Erdogan's autocracy: dark days for Turkey

Erdogan's one-man rule will boost efforts to replace Ataturk's secularism with a religion-based system.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used the April 16 referendum, providing for 18 constitutional amendments, to overthrow the modern, Western-style Turkish state. The was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 following demise of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural autocratic Islam-based Ottoman empire.

Ataturk's state was ethnically Turkish, narrowly nationalist,  assertively secular and quasi-democratic. It had a parliamentary form of government. He appointed the military as a guarantor of this polity. As the system evolved over decades, checks and balances between executive, legislature, and judiciary were adopted with the aim of preventing the rise of a dictator and abuses of power.

Once Erdogan implements the constitutional amendments proposed by his fundamentalist Justice and Development Party and, supposedly, approved by a narrow 51.4% of those who voted in the referendum, the parliamentary system will be replaced by a presidential system.

The post of a prime minister will be abolished and the president, until now a largely ceremonial, politically neutral figure, will become chief executive and head of his party. He will draw up the state budget and appoint cabinet ministers, members of the National Security Council and 12 out of 15 judges to the constitutional court. Prosecutors and lower court judges will be chosen by parliament and president. Checks and balances will be checked.  Modern day sultan Erdogan could reign until 2029.

Having assured his position and boosted his power, Erdogan will be able to step up efforts to replace Ataturk’s secularism with a religion-based system where conservative Islamic tenets dominate. He advocates a partial return to the Ottoman model, regarded by Erdogan and many of his followers as Turkey’s “Golden Age.”

However, Erdogan has no intention of tolerating the diverse ethnicities, faiths, and cultural orientations that had flourished under the Ottomans. He wishes to stick to the ethnically Turkish, national character and to exploit the quasi-democratic aspects of Ataturk’s model.

To achieve his aim of one-man rule, Erdogan has crushed all opposition. After last July’s failed army coup, he finished off the military as a political force and decimated the country’s civil service, judiciary and media by jailing 50,000 and purging more than 130,000. He imposed a state of emergency and intimidated his critics.

To ensure victory-by-fraud in the referendum, Erdogan denied opponents the media means to argue their case and pressured the electoral commission to accept hundreds of thousands of voting slips which did not bear official stamps.

The commission barred a recount and refused to accept formal complaints against the conduct of the referendum. This leaves the 48.6% of the voters who opposed the amendments with no recourse, risking destabilisation at a time Turkey is fighting Islamic State and Kurdish separatists as well as intervening in the Syrian conflict.

Rural-urban divide
Erdogan’s opponents come fr­om Turkey’s three major cities — Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir — while his supporters live mainly in rural areas and provincial towns. The divide is, therefore, civilisational with liberal educated, secular urban Turks up against conservative, religious small town and village Turks.

If Erdogan continues to rely on his constituency without trying to cultivate and mollify his opponents, he could face revolt and resistance in Turkey’s cities comparable to the protests that erupted in May 2013 when he tried to impose a development scheme which would have eradicated Istanbul’s Gezi park, beloved by the city’s residents.

Demonstrations against this effort took place at 90 sites in Turkey, including all the chief cities, as well as in the Turkish diaspora. The protesters, energised by bulldozers in the park, took up a wide range of issues: corruption, lack of freedom of the press and expression, destruction of the environment, challenge to secularism, Erdogan’s war against the Kurds and involvement in Syria. He managed to quell the upsurge without dealing with its causes.

Erdogan’s most risky domestic policy has been his revival of the 30-year-old war on the Kur­ds, who have been fighting for recognition as a distinct ethnic group and for federalism. When he took power, he had pledged to end the conflict by appealing to the Kurds on the basis of their being Sunni Muslims, like the vast majority of Turks.

Erdogan called a halt to army action and engaged in negotiations with the Kurds from 2013 until mid-2015, but resumed attacks on them as a means to boost his party’s electoral prospects in that year’s November election.

His most risky regional policy has been his promotion of the war in Syria by facilitating the transit of foreign fighters and weapons across Turkey into Syria and offering Ankara's full backing to expatriate Syrian dissidents, many of whom are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Ankara also permitted IS and al-Qaeda to take root in poor quarters of Turkey’s cities. He has been repaid by deadly bombings in Ankara and Istanbul and erosion of Turkey’s reliability as a member of the Western alliance, particularly since a number of perpetrators of IS attacks in Europe have visited or travelled through Turkey to join jihadi groups.