HOW DEMOCRATIC IS TURKEY?
Not as democratic as Washington thinks it is.
BY STEVEN A. COOK, MICHAEL KOPLOW | JUNE 3, 2013
It seems strange that the biggest challenge to Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authority during more than a decade in power
would begin as a small environmental rally, but as thousands of Turks
pour into the streets in cities across Turkey, it is clear that
something much larger than the destruction of trees in Istanbul’s
Gezi Park — an underwhelming patch of green space close to Taksim
Square — is driving the unrest.
The Gezi protests, which have been marked by incredible scenes of
demonstrators shouting for Erdogan and the government to resign
as Turkish police respond with tear gas and truncheons, are the
culmination of growing popular discontent over the recent direction
of Turkish politics. The actual issue at hand is the tearing down of
a park that is not more than six square blocks so that the government
can replace it with a shopping mall but the whole affair represents
the way in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has
slowly strangled all opposition while making sure to remain within
democratic lines. Turkey under the AKP has become the textbook case
of a hollow democracy.
The ferocity of the protests and police response in Istanbul’s
Gezi Park is no doubt a surprise to many in Washington. Turkey,
that “excellent model” or “model partner,” is also, as many put it,
“more democratic than it was a decade ago.” There is a certain amount
of truth to these assertions, though the latter, which is repeated ad
nauseum, misrepresents the complex and often contradictory political
processes underway in Turkey. Under the AKP and the charismatic
Erdogan, unprecedented numbers of Turks have become politically
mobilized and prosperous — the Turkish economy tripled in size
from 2002 to 2011, and 87 percent of Turks voted in the most recent
parliamentary elections, compared with 79 percent in the 2002 election
that brought the AKP to power. Yet this mobilization has not come with
a concomitant ability to contest politics. In fact, the opposite is
the case, paving the way for the AKP to cement its hold on power and
turn Turkey into a single-party state. The irony is that the AKP was
building an illiberal system just as Washington was holding up Turkey
as a model for the post-uprising states of the Arab world.
Shortly after the AKP came to power in 2002, a debate got under way
in the United States and Europe about whether Turkey was “leaving
the West.” Much of this was the result of the polite Islamophobia
prevalent in the immediate post-9/11 era. It was also not true. From
the start, Turkey’s new reformist-minded Islamists did everything they
could to dispel the notion that by dint of their election, Turkey was
turning its back on its decade of cooperation and integration with the
West. Ankara re-affirmed Turkey’s commitment to NATO and crucially
undertook wide-ranging political reforms that did away with many of
the authoritarian legacies of the past, such as placing the military
under civilian control and reforming the judicial system.
The new political, cultural, and economic openness helped Erdogan
ride a coalition of pious Muslims, Kurds, cosmopolitan elites, big
business, and average Turks to re-election with 47 percent of the
popular vote in the summer of 2007, the first time any party had gotten
more than 45 percent of the vote since 1983. This was unprecedented
in Turkish politics. Yet Erdogan was not done. In 2011, the prime
minister reinforced his political mystique with 49.95 percent of the
popular vote.
Turkey, it seemed, had arrived. By 2012, Erdogan presided over the
17th-largest economy in the world, had become an influential actor
in the Middle East, and the Turkish prime minister was a trusted
interlocutor with none other than the president of the United States.
Yet even as the AKP was winning elections at home and plaudits from
abroad, an authoritarian turn was underway. In 2007, the party seized
upon a plot in which elements of Turkey’s so-called deep state —
military officers, intelligence operatives, and criminal underworld —
sought to overthrow the government and used it to silence its critics.
Since then, Turkey has become a country where journalists are routinely
jailed on questionable grounds, the machinery of the state has been
used against private business concerns because their owners disagree
with the government, and freedom of expression in all its forms is
under pressure.
Spokesmen and apologists for the AKP offer a variety of explanations
for these deficiencies, from “it’s the law” and the “context is
missing,” to “it’s purely fabricated.” These excuses falter under
scrutiny and reveal the AKP’s simplistic view of democracy. They
also look and sound much like the self-serving justifications that
deposed Arab potentates once used to narrow the political field
and institutionalize the power of their parties and families. Yet
somehow, Washington’s foreign-policy elite saw Turkey as a “model”
or the appropriate partner to forge a soft-landing in Egypt, Tunisia,
Libya and elsewhere.
In the midst of the endless volley of teargas against protesters
in Taksim, one of the prime ministers advisors plaintively asked,
“How can a government that received almost 50 percent of the vote
be authoritarian?” This perfectly captures the more recent dynamic
of Erdogan’s Turkey, where the government uses its growing margins
of victory in elections to justify all sorts of actions that run up
against large reservoirs of opposition.
The most obvious way this pattern has manifested itself is in the
debate over the new Turkish constitution, which Erdogan had been
determined to use as a vehicle to institute a presidential system in
which he would serve as Turkey’s first newly empowered president. When
the opposition parties voiced their fervent opposition to such a plan
and the constitutional commission deadlocked in late 2012 — missing
its deadline of the end of the year to submit its recommendations —
Erdogan threatened to disregard the commission entirely and ram through
his own constitutional plan. He floated the idea again in early April
2013, but softened his position as it became clear that there is
significant opposition to his presidential vision even within the AKP.
Turkey’s new alcohol law, which among other things sets restrictions
on alcohol sales after 10 p.m., curtails advertising, and bans new
liquor licenses from establishments near mosques and schools, is
another example of the AKP’s majoritarian turn. Despite vociferous
opposition, the law was written, debated, and passed in just two weeks,
and Erdogan’s response to the law’s critics has been to assert that
they should just drink at home.
Similarly, the AKP is undertaking massive construction projects in
Istanbul, including the renovation of Taksim Square, the building
of a new airport, and the construction of a third bridge over the
Bosphorus, all of which are controversial and opposed by widespread
coalitions of diverse interests. Yet in every case, the government has
run roughshod over the projects’ opponents in a dismissive manner,
asserting that anyone who does not like what is taking place should
remember how popular the AKP has been when elections roll around. In
a typical attempt to use the AKP’s vote margins as a cudgel, Erdogan
on Saturday warned the CHP — Turkey’s main opposition party —
“if you gather 100,000 people, I can gather a million.”
Turkey’s anti-democratic turn has all taken place without much
notice from the outside world. It was not just coercive measures
— arrests, investigations, tax fines, and imprisonments — that
Washington willfully overlooked in favor of a sunnier narrative
about the “Turkish miracle.” Perhaps it is not as clear, but over
the last decade the AKP has built an informal, powerful, coalition
of party-affiliated businessmen and media outlets whose livelihoods
depend on the political order that Erdogan is constructing. Those
who resist do so at their own risk.
All this is why the current tumult over the “redevelopment” of
Gezi Park runs deeper than merely the bulldozing of green space. It
represents outrage over crony capitalism, arrogance of power, and
the opacity of the AKP machine. In the media, Erdogan has encouraged
changes in ownership or intimidated others to ensure positive coverage
— or, in the case of the Gezi Park protests, no coverage. In what was
a surreal scene – but sadly one that was altogether unsurprising to
close observers of Turkey — CNN International on Friday was covering
the protests live in Taksim while at the very same time CNN Turk, the
network’s Turkish-language affiliate, was running a cooking show as
the historic heart of Turkey’s largest city was in enormous upheaval.
This dynamic of Turkish press censorship and intimidation, in which
media outlets critical of the government are targeted for reprisal,
has resulted in the dismissal of talented journalists like Amberin
Zaman, Hasan Cemal, and Ahmet Altan for criticizing the government or
defying its dictates. This type of implicit government intimidation
is unreasonable in an allegedly democratic or democratizing society.
Under these circumstances, Turkish politics is not necessarily more
open than it was a decade ago, when the AKP was pursuing democratic
reforms in order to meet the European Union’s requirements for
membership negotiations. It is just closed in an entirely different
way. Turkey has essentially become a one-party state. In this the
AKP has received help from Turkey’s insipid opposition, which wallows
in Turkey’s lost insularity and mourns the passing of the hard-line
Kemalist elite that had no particular commitment to democracy.
Successful democracies provide their citizens with ways in which to
express their desires and frustrations beyond periodic elections,
and Turkey has failed spectacularly in this regard.
The combination of a feckless opposition and the AKP’s heavyhanded
tactics have finally come to a head. This episode will not bring down
the government, but it will reset Turkish politics in a new direction;
the question is whether the AKP will learn some important lessons
from the people amassing in the streets or continue to double down
on the theory that elections confer upon the government the right to
do anything it pleases.
It is not just the AKP that needs to reassess its policies, but
Washington as well. Perhaps the Obama administration does not care
about Turkey’s reversion or has deemed it better to counsel, cajole,
and encourage Erdogan privately and through quiet acts of defiance
like extending the term of Amb. Francis Ricciardone, who has gotten
under the government’s skin over press freedom, for another year.
This long game has not worked. It is time the White House realized
that Erdogan’s rhetoric on democracy has far outstripped reality.
Turkey has less to offer the Arab world than the Obama administration
appears to think, and rather than just urging Arab governments to pay
attention to the demands of their citizens, Washington might want to
urge its friends in Ankara to do the same as well. The AKP and Prime
Minister Erdogan might have been elected with an increasing share of
the popular vote over the last decade, but the government’s actions
increasingly make it seem as if Turkish democracy does not extend
farther than the voting booth.
AFP/Getty Images
SUBJECTS: TURKEY, DEMOCRACY
Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern
Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Michael Koplow is program
director of the Israel Institute and the author of the blog Ottomans
and Zionists.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/02/how_democratic_is_turkey?page=full