Recep Tayyip Erdogan has transformed Turkey as only Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic in 1923, had managed to do. One hundred years after the birth of the country from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire and twenty after its rise to power, whoever finds itself governing Ankara in the next few years will always have to come to terms with its Turkey, which after him will never be more the same.
Unlike any of his predecessors, Erdogan has managed to clear political Islam through customs and to promote an alliance between his religious vision and the fiercest nationalism, which has always been the preserve of the armed forces, champions of secularism since the time of Kemal. He opened the doors of the middle class to millions of Turks and attracted an unprecedented level of foreign investment to the country. He has turned Turkey into a regional power that all neighbors (and major world powers) have to reckon with. But he has also questioned democratic guarantees, prosecuted opponents, attacked the independent judiciary and created an authoritarian presidential regime, all of which his successors will face in the coming decades.
Roots and continuity
It is a story that has been going on for almost thirty years. It was December 6, 1997 and Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already been mayor of Istanbul for almost four years. That day he was at a political demonstration in Siirt, in south-eastern Turkey, where he was participating in a rally of the Refah Partisi (the Welfare Party) of the Islamic leader Necmettin Erbakan. Even then, as he had done several times before, he recited a poem by the nationalist sociologist Ziya Gokalp: “Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets and believers our soldiers.” A week later, those few verses cost him a ten-month prison sentence (later reduced on appeal) for “inciting hatred on a religious basis”. The following year his junta was dissolved, as was Erbakan’s party, and two years later, at the end of the trial, he was forced to spend four months in prison. “It’s not goodbye,” he promised then and kept his promise.
In August 2001, together with some followers of the reformist wing of Refah, he founded the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi – Akp (the Justice and Development Party) with which he won the policies the following year, personally entering parliament in March 2003 (after the ban from holding public offices was lifted) and becoming premier on March 14, 2003. “Unlike Erbakan, who was a spiritual father, Erdogan seems more familiar, he’s like a brother,” he said at the time of his electoral victory his biographer, Rusen Cakir. “But he is also a pragmatist: he is a practicing Muslim but is looking for new agreements”. For what?
The Golden Years
The promises of that first term were clear: to defend parliamentary democracy, to expand rights, first of all that of women to wear the veil, to develop the economy and to achieve stability in the south-east inhabited by the Kurds, to whom he addressed new political initiatives to end the armed conflict. It seems incredible, given how things turned out, but that’s exactly how it all began. The first reforms introduced by his government even allowed him to start EU accession talks in 2005, a process that later stalled completely. In fact, Turkey’s main successes in harmonization with Community law date back to this period. Company legislation, industrial policies, scientific research and external relations: in 2006 all these chapters of the acquis were aligned with EU regulations, even if they were only 4 out of 35. However, this was enough to obtain a new majority for the 2007 policies.
Those were the “golden years” of his power, characterized by a relative political and cultural openness. In fact, minorities saw new rights recognized, while the legislative initiative aimed at limiting the political power of the military allowed new voices to intervene in the public debate. Indeed, some universities organized conferences and studies on the massacre of Armenians that took place in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1916, something unthinkable only a few years earlier. The economy was also growing: in the first five years, GDP increased at annual rates of more than 5 percent. Poverty and unemployment plummeted, inflation that had been in the triple digits just a decade earlier dropped to 5 percent and the lira and the Turkish economy began to become attractive to foreign companies, at least until 2013 when foreign direct investment hit maximum level, never reached since then, and the per capita wealth of the Turks reached 12,507 dollars from 3,640 in 2002. Erdogan seemed untouchable but the honeymoon with democracy was already over.
The birth of a strong man
To understand this, we need to go back to July 30, 2008, when the Constitutional Court rejected an indictment calling for the dissolution of the AKP for violating the state’s principles of secularism. It was a victory for his party which, unlike other Islamic movements such as Refah, was not excluded from Turkish politics, yet it pushed Erdogan to change the order of the Republic (and the constitution) to avoid a future ban.
At the time, the government exploited the findings of the Ergenekon trials, which ended five years later with 17 life sentences handed down to former leading figures in the military, political, academic and publishing establishments, for a purge that allowed the AKP – then still supported by the organization of the cleric Fethullah Gulen – to install his loyalists in positions of power. But that was only the beginning.
Meanwhile, the war with the Kurds resumed, after the failure of political negotiations. First at home and then abroad: in all, since 2007, Ankara has conducted at least 15 military operations (mostly airborne) over the borders with Syria and Iraq against Kurdish and dozens of other militias in the southeast of the country.
The push against the military then led the Turkish leader to promote and win a referendum in 2010 for a series of constitutional reforms that will change the powers of the army, the criteria of impunity for members of the armed forces and various aspects of the judicial system, conferring the government even has the power to appoint judges to the Constitutional Court. In the rest of Europe the turning point was welcomed with relief because, it was said, it would have prevented the risk of a military coup that had already marred Turkey too many times in previous years.
Soon after, however, everything became clearer. With the landslide victory obtained in the 2011 policies, the premier tightened his noose on the country’s politics even more and, two years later, managed to crush the Gezi Park protests in blood without suffering the expected and serious political consequences hoped for in the rest of the continent. So much so that in 2014 he won the first presidential elections, the result of a 2007 reform that ousted Parliament from the appointment of the head of state, entrusting his choice to a popular vote.
Even though the office of the president was still a guarantee at the time, Erdogan immediately presented himself as the embodiment of the “will of the people”, intervening directly in government affairs. Since then, however, things began to get worse: the lira began its collapse (in 2013 1.9 lire was enough to buy a dollar, today it takes 19), inflation began to explode (it grew by 195 percent in ten years), foreign reserves to fall (they have halved since 2013) and the economy to contract (wealth per capita has since fallen to around $10,000 while GDP has fallen by more than 10 percent in a decade).
Worsening political and economic conditions resulted in an electoral defeat in 2015 when, in order to regain a majority, the AKP was forced to ally itself with the Milliyetci Hareket Partisi – MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), which had not entered Parliament since 2002 and whose success was fueled by the insecurity caused by the suicide bombings carried out by the self-styled Islamic State and by the continuous war against the Kurds.
A little over six months later, the attempted military coup attributed by Erdogan’s government to the followers of his former ally Gulen took place, causing almost 290 deaths. The reaction was another opportunity for the president to eliminate opponents and increase his power, arresting tens of thousands of people, firing nearly 130,000 civil servants suspected of plotting with the religious and closing independent newspapers and media. From then on, the judiciary, public administration, universities and almost every institution will be infiltrated by loyalists of his party, a difficult reality to manage for anyone – one day – who has to replace Erdogan, who with the 2017 referendum officially abandoned the parliamentary democracy for a presidential system, abolishing the office of prime minister and concentrating power in one’s own hands.
regional ambitions
Despite the economic crisis and the worsening relations with the neighbours, the rest of NATO and the United States for the rapprochement with Iran and Russia and the interventionism first in Iraq and Syria, then in Libya and in the rest of Africa and then in Nagorno-Karabakh alongside Azerbaijan, a big hand came to him from the agreement with the European Union – brokered by German Chancellor Angela Merkel – to host millions of refugees in exchange for 6 billion euros in funding.
Thus Erdogan also won the 2018 presidential elections with a clear majority, while in Parliament the coalition between Akp and Mhp continued to govern the fate of the country and repression was becoming increasingly harsh, also helped by the Covid-19 pandemic which allowed the government to adopt extraordinary measures, exploiting the health crisis to increase consensus.
Meanwhile, internationally, Ankara became a regional power feared by its neighbors (Syria, Iran, Armenia, Greece) and by the main world players (USA, NATO, EU and Russia), carving out an irreplaceable role for itself in North Africa, the Balkans and in mediation between Ukraine and Russia, despite having been the first to arm Kiev with the deadly TB2 Bayraktar drones, produced by his son-in-law (and possible successor in the Party), Selcuk Bayraktar. A policy which in recent years has also allowed him to gradually re-establish relations with the rest of the Middle East where, in addition to the ten-year alliance with Qatar, he has returned to dialogue with the United Arab Emirates and even with Israel.
Despite the aura of untouchability, only two dates seemed to scratch his project of uncontrolled domination of Turkey: June 22, 2019 when, for the first time since 1994, he lost the elections for mayor of Istanbul, won by Ekrem İmamoğlu of Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – Chp (the Popular Republican Party, the main opposition movement); and on February 6, 2023, the day of the devastating earthquake that cost the lives of at least 48,000 people in the south of the country, for which his government was harshly criticized due to the slowness of relief efforts and the lack of controls on illegal activity and the violation of anti- seismic in construction.
However, whether or not all this turns into a political earthquake in favor of the candidate of the united opposition, Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the CHP, Turkey will in any case remain forever marked by the two decades of Erdogan and by his legacy of violated democracy, international aggression and crisis economic.
