QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Turkey’s development under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK party has been widely covered. Since 2002, when the Islamist party first came to power, GDP per capita has tripled and exports grew nearly five-fold. Yet the value of the Turkish lira also plummeted to pennies on the dollar, press freedom declined sharply, the country’s incarceration rate topped the charts in Europe (after Russia), and inequality widened.
Over two decades ago, trust in Turkey’s political establishment had been rocked by allegations of a wide network of ‘deep state’ conspirators brought about by the Susurluk scandal; a ‘post-modern’ military coup in 1997; as well as a deadly earthquake near Istanbul in 1999, which killed over 17,000 people and laid bare the government’s internal riot. In southeast Turkey, the armed forces had subjected Kurdish civilians to a brutal scorched-earth policy as they attempted to smoke out the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Erdogan rode into office on a wave of anti-establishment populism. The Islamist modernizer cut a fresh figure, promising economic development, religious freedom, free markets, and even a solution of the ‘Kurdish question’. His former home, the Welfare Party (RP), had been the first Islamist party to make it into government in 1996, before being overthrown by the military coup a year later
Erdogan himself had been jailed for reading a religious poem. In the AKP’s telling, this was the revenge of Turkey’s religious, alienated masses.
Yet conservative populist parties were far from a novelty. The True Path Party (DYP – itself of a political pedigree dating back to the 1940s) had served in two governments in the 1990s. The Motherland Party (ANAVATAN), a mix of Islamic revival and neoliberal, formed part of five governments since the 1980s. Between 1983 and 1991, it ruled unchallenged. Erdogan’s AKP in 2002 was populated by the reformist wing of the Welfare Party’s successor, the Virtue Party (FP), as well as members of True Path and Motherland. It was a considerable counterweight to secular elites and the armed forces; a revolution it was not.
The AKP did manage to upend much of the existing military, political and business establishment. The government’s bureaucracy and judiciary were slowly infiltrated by the Gulen movement, an Islamist cult which had allied itself with Erdogan. In the late aughts, the Gulenist judiciary mounted a purge of a number of military leaders, journalists, politicians, and business moguls. These were the ‘Ergenekon trials’, which combined facts regarding the collusion between Turkey’s political parties, armed forces, and criminal gangs (especially in regards to its war on the Kurdish-majority southeast) with outlandish fiction. In 2016, Gulen’s men, which had by then established their own ‘deep state’, were themselves purged after a failed coup – along with many judges, teachers, government officials and journalists who did not align with the AKP.
Almost a decade on, the armed forces and intelligence services have become directly tied to the president. In place of a secular business elite, the AKP has cultivated its own, conservative clientelistic network. But little has changed for the country’s poorest. Civil liberties have been curtailed across the board. As North Press previously laid out, Kurds, too, are worse off.
What, then, does the opposition offer? Six parties have formed a coalition to unseat Erdogan. They range from secular to far-right nationalist. Like in 1999, a recent earthquake uncovering the government’s corruption is providing it with considerable tailwind. So, too, is Turkey’s disastrous inflation and economic woes. Most polls suggest that the opposition will clinch victory by the tightest of margins on May 14.
The so-called ‘Table of Six’ has promised to undo many of Erdogan’s most authoritarian policies and re-align the country with the Western world. It also wants to end (some of) the international conflicts Turkey is embroiled in, scrap Erdogan’s wasteful infrastructure ‘mega projects’, and re-establish fiscal orthodoxy. It may even be ready to sit down with the PKK in order to craft a lasting peace.
Yet this is not the radical change many Turks are hoping for. As Cihan Tugal, a professor at UC Berkley, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, the opposition coalition has most often used the narrative of a “restoration”. The alliance itself is made up of the existing establishment. The Future Party and DEVA party are direct outgrowths of the AKP. Its leaders were Erdogan’s Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, respectively. In the early years of AKP rule, they represented a pro-EU and liberally-minded wing within the party, before being pushed out by Erdogan’s paranoid one-man rule.
The IYI Party is a splinter group of the MHP, a ultra-nationalist party founded in 1969 and the AKP’s junior coalition partner in parliament since 2015. IYI’s leader, Merat Aksener, had briefly been Minister of the Interior in the mid-1990s. SAADET and the Democrat Party, two other minor members, are reinventions of the aforementioned Virtue and True Path parties. The CHP, the senior member of the alliance, is Turkey’s secular establishment, par excellence.
This alliance is not just burdened by the weight of its internal ideological incongruity, it will also have to face systemic hurdles. Even if Erdogan is deposed, his military yes-men and hand-picked judges are not going anywhere. Any purge risks a counter-coup. Many of Erdogan’s policies, too, will not be easy to undo. “If the opposition is going to scratch such ‘national economy’ policies, what is it going to replace them with?” asks Tugal, referring to expensive state-led economic projects, which are popular with voters but abhorred by the opposition.
Despite the fact that the CHP has employed a softer rhetoric when speaking about the country’s Kurds, it is difficult to see how the disparate coalition will establish a unified policy towards the southeast. IYI’s Aksener has rejected any concessions even to the HDP, the largest pro-Kurdish party in the country. The fact that she oversaw the most brutal years of the Turkish army’s war on the Kurdish regions as Minister of the Interior has not enamoured her to Kurdish voters, either.
No doubt, Erdogan’s camp will not remain silent in case of an opposition victory. “The best antidote to such a threat is a cohesive, imaginative program for governing — precisely what the opposition seems to lack,” says Tugal. “Turkey doesn’t need restoring. It needs to be set on a new path altogether.” An opposition win will thus change little in and of itself. Voting Erdogan out is not the solution, it is just the first step.