Over the past few months, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has looked increasingly desperate. He has stepped up his repression of critics and political opponents, including, most recently, Metin Gurcan, a founding member of the opposition Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), who was arrested in November on espionage charges. He has threatened to expel diplomats from the United States and some of Turkey’s NATO allies. And as his popularity at home has nosedived, he has embarked on a reckless experiment to lower interest rates amid already high inflation, a policy that has pitched the country into economic turmoil. Meanwhile, he faces an emboldened—and increasingly united—opposition that for the first time poses a direct threat to his rule.
The shift has been dramatic. For much of the past two decades, first as prime minister between 2003 and 2014 and then as president since 2014, Erdogan has seemed invincible. Bringing new prosperity to Turkey’s middle classes, he has pushed his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to victory in more than a dozen nationwide elections. He has weathered wars on his doorstep and, in 2016, an attempted coup. Styling himself as a new sultan, he has gained sweeping control over the judiciary, the media, the police, and other institutions of the state and civil society, even as he has ruthlessly cracked down on political opponents.
In recent years, however, Erdogan’s authoritarian populism has lost its magic. Since the coup attempt, his government has become increasingly paranoid, going after not only suspected coup plotters but also members of the democratic opposition and subsequently arresting tens of thousands of people and forcing more than 150,000 academics, journalists, and others out of their jobs on suspicion of ties to the coup or simply for standing up to Erdogan. And his growing willingness to meddle in elections—including a bungled effort to reverse the outcome of Istanbul’s 2019 mayoral election—has galvanized the opposition.
Now, with his support drastically eroding, the leader of the the oldest democracy and biggest economy between Italy and India faces a reckoning: in 18 months’ time, Turkey will hold a presidential election that Erdogan is very unlikely to win. And because of his long legacy of corruption and abuse of power, he could well be prosecuted if ousted. It seems clear that Erdogan will try to do everything he can to stay in office, including undermining a fair vote, disregarding the result, or even fomenting a January 6–like insurrection. The urgent challenge confronting the country, then, is how to engineer a transfer of power that does not threaten the foundations of Turkish democracy itself, potentially sending shock waves of instability beyond the country’s borders into Europe and the Middle East.
**DEMOCRACY DIVERTED**
When he came to power in 2003, Erdogan was greeted as a reformer who would build and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions. At first, he and the AKP seemed to deliver on those promises. He improved access to services, such as health care, and delivered a decade of low unemployment and strong economic growth. Under Erdogan, Turkey became a majority middle-class society for the first time. He also expanded some freedoms, notably offering some minority language rights to Turkey’s Kurds.
For awhile, these policies made Erdogan popular both at home and abroad. Domestically, he built a base of adoring supporters, who were mostly conservative, rural, working, lower-middle-class voters who reliably voted for the AKP in election after election. Meanwhile, his government was held up by the the U.S. and Europe as a model of Muslim liberal democracy, a country that was seriously considered for membership in the European Union.
But before long, Erdogan began to show far more authoritarian tendencies. In 2008, he unleashed the so-called Ergenekon case, a sweeping and largely inconclusive investigation into Turkey’s “deep state” in which more than 140 people were charged with plotting a coup against the democratically elected government. In fact, it quickly became clear that Erdogan—with help from the cleric Fethullah Gulen, the leader of the Gulen movement and an ally at the time, whose followers in the police, media, and judiciary helped concoct evidence targeting Erdogan’s democratic opponents—was attempting to root out the secularists who had long controlled state institutions.
In his second decade in office, Erdogan resorted to harsher tactics to maintain power. In 2013, he used force to crack down on the Gezi protests, in which millions of antigovernment protesters took to the streets in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. After the protests, the government tightened the screws on civil society, and the space for political activism narrowed. Then, following the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan used a prolonged state of emergency to further repress perceived threats to his rule. He launched a sweeping retribution campaign against his former allies in the Gulen movement, purging thousands of alleged and known Gulenists from government posts and throwing them in jail. And they were joined by growing numbers of socialists, social democrats, the Alevis (a liberal Muslim sect), liberals, leftists, Turkish and Kurdish nationalists, centrists, and even some conservatives opposed to Erdogan’s strong-arm populism.
Meanwhile, Erdogan began to pivot away from Turkey’s longstanding ties to Europe and the United States. In 2013, he blamed President Barack Obama for General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s coup in Egypt, aligning himself increasingly with political Islamist forces in the Middle East, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. Although they were initially on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin also eventually entered an entente. Following Putin’s outreach to him in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt, Putin agreed to allow Turkey to go after the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which the United States had relied on to fight the Islamic State (or ISIS), and Erdogan committed to buying the Russian-made S-400 missile defense system. By 2020, Erdogan faced tough U.S. sanctions for the Russian defense agreement, and the seven-decade alliance between Washington and Ankara was entering its greatest crisis in recent memory.
**THE SULTAN AMENDMENT**
For years, as Erdogan pushed forward his authoritarian populism, he could count on a divided opposition. Among the nearly half-dozen factions that have regularly challenged him at the ballot box, ranging from Turkish nationalists to Kurdish nationalists and secularists to political Islamists, their mutual hatred usually transcended their shared opposition to AKP rule. These divisions meant that Erdogan’s party could win elections easily, as it did continually for the first 15 years of his rule.
In 2017, however, Erdogan made a fateful mistake. He succeeded in ramming through a constitutional amendment that switched Turkey’s political system from a parliamentary democracy to an executive presidential one. In addition to abolishing the office of prime minister, the amendment gave Erdogan more direct control of the state bureaucracy and significantly weakened the powers of the legislature. In effect, Erdogan crowned himself as Turkey’s new sultan—simultaneously becoming the head of state, head of government, head of the ruling party, and head of the police (which is a national force in Turkey).
Yet even as it gave Erdogan more power, the constitutional reform inadvertently strengthened the opposition. Under the parliamentary system, elections were fought among all the parties at once, giving the AKP a natural advantage over its multiple rivals. But the new presidential system requires a runoff between the two leading candidates. This means that the leading opposition candidate now has the ability to bring together a broad anti-Erdogan coalition under one banner.
The current opposition block depends on an alliance between two key factions: the secularist, leftist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the centrist, Turkish nationalist Good Party (IYI). The pro-Kurdish, liberal Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has supported this alliance informally, as have a number of other smaller, centrist and right-wing forces, including the Felicity Party (SP), a political Islamist party that opposes the AKP for its corruption, among other reasons. Politically, these parties are far apart on many issues, but they are increasingly united in their desire to defeat Erdogan.
Meanwhile, the president’s AKP base in crumbling. Support for the governing populist block, which includes the AKP and the smaller Nationalist Action Party (MHP), an Erdogan ally since 2018, has fallen to around 30 to 40 percent in the polls, down from 52 percent in the 2018 presidential elections. Some former AKP supporters have flocked to the MHP, and others have gone to more recently established opposition parties such as DEVA, led by the former economy minister Ali Babacan. This means that Erdogan now has to rely on a minority to repress the majority, which, with the new runoff system, will be increasingly difficult to do.
Has been doing that for years
So….yup?
>Will the person who said *”Democracy is like a train: you get off once you have reached your destination.”* undermine Turkish democracy to stay in power?
Boy, that’s a hard one to imagine! /s
He will if you let him.
>As a close observer of Erdogan’s career, I have become a firm believer in term limits. Had he left the scene after his first decade in office, with a record of strong economic growth and broad popular support, he would be regarded today as one of Turkey’s most successful leaders. But his pursuit of unchecked power in recent years has taken him, and Turkey, in a far more dangerous direction. And if an effective strategy for getting him to leave the scene is not put into play now, he may well wind up being remembered as the Turkish leader who “pulled a Trump,” claiming that the election was stolen and throwing his country and its citizens into chaos.
The same is true of Putin. His first decade was spent rebuilding the Russian economy and its relationship with the West and the second decade walking back on most of those gains.
Wow, the first English article about 2023 Election I’ve seen that don’t have any non-sensical stuff.
It includes many key elements that are missing from similar ones, such as Gulen’s organization purging the army of seculars in 2008, Imamoglu’s huge victory in 2019 shattering Erdogan’s image, and actually explaining how unlikely Erdogan is to win in 2023, even counting him pulling a Lukashenko.
Wait…
There’s a democracy??
Hasn’t he already?
This was more appropriate to ask in 2015. He has already undermined it severely and deeply.
No no no no way
Already has
Does a bear shit in the woods?
Erdogan: Democracy is invented by our enemy, Greek.
Yes?
It cannot do this because it is very difficult for someone who has lost public support to stay in power and the TSK will not allow it.
Of course he will. People will do anything to stay in power.
Turkish democracy has always been a sham even before Erdogan. For the last 100 years the army has staged a coup d’etat more or less every 20 years or so.
Which is why Turkey’s application to the EU was always going to fail, with or without Erdogan. From a democratic point of view, there’s not much difference in dealing with a nationalist secular military junta and a islamist despot.
After all, no matter the ideological justification for their rule, they both deny the Armenian genocide and treat their ethnic Kurdish minority appallingly
Wow, that’s like this slowpoke Pokémon meme. That process began at least a decade ago and culminated in Erdogan’s Reichstag fire (the staged insurrection attempt) in fucking 2016.
Hasen’t he already done it by organizing various purges, especially in the army?
21 comments
Over the past few months, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has looked increasingly desperate. He has stepped up his repression of critics and political opponents, including, most recently, Metin Gurcan, a founding member of the opposition Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), who was arrested in November on espionage charges. He has threatened to expel diplomats from the United States and some of Turkey’s NATO allies. And as his popularity at home has nosedived, he has embarked on a reckless experiment to lower interest rates amid already high inflation, a policy that has pitched the country into economic turmoil. Meanwhile, he faces an emboldened—and increasingly united—opposition that for the first time poses a direct threat to his rule.
The shift has been dramatic. For much of the past two decades, first as prime minister between 2003 and 2014 and then as president since 2014, Erdogan has seemed invincible. Bringing new prosperity to Turkey’s middle classes, he has pushed his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to victory in more than a dozen nationwide elections. He has weathered wars on his doorstep and, in 2016, an attempted coup. Styling himself as a new sultan, he has gained sweeping control over the judiciary, the media, the police, and other institutions of the state and civil society, even as he has ruthlessly cracked down on political opponents.
In recent years, however, Erdogan’s authoritarian populism has lost its magic. Since the coup attempt, his government has become increasingly paranoid, going after not only suspected coup plotters but also members of the democratic opposition and subsequently arresting tens of thousands of people and forcing more than 150,000 academics, journalists, and others out of their jobs on suspicion of ties to the coup or simply for standing up to Erdogan. And his growing willingness to meddle in elections—including a bungled effort to reverse the outcome of Istanbul’s 2019 mayoral election—has galvanized the opposition.
Now, with his support drastically eroding, the leader of the the oldest democracy and biggest economy between Italy and India faces a reckoning: in 18 months’ time, Turkey will hold a presidential election that Erdogan is very unlikely to win. And because of his long legacy of corruption and abuse of power, he could well be prosecuted if ousted. It seems clear that Erdogan will try to do everything he can to stay in office, including undermining a fair vote, disregarding the result, or even fomenting a January 6–like insurrection. The urgent challenge confronting the country, then, is how to engineer a transfer of power that does not threaten the foundations of Turkish democracy itself, potentially sending shock waves of instability beyond the country’s borders into Europe and the Middle East.
**DEMOCRACY DIVERTED**
When he came to power in 2003, Erdogan was greeted as a reformer who would build and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions. At first, he and the AKP seemed to deliver on those promises. He improved access to services, such as health care, and delivered a decade of low unemployment and strong economic growth. Under Erdogan, Turkey became a majority middle-class society for the first time. He also expanded some freedoms, notably offering some minority language rights to Turkey’s Kurds.
For awhile, these policies made Erdogan popular both at home and abroad. Domestically, he built a base of adoring supporters, who were mostly conservative, rural, working, lower-middle-class voters who reliably voted for the AKP in election after election. Meanwhile, his government was held up by the the U.S. and Europe as a model of Muslim liberal democracy, a country that was seriously considered for membership in the European Union.
But before long, Erdogan began to show far more authoritarian tendencies. In 2008, he unleashed the so-called Ergenekon case, a sweeping and largely inconclusive investigation into Turkey’s “deep state” in which more than 140 people were charged with plotting a coup against the democratically elected government. In fact, it quickly became clear that Erdogan—with help from the cleric Fethullah Gulen, the leader of the Gulen movement and an ally at the time, whose followers in the police, media, and judiciary helped concoct evidence targeting Erdogan’s democratic opponents—was attempting to root out the secularists who had long controlled state institutions.
In his second decade in office, Erdogan resorted to harsher tactics to maintain power. In 2013, he used force to crack down on the Gezi protests, in which millions of antigovernment protesters took to the streets in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. After the protests, the government tightened the screws on civil society, and the space for political activism narrowed. Then, following the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan used a prolonged state of emergency to further repress perceived threats to his rule. He launched a sweeping retribution campaign against his former allies in the Gulen movement, purging thousands of alleged and known Gulenists from government posts and throwing them in jail. And they were joined by growing numbers of socialists, social democrats, the Alevis (a liberal Muslim sect), liberals, leftists, Turkish and Kurdish nationalists, centrists, and even some conservatives opposed to Erdogan’s strong-arm populism.
Meanwhile, Erdogan began to pivot away from Turkey’s longstanding ties to Europe and the United States. In 2013, he blamed President Barack Obama for General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s coup in Egypt, aligning himself increasingly with political Islamist forces in the Middle East, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. Although they were initially on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin also eventually entered an entente. Following Putin’s outreach to him in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt, Putin agreed to allow Turkey to go after the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which the United States had relied on to fight the Islamic State (or ISIS), and Erdogan committed to buying the Russian-made S-400 missile defense system. By 2020, Erdogan faced tough U.S. sanctions for the Russian defense agreement, and the seven-decade alliance between Washington and Ankara was entering its greatest crisis in recent memory.
**THE SULTAN AMENDMENT**
For years, as Erdogan pushed forward his authoritarian populism, he could count on a divided opposition. Among the nearly half-dozen factions that have regularly challenged him at the ballot box, ranging from Turkish nationalists to Kurdish nationalists and secularists to political Islamists, their mutual hatred usually transcended their shared opposition to AKP rule. These divisions meant that Erdogan’s party could win elections easily, as it did continually for the first 15 years of his rule.
In 2017, however, Erdogan made a fateful mistake. He succeeded in ramming through a constitutional amendment that switched Turkey’s political system from a parliamentary democracy to an executive presidential one. In addition to abolishing the office of prime minister, the amendment gave Erdogan more direct control of the state bureaucracy and significantly weakened the powers of the legislature. In effect, Erdogan crowned himself as Turkey’s new sultan—simultaneously becoming the head of state, head of government, head of the ruling party, and head of the police (which is a national force in Turkey).
Yet even as it gave Erdogan more power, the constitutional reform inadvertently strengthened the opposition. Under the parliamentary system, elections were fought among all the parties at once, giving the AKP a natural advantage over its multiple rivals. But the new presidential system requires a runoff between the two leading candidates. This means that the leading opposition candidate now has the ability to bring together a broad anti-Erdogan coalition under one banner.
The current opposition block depends on an alliance between two key factions: the secularist, leftist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the centrist, Turkish nationalist Good Party (IYI). The pro-Kurdish, liberal Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has supported this alliance informally, as have a number of other smaller, centrist and right-wing forces, including the Felicity Party (SP), a political Islamist party that opposes the AKP for its corruption, among other reasons. Politically, these parties are far apart on many issues, but they are increasingly united in their desire to defeat Erdogan.
Meanwhile, the president’s AKP base in crumbling. Support for the governing populist block, which includes the AKP and the smaller Nationalist Action Party (MHP), an Erdogan ally since 2018, has fallen to around 30 to 40 percent in the polls, down from 52 percent in the 2018 presidential elections. Some former AKP supporters have flocked to the MHP, and others have gone to more recently established opposition parties such as DEVA, led by the former economy minister Ali Babacan. This means that Erdogan now has to rely on a minority to repress the majority, which, with the new runoff system, will be increasingly difficult to do.
Has been doing that for years
So….yup?
>Will the person who said *”Democracy is like a train: you get off once you have reached your destination.”* undermine Turkish democracy to stay in power?
Boy, that’s a hard one to imagine! /s
He will if you let him.
>As a close observer of Erdogan’s career, I have become a firm believer in term limits. Had he left the scene after his first decade in office, with a record of strong economic growth and broad popular support, he would be regarded today as one of Turkey’s most successful leaders. But his pursuit of unchecked power in recent years has taken him, and Turkey, in a far more dangerous direction. And if an effective strategy for getting him to leave the scene is not put into play now, he may well wind up being remembered as the Turkish leader who “pulled a Trump,” claiming that the election was stolen and throwing his country and its citizens into chaos.
The same is true of Putin. His first decade was spent rebuilding the Russian economy and its relationship with the West and the second decade walking back on most of those gains.
Wow, the first English article about 2023 Election I’ve seen that don’t have any non-sensical stuff.
It includes many key elements that are missing from similar ones, such as Gulen’s organization purging the army of seculars in 2008, Imamoglu’s huge victory in 2019 shattering Erdogan’s image, and actually explaining how unlikely Erdogan is to win in 2023, even counting him pulling a Lukashenko.
Wait…
There’s a democracy??
Hasn’t he already?
This was more appropriate to ask in 2015. He has already undermined it severely and deeply.
No no no no way
Already has
Does a bear shit in the woods?
Erdogan: Democracy is invented by our enemy, Greek.
Yes?
It cannot do this because it is very difficult for someone who has lost public support to stay in power and the TSK will not allow it.
Of course he will. People will do anything to stay in power.
Turkish democracy has always been a sham even before Erdogan. For the last 100 years the army has staged a coup d’etat more or less every 20 years or so.
Which is why Turkey’s application to the EU was always going to fail, with or without Erdogan. From a democratic point of view, there’s not much difference in dealing with a nationalist secular military junta and a islamist despot.
After all, no matter the ideological justification for their rule, they both deny the Armenian genocide and treat their ethnic Kurdish minority appallingly
Wow, that’s like this slowpoke Pokémon meme. That process began at least a decade ago and culminated in Erdogan’s Reichstag fire (the staged insurrection attempt) in fucking 2016.
Hasen’t he already done it by organizing various purges, especially in the army?
Isn’t his health situation pretty bad?