Erdogan’s victory, Turkish democracy and Islam

Turkey provides a unique example of the interaction between religion and politics. Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the Turkish Presidential election run-off yesterday with his strong-man appeal to Islamic piety. Kemal Kilicdargoglu with his promise of modern social democracy, won only 44.9% of the vote in the first round, so stood little chance of overtaking Erdogan with 49.5%.

Two highly charged mindsets define Turkey’s national identity. Kemal Atatürk, a revolutionary nationalist who, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, founded the modern Turkish secular state in 1923. He was influenced by French laicite, an ideological commitment to keep religion out of the public domain, and achieve its complete separation from the state. For many, this is expressed as a passionate rejection of Islam in favour of Turkey’s 1928 secular constitution, traditionally supported by the military. For others there is a no less passionate religious commitment but to a moderate, pious Islamic conservatism.

The US Brookings Institution wrote glowingly in 2002 that the AKP, Erdogan’s Justice & Development Party which had just swept to power, “heralds democracy”. It seemed like a “new model” for the Islamic world. A year later, Erdogan became Prime Minister. His development of a modern transport system, political flair and skillful negotiation of deep nationalist tensions, while maintaining his espousal of Islamic values in the AKP, have enabled him to increase his power ever since.

Erdogan’s religious appeal owed much to the phenomenal success of the Gulen Islamic revival movement that provided him with the cultural and religious credentials of Turkish Islamic piety and helped to attract pious voters. Inspired by Fetullah Gulen, a scholar and preacher, the movement prioritized modern education, understanding of science and a commitment to interfaith dialogue as well as traditional Islamic practice.

During the 1980s, starting with popular dershane, crammer schools, the Gulenists – calling themselves Hizmet, meaning service – gained ground in the medium-sized towns of Anatolia. Those with money, the “Anatolian tigers”, invested in media and business, forming the Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists. Nationwide, Gulenist-led universities and schools became a ladder into the civil service, judiciary, police and army. With a flat structure and a reputation for being secretive, Hizmet was accused both of “infiltration” of the state structures and of becoming too close to Erdogan, collaborating in his dismissals of secular opponents of the AKP.

At trials, beginning in 2008, Gulenist prosecutors brought charges, some falsified, against some 275 key secularists, high ranking military, government critics and opposition politicians. By 1999, Fethullah Gulen had withdrawn from the fray to a ranch in Pennsylvania after a new Turkish government which aimed to restore the constitution’s secular principles put him in danger of arrest for “anti-secular activity”.

By 2012 Erdogan was powerful enough to dispense with Hizmet’s blessing. Influential in the judiciary, the media, universities and schools and with supporters in some 160 countries, Hizmet was now a potential rival needing to be curbed. That October Erdogan obliged Hizmet to hand over its cash-cow, the dershane schools, to the state. In February 2014 Hizmet members hit back by releasing tapes, which provided concrete evidence of major corruption involving the President and his son. Erdogan brazened it out and was elected President that August.

The key to survival as an autocrat is ruthlessness, luck and courage. A military coup got underway on the night of 15 July 2016 while Erdogan was on holiday in Marmaris, south-west Turkey. He narrowly escaped capture, broadcast to the nation via a mobile phone held to camera in a TV studio, flew back to Istanbul, called his supporters out onto the streets and regained control. Over 250 people were killed and 2,200 injured. Here was his opportunity finally to take control of the army and destroy his old allies, the Gulenists, some of whom had joined the coup.

A disturbing feature of the coup’s aftermath, demonstrating the efficiency and depth of surveillance by the National Intelligence Agency, was the immediate arrest of thousands of Gulenists alongside the coup’s secular military participants. A massive purge of civil service, police, armed forces, judiciary, media, universities and schools followed. Many were guilty of nothing more than a vague connection with Hizmet. “Restoring democracy”, Erdogan had seized the last pieces completing the puzzle of autocratic power.

A sorry story of not much import? No. If we perceive geopolitics as a struggle between democracy and autocracy, the Turkish experience is a neon sign flashing confirmation that democracy is losing the global struggle.

Look at the post-Cold War record: Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, three tragic failures of intervention; Iran still in the hands of the mullahs; Russia triumphant in a devastated Syria and now destroying Ukraine; Putin contemptuous of European democracies, the USA and international law; China with its terrifying surveillance society watching Ukraine as a dry-run for taking Taiwan; Narendra Modi discriminating against religious minorities in India; the army in Pakistan unwilling to accept Imran Khan’s attempt to reduce its power over the State; Sudan wrecked by two military factions, South Africa by government corruption. Just one hopeful sign in Brazil, with its peaceful democratic transfer of power from Bolsonaro to Lula.

There are two main possible reactions to Erdogan’s adding five more years to his twenty in power. Firstly, realpolitik requires continuing efforts to keep Turkey, a NATO member, out of the expanding band of brother autocratic regimes around the world, notably Russia. Another imperative is continuing huge payments to Erdogan, following a 2016 migration deal which is keeping nearly four million refugees (3.6 million of them Syrians) out of the EU.

Secondly, there is the utopian hope that one last push in the next elections in 2028 will remove Erdogan, ending the imprisonment of opposition politicians, journalists and dissident voices, as well as removing government control of 98% of press, radio and television. But how realistic is this? Over half the electorate, not only in Erdogan’s Anatolian heartland, feel he represents their values and hopes, and sustains their national identity. He represents strength amidst the fragility of their lives and their fear of repeating the chaos across Turkey’s southern and eastern borders.

Must foreign policy choose between these two visions of Turkey’s future? Between realpolitik and utopia? In a recent slim volume, The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, the author Robert D. Kaplan, a US journalist who has served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, implies we need to embrace both. The tragic mind, he argues, experiences failure not as fatalism or despair but as a goad to greater understanding and as a prompt for the heroism of “acting bravely in the face of no great result”.

The tragedy of Kemal Kilicdargoglu and his defeated Republican People’s Party (CHP) is that, however much he may understand the culture and thinking of Turkey’s rural poor and of the working class in its medium sized towns, he does not speak to them and their condition convincingly. The more street-wise Erdogan plays on their heart-strings. No-one can doubt Kilicdargoglu’s heroism in facing a ruthless autocrat. There are lessons to be learned about navigating today’s multiple threats to democracy from the failure of Turkey’s opposition.