Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan marches forward into 2014. (Cem Oksuz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)[/caption]
Even before key personalities related to the current Turkish power system were swept up in a wave of arrests and resignations earlier this month, 2013 had hardly been a good year for Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His country witnessed its most serious street protests since the unrest leading to the 1980 military coup, the collapse of its Middle East foreign policy, and a plunge in the lira. But the shock detention of Erdoğan’s closest political and business allies signaled that, rather than being a year for political reinvention in local and presidential elections scheduled for March and August, 2014 will see a struggle for his political life.
The crises that embroiled Turkey in 2013 put the skids on Erdoğan’s ambitious plan to lead a Sunni regional bloc, a policy painstakingly crafted over several years with a Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt, and over a decade of lucrative trade and political exchanges with Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Amid the kidnapping and detention of Turkish pilots in Lebanon, 2013 marked the end of Turkey’s honeymoon with the region. The great love affair flourished on the back of Turkey’s turn to the East, the commonality of Islam, addictive television soap-operas and millions of Arab tourists visiting the country, but turned sour after being caught up in the Arab Spring’s treacherous slipstream. Syria’s civil war cast its long shadow as twin car bombings killed 51 in the Turkish border town of Reyhanlı and hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees mixed with tourists from the Gulf. Turkey’s standing also took a dive in Egypt, where Erdoğan refused to ditch his pro-Muslim Brotherhood policy in the aftermath of the army coup, and in Iraq, where Ankara’s oil deals with the Kurds upset the Shi’a government.
The same year saw Turkey’s support for the mostly Sunni rebels fighting the Assad regime in Damascus devolve into a jihadi free-for-all as the secularists were shunted aside by Sunni religious fundamentalists flocking to Syria to fight the alliance between the majority Alawite regime and allies Iran and Hezbollah, both Shi’a powers. Ankara has long acted as a logistics and training hub for fighters seeking to overthrow the Assad regime, a gamble that annulled its “zero problems” foreign policy. It also left Turkey footing much of the bill for the Syrian imbroglio, as the West refused to engage and shrewd Russian diplomacy maneuvered the Syrian president into a more stable position than at any time since the start of the civil war.
Next year, Erdoğan will have to fight hard to realign Turkey’s ties in a Middle East in flux if he is to claw back some sympathy from estranged former allies in Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad and Tel Aviv. He has already made a good start with his Kurdish opening, which included reconciliatory trips to Baghdad and Shi’a heartland locations such as Najaf and Karbala. But it will be hard to build upon these in a year when the prime minister must focus on domestic politics even as his foreign ministry exerts serious efforts to head off the fallout from Armenian campaigners preparing to commemorate the centenary of the 1915 genocide.
Domestically, Erdoğan accelerated a program of creeping Islamization by continuing to polarize society with ethnically divisive rhetoric and converting several former Byzantine churches into mosques. The fabled Hagia Sophia is next in line for conversion, after eighty years of service as a museum.
Erdoğan’s naming of the third bridge across the Bosporus as Yavuz Sultan Selim elicited howls of outrage from the traditionally persecuted Alevi community, in whose historical memory the sultan remains a bloodthirsty ruler responsible for slaying thousands of them. But the uproar didn’t deter Erdoğan from dispensing advice to young people to have three children, not spend their student years in mixed-sex dormitories, steer clear of abortions, and avoid drinking alcohol or kissing in public.
Erdoğan’s grating paternalism nearly came unstuck in May, when a youthful rebellion of mostly liberal secularists erupted after the government’s heavy-handed crackdown on environmentalists protesting the destruction of one of central Istanbul’s last parks spiraled into a nationwide insurrection. Erdoğan exploited a largely browbeaten media to accuse the demonstrators of everything from terrorism to irreligiosity, before sending in the police. Throughout the three-week period it took to pacify the country, he claimed from his media pulpit that his electoral popularity justified a harsh response.
Though he backed down on Gezi Park, Erdoğan continued his policy of large-scale but environmentally and archaeologically destructive public works, inaugurating in October the first train crossing under the Bosporus and moving ahead with plans to construct a second Bosporus canal and the world’s largest airport in Istanbul. Turkey’s GDP growth hovered at around 4 percent, a drop from previous years that is expected to accelerate when America’s quantitative easing program winds up over 2014. With Turkey grouped as one of the ‘Fragile Five’ emerging economies expected to suffer the most from Western investors withdrawing their money, Erdoğan will find it hard to continue conjuring up goodwill in the electorate through galloping growth, one of the cornerstones of his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) decade-long success.
Besides, having been elected prime minister twice, a clause in the AKP charter makes it impossible for Erdoğan to stand for a third time. But rather than take a break from politics, and despite failing to push through a new constitution that would have allowed him to keep on ruling by changing Turkey’s political system into a presidential one, he will likely contest June’s presidential elections. It is this trajectory that stands to be affected the most by the current arrests of his political and economic allies, and the ongoing investigation into their financial affairs.
The inquiry appears to emanate from the Gülen movement, a powerful religious group affiliated to a religious preacher living in exile in the US called Fethullah Gülen. Erdoğan may recognize a sort of ethical symmetry to his circumstances, as he finds himself going from leading what his critics described as a “witch hunt” against Turkey’s secularist elites, to being subjected to one himself. But it is a telling snapshot of where Turkey stands today that the fight for the future of the “secular” republic is being conducted by rival groups of Islamists. Whether Erdoğan manages to survive this latest challenge and emerge with a reconstituted support base will demonstrate if, alchemist-like, he can transform this past disastrous year into a good one in 2014.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
