Without Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and an embattled Europe, would Turkey still be sliding further into dictatorship under strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? We obviously can’t know, but the silence of the “international community” is deafening as Erdoğan seeks to ban his main opponent and opens the way to flouting presidential term limits that ought to have prevented him from staying in power beyond 2028.
Turkey has never been a stable democracy. Since its war-torn foundation by Kemal Atatürk, after the collapse of the Ottoman sultanate in the wake of the First World War, authoritarian governments have been the norm in Istanbul, punctuated by coups as often as by elections.
However, Atatürk’s vision of a secular western-orientated nation, encompassing a largely Muslim population at the southern gateway of Europe and Asia, at least paid lip service to democratic institutions and norms. Turkey joined both Nato and the Council of Europe after the Second World War. And as European democracy and the European Union strengthened dramatically after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there was a very real prospect that Turkey could become fully part of a hugely expanded European project. A customs union with the EU was agreed in 1995 and negotiations for full EU membership began.
The irony is that Erdoğan appeared for a while to be the hinge figure in this new European Turkey. A moderate Muslim and modernising mayor of Istanbul, Erdoğan came to power in an election landslide in 2003, and briefly looked to the EU to create a more open and prosperous Turkey free of both military and Islamic domination. EU membership didn’t happen in the 2000s and 2010s because the forces against it proved too great, including from Angela Merkel’s Germany. But even as Erdoğan became increasingly authoritarian, particularly after an attempted military coup in 2016, the broad west-orientation remained off the back of huge trade and defence alignments with both the EU and the US.
The Ukraine war has proved to be a watershed. Notwithstanding military support for Kyiv as a Nato member, Erdoğan has played both sides economically, and now presents himself as a bridge between Brussels and Moscow, rather like Trump. And the combination of the war plus a resurgent Trump and Putin has radically reduced any internal or external pressure against his internal strongman coup launched last week.
The acute irony is that the opposition leader he is seeking to crush is almost the mirror image of the Erdoğan who came to power democratically in 2003. Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was about to be chosen as the opposition Republican People’s Party presidential candidate before his arrest last week, came to prominence as a successful mayor of Istanbul with strong appeal across Turkey’s secular/Muslim divide.
It is far from certain that Erdoğan will triumph in his attempted coup. Western, democratic forces are strong, especially in the major Turkish cities, and Turkey’s (albeit weakened) army can’t necessarily be relied on by Erdoğan to crush dissent if the current protests massively escalate. It is also just possible that an alternative opposition candidate to İmamoğlu might come through and win, if Erdoğan isn’t able to ban the main opposition party outright.
In so many ways this existential crisis for Turkish democracy against the strongman reflects today’s wider international crisis of democracy and legitimacy. Will Erdoğan end up alongside Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping on an axis of global dictators? Or will Turkey seek once again to become part of a European democratic project, integrating still more into the European economy? The spectrum of possible outcomes is very wide and hard to predict, as it is in respect of Trump, Putin and an as yet democratic Europe. We should hope that the west triumphs in Istanbul as in Kyiv… and Washington.
