Popular backlash against the July 15 half-baked putsch by a smaller military clique in Turkey has created enough space for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to move much beyond his dream of an omnipresent authoritarian presidency.
However, the massive purges being undertaken across the state institutions and a predominantly Kemalist army may unleash their own chain of reactions. Is it the victory of democracy or the defeat of Bonapartism that has paved the way for populist authoritarianism?
Within hours of the attempted coup, the people of Turkey came out on the streets amid religious calls for defiance from the minarets, and the mutineers were forced to surrender in a most humiliating manner. This was unprecedented in a country where the armed forces have remained the sole architect and custodian of the modern secular Republic of Turkey since it was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923. After four successful coups in the past, why did this fifth coup fail so miserably and is being seen as a ‘blessing’ by President Erdogan?
The coup was, by all means, badly planned, and lacked the backing of not only various chains of command but also the rank and file of the armed forces. It was, it seems, initiated in a panic and ended in a fiasco – unlike the previous coups that were launched with full might and preparedness and saw no resistance from any section of the populace. Within the initial hours of the coup, the people, all the three major opposition parties, the pro-Kurdish main opposition HDP in particular, and the Kemalists categorically came out against the renegade soldiers and officers. The Kemalists even suspect that this was a state-managed provocation to allow a power-hungry Erdogan to clean up his opponents from the military, judiciary and civil services.
Erdogan has laid the whole blame on his erstwhile partner and now one of his main adversaries and a most reformist preacher Fethullah Gulen and his large number of followers in the state institutions. Gulen has denied the charge and counter-charged Erdogan for having staged the coup to repress his critics and detractors.
A leading expert and investigative journalist on the Gulen community, Ahmet Sik, suspects that the coup-makers acted in haste to pre-empt a major crackdown against Gulen sympathisers on July 16. However, that doesn’t absolve Gulen from flirting with the state apparatuses. He even supported repressive military rule during 1980 and 1983 and overthrow of the conservative Islamist government of Najamuddin Arbakon by the army in 1997 – reflecting an ideological division between the Islamic reformists and traditionalists over the spoils of power.
It is noteworthy that, with the help of Gulen, Erdogan tried hundreds of officers of the armed forces on trumped-up charges and replaced them with Gulen sympathisers. Threatened from what he saw a ‘parallel state’ being run by Gulen from Pennsylvania (US), Erdogan soon came down heavily against large numbers of judges, civil servants, journalists, media houses and educational institutions run by Gulen’s welfare organisation. This happened when his (Erdogan’s) cabinet members and close friends (and also son) came under serious corruption charges and were prosecuted by officials considered close to Gulen.
The split between Islamic conservatives and Islamic reformers came over the country’s relationship with Israel. But it was essentially a power struggle that got intensified before the last elections in 2015 when the Erdogan regime came under great public scrutiny about his grandiose and authoritarian tendencies. In order to become an all-powerful president, he intensified the repression of Kurds in south-eastern Turkey and the KPP fighting against Turkish domination, on the one hand, and remobilised the radical right on the Islamist and revivalist agenda that he had been discarding during his two terms in office as prime minister and president.
During the first two terms, Erdogan’s party, the AKP, represented Islamic liberalism poised against Kemalism and eliminated the Islamic populism of ‘National Vision’. Later, the party started to mobilise radical Islamists, such as the Haksoz circle, influenced by the Iranian revolution, and the Malaty circle, representing the have-nots’ Islam. In his Turkish racist tirade against the Kurds, Erdogan mobilised the two factions of the Grey Wolves and two violently chauvinist militias, Ulku Ocaklari and Alperen Ocaklari, to brutally suppress the Kurds.
Playing on the revival of the glory of Ottoman Empire, the new Sultan offered Western powers his services to settle the Middle-Eastern crises and tried to squeeze the Syrian regime by allowing and supporting all kinds of Salafis and other extremists while in fact targeting Kurds who valiantly fought against Isis in western Syria. His totalitarian Turkish authoritarianism brought him in conflict not only with democratic forces in Turkey, but also with its neighbours.
Despite the bloody overthrow of his Ikhwan allies in Egypt, Erdogan tried to get closer to Saudi Arabia in his newly developed enmity with the Alawiite Baathist regime in Damascus. But the Saudis got closer to the military regime in Egypt rather than making him the trouble-shooter against the Iranian influence in the region.
Consequently, Erdogan allowed the radical Salafi influence to increase not only in neighbouring Syria, but also in the rural areas of Turkey. His increasing reliance on radical Islamic themes, cultural conservatism, aggressive chauvinist military campaign against the Kurds, attacks on the Alevis of Turkey and other minorities by his supporters, closure of media organisations and persecution of journalists, hobnobbing with jihadist factions, suppression of democratic rights and civil liberties and successive purges of judges, prosecutors, military officers and bureaucrats is changing his regime. Author Cihan Tugal finds Turkey sliding “from soft to hard totalitarianism”.
Leading experts on fascism and the Turkish model of Islamic democracy, such as Cihan Tugal, tend to equate Erdogan’s political project closer to neo-fascism and compare it with the rise of the inter-war period of fascism in Germany and Italy. But, according to him, due to Erdogan’s reactionary and radicalised mass base and conflicting partnership with the West, the “shift to hard totalitarianism” remained “indecisive”.
Given Europe’s reliance on Turkey to stem the immigration flood, and having the second largest army in Western Europe and being a member of Nato, Turkey is too important to ignore. Erdogan exploits these Western requirements to prop up his authoritarian regime and regional influence, despite having mobilised a radicalised mass base that brings him in conflict with his Western partners, his neighbours and the democratic forces at home, the pro-Kurdish opposition in particular.
In a remarkable comment on Turkey’s failed coup, Robert Fisk observes that “the real question will be the degree to which his (momentary) success will embolden Erdogan to undertake more trials, imprison more journalists, close down more newspapers, kill more Kurds”. He predicts: “Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot began the Ottoman Empire’s dismemberment, but it continues to this day. In this grim historical framework must we view the coup-that-wasn’t in Ankara. Stand by for another one in the months or years to come”.
If that comes to be true, what are we debating in Pakistan? How does it change the civil-military equation here? How can the temporary defeat of Bonapartism in Turkey help pre-empt the possible eventuality here? Or how can the success of civilian authoritarianism with the mobilisation of the masses in Turkey in any way strengthen democracy in Pakistan where people are left out in the cold and the political forces are at each other’s throats?
The writer is a senior journalist.
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