Erdogan’s Turkey?

S P SETH

With a string of election victories over the last decade for his Justice and Development Party (AKP), up until now with the loss of parliamentary majority, Turkey’s President and founder of AKP, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had come to believe that he personified Turkey. Therefore, those who opposed him were a bunch of terrorists, traitors or infidels. In that sense, periodic elections that returned him and his party to power were a reaffirmation of his faith in the efficacy of the process, but not necessarily its tolerant and inclusive spirit and message. And this process that periodically validated his power led him to reenergize Turkey to make it into a successful and strong country economically and politically, based on Islamic faith that Ergodan constantly evoked as if lecturing his people from the pulpit. He often came out as a shrill father figure telling his errant and wayward children not to lose the direction and goals he had set for them in matters religious, economic and political. And if they wouldn’t listen to him, as children often do not, Erdogan had no patience or tolerance and he sought to enforce his authority by wielding the state power at his disposal.

This was evident when his government used force to crush non-violent protests in 2013 against plans to build a shopping mall on an Istanbul park. And this was followed by large-scale arrests of students and other suspects. In other words, it was a sledgehammer approach to an otherwise normal exercise of people’s democratic right of protest. And when evidence of large-scale corruption enveloping his ministers was paraded around, Erdogan was furious and undertook a purge of police, bureaucracy and judiciary, alleging that it was a conspiracy by his erstwhile ally, Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen and his followers.  He was equally dismissive of people’s anger and anguish when a mining tragedy killed more than 300 people. Erdogan’s callous response was: “It’s not like [these accidents] don’t happen elsewhere in the world.” He is imperious with a sense of imperial grandeur as reflected in his vast presidential palace near Ankara costing over $600 million.

Such increasing exercise of autocratic power created a popular reaction leading to the ruling party, AKP, losing its parliamentary majority. It still has the largest number of parliamentary seats with over 40 per cent of the votes polled. But to form government it will require cobbling together a coalition with the opposition groups that might not be forthcoming as the second and third in ranking are poles apart from the AKP. The Republican People’s Party, with its secular agenda, polled 25 per cent of the vote and came second. But the great winner, in a sense, was the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) with 13 per cent, capitalizing on secular voters, women, gays and other marginalized groups unhappy with Erdogan’s autocratic ways.

While the election is a healthy tick for the democratic process, its outcome in the absence of a clear winner is likely to create political uncertainty in the days to come. If a government can’t be formed or function because of lack of parliamentary support, President Erdogan has the option of calling new parliamentary elections after 45 days. And considering the level of popular dissatisfaction with Erdogan and his party, an election might not return a better result. Erdogan’s hope of becoming the country’s executive president by amending the constitution with a likely two-third parliamentary majority, which he hoped to get, is not likely to proceed. With his “poisonous mix of arrogance and paranoia”, as one Turkish writer put it, it is difficult to predict how will he navigate the new situation? In other words, Turkey is at crossroads requiring deft handling of the situation for the next stage of its political evolution.

Which is that while it is predominantly an Islamic society, it is also a multi-cultural and ethnically diverse country with a strong secular component. While Erdogan did a pretty good job of delivering economic goods by seeking to harmonize Islam with capitalism, sometime excessively as revealed by blatant corruption, he hasn’t done a good job of handling cultural diversity by imposing conservative Islamic values, as he understands. And as economy shows signs of slowing and the President becoming even more autocratic, it is not a good mix and people have shown their dissatisfaction. In other words, things are going to get more difficult unless the President tackles the situation with patience, finesse, tolerance and accommodation of diverse views.

Just as with domestic policy, Erdogan’s autocratic style has also contributed to the mess in the Middle East as he sought to project Turkey as the determining regional player. From the onset of the protests against Bashar al-Assad regime in 2011, Erdogan advised the Syrian dictator to step down and hand over power to the rebels. Not surprisingly, Assad didn’t heed this advice and is still battling on against a mix of varied groups from nationalists to extremists of different hues. Incensed over this, Erdogan government facilitated the border crossings of foreign jihadists to join the extremist groups, some of them engaged in fighting with each other. The upshot of it has been the strengthening of the IS position in the Syrian theatre. And Turkey is at odds with the US-led coalition against IS by denying them the use of its bases for aerial attacks, even though it is a NATO ally.

Erdogan had hoped that Assad’s use of chemical weapons against the rebels, which the US President Barack Obama had described as the ‘red line’, would see the end of the Assad regime. And when Obama backtracked on it, the Turkish president was greatly disappointed causing a dip in US-Turkish relations, which haven’t really recovered. Erdogan has come to believe, or so he let it be known, that there was a Western and Jewish conspiracy to defeat the ruling AKP, but Turkish people weren’t persuaded as the election results have testified. His advocacy of Muslim Brotherhood has poisoned relations with the Sisi-led military regime in Egypt, and with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies.

Erdogan is an absolutist with very little room for compromise. The country’s transition to democracy from military junta, which he engineered, served his purpose. But periodic elections returning his party to power have run their course and no longer favouring him. When serving as mayor of Istanbul in the nineties, he once reportedly said that, “Democracy is like a tram---you ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.” One hopes that Erdogan would not heed his own nineties’ message because if he tries to become a dictator, Turkey would plunge into all sorts of troubles.

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com