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Global Insight: Hubris threatens to humble all-powerful Erdogan
Mighty he may be but this is a tricky moment for prime minister
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After more than a decade as prime minister of Turkey and three, thumping electoral triumphs with a rising share of the vote on an increased turnout, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is – and behaves as – lord of all he surveys. But the gathering smell of authoritarianism around his neo-Islamist government has brought with it an unmistakable whiff of hubris – and so it has proved as protests against bulldozing a park to build yet another shopping mall in Istanbul spell that word out for him.
The proximate cause of this metropolitan outrage is the destruction of Gezi Park, a little green oasis near Taksim Square in the chaos of central Istanbul, earmarked for redevelopment without public consultation – by a government which is all about the former and not at all about the latter.
Yet, if these demonstrations – gathering in strength as Turkey’s police trigger-happily deluged its public squares in teargas – were only about green space, they would not have spread like flash floods beyond Istanbul to the capital, Ankara, and dozens of other cities. Mighty he may be, but this is a tricky moment for Mr Erdogan.
His ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), rebuilt from the debris of two banned Islamist parties into a Muslim version of Christian Democracy, has delivered much of what its name promises: more than doubling per capita income, spreading wealth and healthcare, schools and roads, while a new breed of “Anatolian tiger” entrepreneurs has risen up against Turkey’s incumbent handful of business conglomerates.
Another way of looking at the AKP is as a party of building contractors, who have never seen anything they did not want to build and have grown accustomed to bulldozing anything in their path. In Istanbul alone, there are plans for a new airport, a new bridge across the Bosphorus and a ship canal to run alongside it, as well as a vast, hilltop mosque to cast a shadow over the city’s jewels of Islamic architecture. Mr Erdogan’s critics insistently accuse him of aspiring to become a neo-Ottoman sultan, but Pharaoh would be just as near the mark. As Turkish Islamists have bitingly remarked, the mujahids or aspiring warriors of decades back have become the müteahhids or construction tycoons of today.
But these protests are just as much about the AKP’s encroachment on public, social and cultural space as the elimination of green space. The new establishment headed by Mr Erdogan has politically sidelined the secular elites that had ruled the republic created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as of right. In particular, he has elbowed aside the army. That removed an undemocratic check on executive power, but nothing convincing has yet emerged to fill this political space.
Thus, the new establishment feels free to redesign the secular school curriculum or trample on the independence of the Turkish Academy of Sciences, to jail journalists or introduce restrictions on alcohol. Hostility to what many secular Turks see as an assault on their way of life is now crystallising into street protests in large part because the secular opposition – especially the Republican People’s Party of Ataturk – is impotent.
The real drama of Mr Erdogan’s Turkey is not the secularists’ spectre of creeping theocracy but that the Kemalist opposition has proved unelectable, trapped in the past and reliant on generals and judges to win back what it keeps losing at the ballot box. Part of this drama is the paradox that Mr Erdogan and the AKP, politically paramount but paranoid about plots against them, behave as though they were still the opposition – with the difference that the feedback loop of this normally well-oiled political machine has been short-circuited by sycophants. Before first winning power in October 2002, the AKP spent 22 months interviewing in depth 41,000 people across the country. Now, even allies admit, Mr Erdogan listens mostly to himself.
The prime minister, Turkey’s most towering figure since Ataturk, is intent on sealing a peace with the country’s restive Kurdish minority and then gliding next year into a presidency with enhanced powers. With such an ambitious agenda he would be foolish to open a new front. Hubris may not be a well-organised opposition but it has a way of humbling the mighty.
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