that Turkey's residents support a secular, Western
democracy while Europe's Turks do not?
If my friends in Istanbul who voted "no" woke this morning
afraid for their country's future, so, too, should my friends in much of
Europe. In the Netherlands, for instance, a whopping 71 percent of
Dutch-Turks who participated in the vote chose "yes." As the results of the referendum
became known, thousands descended on the Turkish Consulate in Rotterdam,
waving Turkish flags and celebrating the victory of an Islamist leader who
had pledged to "raise a new, religious generation," end secular
education, and who has imprisoned countless journalists, writers, artists,
and others who have dared to criticize him.
It was not only in Holland. According to the Daily Sabah, 75
percent of Belgian Turks who voted opted for "yes," as did 73 percent in
Austria, 65 percent in France, and 63 percent in Germany. Only Switzerland,
Sweden, and the United Kingdom showed majorities with "no" votes.
And of these three, Sweden is effectively the only member of the EU.
 American-Turks,
however, showed the greatest resistance, with 83 percent voting
"no." Still, some prominent Islamist voices spoke out in support
of Erdogan, including former Muslim American Society president and political activist Esam Omeish, who celebrated the referendum results on his Facebook page
with a photo of himself holding a Turkish flag that reads "evet,"
or "yes."
In Europe, some have argued, as did "Volkan," a pseudonym for
the owner of the popular DutchTurks.nl
blog, that the results were self-inflicted, the result of having
antagonized Turkey and Erdogan in recent months. Holland, for instance, refused entry to pro-Erdogan officials seeking to
campaign on his behalf. Germany, where rallies were similarly blocked, has
also been outspoken in its criticism of Erdogan's imprisonment of
a German-Turkish journalist.
But such explanations do not account for the results in Austria and
France, or for the similar outcome of the November 2015 election, in which
majorities in Germany, the Netherlands, and France all voted for Erdogan's Justice and Development Party
(AKP).
What I did not tell my friend, as we sat watching the sunlight dance
over the Bosphorus, was that the European Turks who were voting to change
the Turkish Constitution, who were effectively choosing to establish a more
fundamentalist, Islamist Turkey in place of the secular, Western democracy
that has been in place since 1923, have no interest in the
"freedoms" that she spoke of. That they have them in Europe is
meaningless: they don't want them. They don't want them in Turkey, where
they come from; and they don't want them in Europe, where they now live.
Not for themselves. And not for anybody else.
Indeed, as the IPT noted after the November 2015 elections, of the 4.6
million Turks living in Europe, a majority seems to prefer to live in an Islamic state, and not a secular
one.
This is the frightening lesson that Europe must learn from the results
of the April 16 referendum. While its leaders now confer about the
"proper" response to Erdogan in his new role and what they expect
of him as the leader of a clearly-divided country, they might also consider
their response to his supporters who are not just Turkish citizens, but
Europe's own. How to reckon with Europeans who choose against European
norms and values, who actively vote against the separation of church and
state, who seek a more Islamized society? What does this say about the failure
of integration? More, what does it say – or threaten – about Europe's
potential future? And what can be done to save it?
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
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