Turkey's trend towards authoritarianism may now accelerate

A midnight awakening to news of a coup attempt was probably the last thing that anyone expected in Turkey on Friday evening. Yes, the country is generally agreed to be in a dire way politically, facing armed challenges from the Islamic State, Kurdish militants, and (the government claims) a little-known Sufi movement led by an exiled clergyman living since 1999 on the east coast of the United States. Moreover the drift towards an Islamist-flavoured authoritarian political system still carries on and several opposition parliamentarians seem poised to face court proceedings, if not prison, for things they have said in speeches.

But when around 11 pm on Friday evening, the prime minister, Binali Yildirim, announced that an attempted coup was apparently under way, there was general incredulity. Turkey’s military once dominated the country’s life, a praetorian force which civilian party politicians were unable (or perhaps unwilling) to stand up to. But when Islamists came to power in 2002, the military despite obvious unhappiness did not step in—and between 2008 and 2012 their power was broken by a series of arrests and trials on trumped up conspiracy charges which President Erdoan himself eventually moved to quash.

I witnessed Turkey’s last full scale military coup on 12th September 1980. It was announced just before dawn and had been carried out with careful planning and forethought. The politicians had already been locked up and spirited away. Martial law was already in force throughout the country. A junta was announced. There were tanks at every street corner and a national curfew. And above all the military takeover of 1980 took place at a time when national politics were completely deadlocked; the economy was in ruins; and ordinary Turkish people craved strong government and stability and so accepted the change, at least initially, with a huge sigh of relief, not least because the military stressed that everything was happening “within the normal chain of command.”

None of that applies to July 2016. The coup makers struck strangely in the late evening rather than before dawn. They did not manage to close down television and the social media. They did hold a few key points—the bridges across the Bosporus—but they botched an attempt to seize the Gölba Satellite groundstation outside Ankara and so broadcasters carried on though 42 people were killed in the battle for the station. They seem not to have arrested any politicians, least of all the head of state and the prime minister.

Nor did they have the semblance of legitimacy that comes from acting within the chain of command: the chief of general staff, General Hulusi Akar was seized and locked up. Most other senior generals refused to join the coup and within an hour or two were broadcasting appeals against. It appears that the airforce, usually considered the most radical wing of the military, was not involved, and that the coup leaders were officers of colonel rank and below from the gendarmerie, including a spate of lieutenants—too junior to carry weight with much of the army.

An attempt was made to publish a declaration of the installation of a junta, called a “Peace Council” but it carried no signatures. There was mention of martial-law but it never turned into a reality.

Instead it became clear that the coup-makers face opposition not only from the 50 per cent of the Turkish electorate—conservative Islamists—who support President Erdoan, but also from liberals and the middle class who strongly dislike him. Young Turks have grown up with memories, sometimes exaggerated tales, of the military coup of 1980, the repression of the left which followed it, the accompanying mass trials, jailings, torture, and deaths under torture. The military did, it needs to be remembered, unwittingly permit the liberalization of the economy which ushered in three decades of steady growth and prosperity, but the memory of its harshness lingers on. No carnations would be thrown at Turkish tanks in the event of a coup today.

And in the Turkey of 2016, the Islamic clergy also play a more open part than in the past. During the small hours of Saturday morning, minarets and mosques resounded with a special call to pray, urging the faithful to defend their fatherland.

President Erdoan, staying in a hotel at Marmaris on the south-west coast, quickly regained the initiative despite his lack of back up support around him, gave television interviews using Facetime on a mobile phone—and by the middle of the night had found a small plane to fly him back to Istanbul.

The fact that he could make such a journey during a coup attempt reveals both the lack of planning and the apparent lack of support for the coupmakers from the rest of the military. Much of the army and the entire police force (in Turkey a generally pro-Islamist institution) remained loyal to him. There was bloodshed on a substantial scale—at least 161 people are believed to have died in clashes so far in Ankara and Istanbul. Bombs were dropped near the presidential palace killing five people and the Grand National Assembly was also struck. Yildirim says that more than 2,800 officers have so far been detained, including five generals. Turkey's state-run news agency says authorities have detained ten members of the country's Council of State, its top administrative court, while more than 2,700 of the country's judges have been removed from duty. More arrests and trials will inevitably follow and the trend towards authoritarianism is more likely to tighten than disappear.

But Turkey has been spared military rule by what would probably have been a very radical regime of junior officers—or worse still, a likely descent into civil war between supporters and opponents of the elected government, at time when it is already fighting bitterly against terrorism on three fronts.