Most Turks across that country’s polarised political spectrum greeted the failure of the July 15 coup with relief on the assumption that the worst democratically elected leader is preferable to the best general. Last Sunday’s multi-party turnout at Istanbul’s Taksim Square was an affirmation of that sentiment, understandable for a country that has experienced four coups in its 93-year-old history. Ironically, in the 10 days since, it is democracy that may now be under threat in Turkey from its first directly elected President, Recip Tayyip Erdogan. His actions since July 15 bear the hallmarks of dictatorial rule being established under the guise of “national security” (a ruse that may have a certain familiar ring to Indians who recall the year 1975).
An extensive purge of the armed forces and the president’s own bodyguard was to be expected. But Mr Erdogan, who was prime minister for 11 years and became president in 2014, has gone to greater lengths. Having acquired three-month emergency powers from a disoriented Parliament, he has exercised these to the fullest, arresting or dismissing some 60,000 soldiers, judges, teachers, civil servants and journalists and closing hundreds of schools, associations and foundations allegedly connected to the US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, deemed the key coup plotter. This mass purge in public life may have an immediate legitimacy. But set against Mr Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism, hard-line Islamism and corruption over the past few years, it is difficult to escape the view that he is leveraging Turkey’s democratic machinery to silence legitimate dissent and invest himself with absolutist powers. This poorly organised coup has handed him his best opportunity to do so yet because his hopes of establishing an executive presidency looked poor since the two-thirds parliamentary majority required for an amendment to the Constitution would have been hard to obtain, despite his party’s absolute majority.
Turkey is not a failed state like a few of those in West Asia and North Africa are. But the combined evidence of several purges of the armed forces in 2010 and 2013 (again, against alleged Gulen elements) and growing attacks on the media and other critics of Mr Erdogan, suggests that Turkey, once feted as an example of the virtues of dynamic and liberal Islamism, now looks more like a state headed by a strongman with all the attendant weaknesses and risks – including those of future coups. Mr Erdogan’s announcement that Turkey was exiting the European Human Rights Convention could be an early indicator of the distance he wants to maintain with the European Union, the common market Turkey has long aspired to join. A refugee-exchange deal, thus, hangs in the balance just as Islamic terror is rising in Europe and the Turkish economy is shrinking. Given Turkey’s status as a frontline NATO power in the war against the Islamic State, and its lynchpin role in sheltering over two million refugees from this confrontation, it is clear that both the US and European leaders will need to find new strategies to negotiate with a democratic dictator. Till they do, the prognosis for this critical region on the cusp of Europe and Asia is grim.
