ISTANBUL – What a long time a year can be in politics. Twelve months ago, Turkey’s effervescent Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed to be on top of the world, at least his world.
He was putting final touches on a new constitution under which he’d be transformed into a president with executive powers at home and the spiritual authority of a Muslim Caliph abroad. Erdogan’s “neo-Ottoman dream” appeared to have succeeded enough for Turkish voters to give his Justice and Development Party (AKP) a lock on power for the foreseeable future.
As 2014 opens, though, Erdogan looks to be fighting for his political life, his “neo-Ottoman dream” a will-o’-the-wisp. All the talk in political circles in Istanbul, home to a fifth of Turkey’s population, is about how to ease Erdogan off the stage and into history.
Why this sudden turn of fortune?
The short answer: hubris. Intoxicated by Turkey’s success in his decade of stewardship, Erdogan started acting out of character.
He owed his electoral success to his ability to learn the key lessons of modern Turkish politics. When I first met him in Istanbul in the 1990s, he spent time arguing that the root cause of Turkey’s relative underdevelopment and almost permanent political crisis was a clash of ideologies. The Kemalists, supporters of Ataturk (the founder of the republic), had turned his legacy of a secular state into a rigid ideology that ignored the inevitable diversity of a complex society such as modern Turkey. At the other end of the spectrum, pious Muslims regarded secularism
— that is to say, the separation of the mosque and state — as a direct attack on their religion.
In the early the years of the Kemalist republic, Turkey witnessed several Islamist armed uprisings, all crushed by the army with exceptional brutality. In the 1950s, the Islamist Democrat Party won general elections and formed the government; the Kemalists’ counter-attack came in the form of a military coup in 1960. That pattern of Kemalist-Islamist power struggle continued until AKP, led by Erdogan, won its first general-election victory in 2002.
Erdogan’s “de-ideologization” method succeeded in giving Turkey political stability (especially immunity against coups), paving the way for economic development. Over the last 10 years, Turkey has tamed its once-notorious inflation, revived its moribund currency, created more than 8 million new jobs and, with average economic growth rates of 6 percent to 7 percent, joined the ranks of emerging industrial powers. More important, in the eyes of many Turks, Erdogan managed to drastically reduce corruption, the endemic bane of Turkish politics.
However, starting in 2011, Erdogan started behaving in a different way. In a clearly ideological drive, he began purging the military of officers indifferent if not hostile to religion, replacing them with those with AKP connections. He then started to purge the judiciary by promoting Islamist judges in place of secularist ones forced into early retirement.
His next target was the big business elite, which had formed with army support over decades. He started granting juicy government contracts to people with AKP links — and, as recent revelations show, to members of his family and party and Cabinet entourage.
Erdogan’s next target was the Alevi community, some 12 percent of the population and an esoteric sect of Islam that has always supported the secular republic. And then he also ruined the relatively good relations he’d established with the Kurdish community, another seventh of the population, by treating them as second-class citizens.
If all that wasn’t enough for a perfect storm, Erdogan unveiled a gargantuan project to transform Istanbul into “the greatest city of Islamic civilization” in time to mark the first millennium of Islam’s first great military victory against Christendom. The project was part of his grand scheme to “breed a new generation of pious Turks.”
The new Erdogan, or (as his critics here claim) the “real Erdogan,” had decided to come out.
Having marketed himself as a leader who rejected ideological dogma, he has become the most ideologically dogmatic leader modern Turkey has seen. Having won support by arguing that a government should administer a country rather than engage in social and cultural engineering, he now talks of “creating the new Turkish man” in terms that recall the ranting of men like Hitler, Stalin and Mao and their versions of the “new man.”
In this political Jekyll-and-Hyde alternation, Erdogan has lost a good chunk of his AKP base, including President Abdullah Gul and his faction. Today, his dream of ruling Turkey for another 20 years now strikes most Turks as a nightmare.
Yet the manner in which he is eased off stage could determine the trajectory of Turkish politics for a generation.
Those who advocate an army coup in the name of “saving the nation” misunderstand the present and misread the future. The best way to resolve the crisis created by Erdogan’s loss of legitimacy is early elections.
The next general election is set for 2015, but Turkey clearly can’t afford to wait that long. The chief feature of the so-called “Turkish model” is its ability to change governments through elections. If Turkey manages to do so once again, it could emerge from this crisis stronger than ever. If not, anything is possible.