Is Turkey turning Islamist? This allegation is a well selling story offered to the world by secular elite Turks with Western education and good English. They refer to the ongoing standoff between the government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and the classical establishment of Turkey in the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the army. The confrontation reached a new peak in February with the arrest of high ranking generals in the course of a critical investigation against an assumed state sponsored terrorist network. However, the dichotomy Islamists versus Secularists is misleading. Instead, the government of Tayyip Erdogan is running into trouble because it has adopted some of the rather classically republican habits of governing Turkey. How did it get there after eight years in power?
Against the backdrop of Islamist movements since the foundation of the Muslim brotherhood in 1928, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) is not an Islamist party. Judged by its policies and its electorate, the AKP is a melting pot of devout conservatives, Turkish nationalists, liberal reformists and pious businessmen. In order to keep these factions together, its political line is primarily one of pragmatism; in negative terms, this could be seen as a zigzag course and as an explanation why reforms are sometimes sluggish. The regional elections in March 2009 demonstrated that the AKP is mainly the party of the rising Anatolian middle classes which form a new business oriented powerful elite. The AKP celebrated its greatest successes in Central Anatolia, but was defeated in the Mediterranean cities and the Kurdish East. There is also a growing Islamist party in Turkey on the rise, the Felicity Party (SP), which received some 5% of the vote primarily among the underprivileged impoverished Turks.
Erdogan’s time in office can be divided into two distinct periods. First, during the years of reform from 2003 to 2005, Erdogan reformed Turkey: an updated penal code, amended civil rights and the gradual reduction of the military’s role in politics. Erdogan’s second period though has been one of a constant struggle for power. Since 2006, Turkey has seen a bitter dispute about the office of President, a thinly veiled coup threat of the general staff in April 2007, and the undemocratic closure proceedings against the AKP in 2008. However, a profound irony of Erdogan’s struggle with the classical elites is that he has assumed some traditional positions of the Turkish centralized state—for example, in dealing with the PKK, or in media relations, recently in his policies on the Greek minority, and on Armenia. His often emotional and apodictic rhetoric provides the notion of a traditional Turkish ruler who detests criticism. Erdogan meets regularly with the chief of the general staff. His proposals to alleviate the Kurdish problem were approved by the army’s representatives on the National Security Council. At times, Erdogan defended the general staff against fierce attacks from the kemalist nationalist CHP. Tayyip Erdogan, the man from the periphery, has arrived at the center of the Turkish state.
Once a politician has taken the heights of the prime minister’s office or of the President’s palace in Ankara, mountainous Turkey looks completely flat. It is an extremely centralized state in which the teacher in a remote village is appointed by government agencies in the same way as hazelnut prices are fixed by bureaucrats in Ankara. Erdogan and his political associates had resented this centralist system for a long time. Now, at the top they have learned to like it. President Abdullah Gul has appointed the president of YÖK, a powerful agency overlooking universities which is crucial to shape the minds and skills of future economic cadre and state officials. Likewise, the general director of the state television network TRT was appointed by the President in 2007. In an even more crucial institution, Gul will appoint three new judges to the constitutional court before the end of this year. In the investigation against coup plotting generals and civilians, pro-government prosecutors have occasionally acted in similar ways as Turkish kemalist judges when they violated judicial rights of individuals. After eight years with the same government, and a President from the same party, Turkey changes gradually from the top to the bottom as any country with such a strongly centralized state would change.
The Turkish constitution was written under the tutelage of the army in the early 1980s. Tayyip Erdogan talked on numerous occasions about the need of constitutional change but has achieved little so far. Therefore the germs of authoritarianism are still entrenched in many regulations and the composition of the top leading institutions. A striking example is the Turkish party closure law which threatened the existence of the AKP in 2008 and was used to shut down the pro-Kurdish DTP in 2009. These interventions fit the way how most of Turkey is governed. It is remarkable that in a country as diverse as this there are so few powers devolved to the regions. The dilemma is that towns and districts do not have the sources of revenue which would enable them to cope with their responsibilities. Local authority is further weakened by a division of power between a democratically elected mayor and a bureaucratically appointed governor. The poorer Kurdish regions in the East as well as the rich and potentially powerful secular regions in the West do not enjoy the privilege of having a self-sufficient local government or strong representatives in the capital to push for their interests. There is no separation of powers neither at the top of the state nor in the provinces. The fact that regions and cities are deprived of participation, that they have no money and no clout is the biggest obstacle for future democratization in Turkey.
The rise of the new elites from Anatolia to power is a development the Turkish political system is no longer able to cope with. The AKP government’s strength and attitude emanates from institutions that the kemalist elites had once built to safeguard their supremacy. The resulting battles reveal that the republic cannot properly balance the interest groups competing for power. Turkey has seen four coup d’état in forty years to restore a rough political equilibrium. But popular support for a coup has sharply diminished. Instead permanent obstruction of reforms and a destabilization through unending confrontation look more likely. Today, the country needs a profound constitutional reform which would aim at decentralizing and further democratizing Turkey at the same time. A new division of power both at the center and in the provinces is long overdue. The AKP, the Turkish parliament and the European Union in membership negotiations with Turkey should vigorously push for these reforms.
Michael Thumann – DIE ZEIT’s Middle East Bureau Chief
