By Dexter Filkins* – The New Yorker
For a time, it looked as if Turkey’s battered democracy might pull off an improbable revival in Sunday’s national elections. With the Turkish economy reeling, the aura of inevitable victory that surrounded President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has led his country without pause for fifteen years, appeared to be dissipating. His chief opponent, Muharrem ?nce, of the Republican People’s Party, ran a strong campaign, at times calling out the corruption that surrounds Erdogan and his circle. ?nce and Erdogan’s other opponents hoped that they could hold the President to under fifty per cent on Sunday and then, in a runoff, ride a newfound momentum to an upset victory.
It was not to be. Erdogan declared a win in the first round, claiming fifty-three per cent of the votes cast. In a speech in Istanbul, he appeared already to have moved on. “Citizens have cast their votes and spoken clearly,’’ he said.
Assuming that his victory holds, Erdogan will stand firmly in the ranks of authoritarian leaders around the world—including Viktor Orbán, of Hungary, and Andrzej Duda, of Poland—who are using the cover of elections to undermine the other institutions that make a liberal democracy work. By virtue of a block of constitutional amendments narrowly approved in a referendum last year, and of Sunday’s victory, Erdogan will have more power than ever.
The wonder was that there was any suspense at all: as a candidate, Erdogan got nearly all the media attention, but he also sent one of his main opponents, Selahattin Demirtas, of the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, to prison on a trumped-up charge of terrorism. Indeed, it’s a testament to the Turkish people that so many refused to give up on the idea of democratic rule.
Erdogan came to power in 2003, after having spent time as Istanbul’s mayor and in prison as a political prisoner. (He had recited a poem that appeared to advocate militant Islam.) For a pious Muslim politician in Turkey, the duality was unremarkable: since the nation’s founding, in 1923, it had been ruled by a pro-Western secular élite that relied on the military to keep it in power—and Islamists and Communists out. With the end of the Cold War, Turkey began to liberalize and, in 2002, Erdogan’s party, known by its Turkish initials, the A.K.P., swept to power.
At the time—just after the 9/11 attacks, just before the invasion of Iraq—the West and, particularly, the United States were desperate for friends in the Islamic world. The Europeans offered Turkey membership in the European Union, and the Bush and Obama Administrations embraced Erdogan for his seeming moderation. “Before anything else, I’m a Muslim,’’ he told the Times Magazine shortly after becoming Prime Minister, in 2003. “As a Muslim, I try to comply with the requirements of my religion. I have a responsibility to God, who created me, and I try to fulfill that responsibility. But I try now very much to keep this away from political life, to keep it private.” Indeed, Erdogan seemed to realize that the West’s obsession with militant Islam gave him the freedom to pursue his real agenda—to gain more power for himself.
His first anti-democratic campaign began in 2008, with trials of members of the military and the secular establishment charged with attempting to foment a coup. The cases were known by their unusual code names, Sledgehammer and Ergenekon. I remember going through the evidence in both cases—page after page of indictments, charges, and transcripts—and being astounded at how preposterous much of the evidence appeared.
It felt as if I were sitting in a courtroom in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-forties, or the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties. Unlike in those earlier regimes, Erdo?an did not have his opponents shot, but the prosecutions led to the imprisonment of hundreds of officers, journalists, and intellectuals.
The second campaign began in 2016, in the aftermath of a failed coup in which dozens of Turks were killed. Much remains unknown about the attempt, but it was staged by disgruntled military officers and members of the Gulenist religious group, whose leader, Fethullah Gülen, lives in exile in Pennsylvania. (Gülen has denied involvement.)
In the nearly two years since, Erdogan has jailed as many as forty thousand people—most of them without trial—including judges, journalists, academics, and members of parliament. The free press has been decimated, as has the independent judiciary.
Under such conditions, is it any wonder that Erdogan won? That’s the real lesson of Sunday’s election—that, in Turkey, as in Russia and Hungary and Poland, there’s more to democracy than just elections.
The only question left is how long Erdogan will stay. He is only sixty-four; although many believed that he had undergone cancer treatment, in 2012, he has said that he did not have the disease, and he is, by all accounts, tireless and enthusiastic. But he is showing the telltale signs of a late-stage autocrat. His love of grandiose construction projects—a canal stretching from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara; his eleven-hundred-room, six-hundred-million-dollar palace—bespeak a monarch whose sense of importance has begun to border on the absolute.
Leaders who no can longer tolerate being questioned usually end up making terrible errors. Erdo?an may yet do so. The Turkish economy is heading toward a recession, and, during the campaign, he promised that if he won he would take control of the country’s Central Bank. Throughout history, when a country’s populist autocrat gets control of that institution, chaos is usually not far away.
For Turkey’s sake, let’s hope that something slows him down. In any case, when Erdo?an finally leaves office, the Turkish people will find that much of what had once held their country together has been dismantled or severely degraded. That’s when the real work of rebuilding Turkey’s democracy will begin.
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*Dexter Filkins joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2011. Filkins worked at the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was the paper’s New Delhi bureau chief, before joining the New York Times, in 2000, reporting from New York, South Asia, and Iraq, where he was based from 2003 to 2006. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times journalists covering Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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Annex:
The Guardian view on Erdogan’s Turkey: illiberal democrat takes power
Editorial
The country’s new president is a man who developed a party, became the party, and is now trying to become the state. It’s a worrying development
After winning landmark presidential and parliamentary elections, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an has taken a giant step towards one-man rule in Turkey. This is an extremely worrying development in the largest Muslim Nato member state. Since the July 2016 failed military coup Turkey has been under a state of emergency, which makes it hard to believe election campaigns were fought cleanly. Government control of media meant opposition parties were not given equal airtime. Journalists and human rights defenders have been prosecuted and jailed, sometimes for bogus terrorism offences. Farcically, one of the six candidates for the Turkish presidency campaigned from jail.
Though Turkey is not a dictatorship, it is now an illiberal democracy. The public votes but the government pays no more than lip service to minority and individual freedoms. Mr Erdogan, the leader of the Justice and Development party (AKP), will take up the vast presidential powers he fought for – and won in a referendum last year. He will now control a powerful system of government that abolishes the role of prime minister and shrinks the role of parliament. He can now legislate by decree. The new president and his party control the body that appoints the judiciary. Until these changes judges and prosecutors had been a thorn in Mr Erdogan’s side. But a quarter of them were dismissed in a crackdown last year. Little wonder the judiciary now gives Mr Erdogan standing ovations. So much for the separation of powers.
Mr Erdogan is a politician who developed a party, became that party, and is now in the process of becoming the state. In 2003 he sold himself as a technocrat, before donning Islamist garb. Mr Erdo?an may be committed to the symbols of Islam, but he seems much more committed to himself. His victory on Sunday was made possible by joining with an ultra-nationalist party that had previously opposed him. It would have been better if Mr Erdogan had gracefully slipped into Turkey’s traditionally ceremonial presidential role and mentored a younger generation. Instead he could be in power until 2034.
Mr Erdogan’s AKP came to power after a financial crisis wherein the political elite were seen as either exhausted or corrupt. Inflation was in double figures. Interest rates hit 6,000%. Mr Erdogan delivered growth and stability. The economy is double the size it was a decade ago. Yet Mr Erdogan’s story could easily be one of hubris and nemesis. He faces incipient economic and diplomatic crises. In Turkey inflation is creeping upwards, the currency is falling – putting pressure on companies that borrowed in dollars. Mr Erdogan’s vow to continue to “liberate Syrian lands” bodes ill for regional peace. He has replaced able ministers with supplicants. Turks are deeply divided. Graft allegations stain the AKP and the opposition fared much better than polls predicted. Mr Erdogan has ascended to great heights but that would make a fall all the more dramatic.
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