Erdoğan: a failure of moderate Islamism
“2023’s most important election” takes place on May 14 in Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has thrown his initial opponent in jail, changed the constitution in his favour and shut down most of the independent media. But in spite of all these institutional advantages and a willingness to jettison the rule of law, Erdoğan is behind in the polls to his challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a mild-mannered former civil servant. Erdoğan’s unpopularity has many causes, including the devastating earthquakes that hit Turkey in February and the number of collapsed buildings that were put up by cronies of the president. Corruption in this case literally cost thousands of lives.
Nonetheless, it remains difficult to imagine that Turkey’s president will meekly accept the results of a close election which he loses. The shadow of Trump and Bolsonaro makes such a thing easier: it’s no longer the done thing to accept unwelcome results. If Erdoğan does reject the outcome, you pity the US Ambassador being sent in to tell him to stand down. So, for all the polling and other evidence that ordinary Turks would like to see the back of Erdoğan, I am cautious about writing his political obituary.
Erdoğan’s career is one of the most consequential of recent geopolitical history. I vividly remember, when running the Foreign Office’s countering violent extremism (CVE) programme, the debates around whether Erdoğan represented a positive, pragmatic version of Islamist politics, or a dangerous fusion of authoritarianism and religious intolerance. Famously, Erdoğan had served a short prison sentence in the late 1990s as mayor of Istanbul when he publicly quoted an Islamist poem with the lines “The minarets are our spears, the domes are our shields”. The fact that you could be imprisoned for publicly quoting poetry that undermined the secular character of the Turkish state was in itself problematic. At that time, the possibility that Turkey could join the EU was taken seriously. On the one hand, the military-enforced secularist norms were a profoundly undemocratic legacy of Ataturk, forcing millions of Turks to minimise their own cultural inclination to live a Muslim lifestyle. On the other, the realistic prospect of a large Muslim country joining the EU was clearly challenging.
Britain under David Cameron was the most forceful proponent of Turkey’s accession to the EU. Long before Brexit, the prospect that the EU might be rendered ineffective as it attempted to absorb Turkey was too tempting for British Europhobes to ignore. It is a strange irony that the prospect of Turkey joining the EU was used as a major element of the Brexit campaign (including the ludicrous idea that 76 million Turks would emigrate to the UK, as if a vast country might become completely uninhabited as a result of emigration). Whereas, the same Europhobes had enthusiastically sought the accession of Turkey to the EU in previous years as a means of undermining the institution.
The biggest barrier to Turkish EU accession has become Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Since becoming Prime Minister and then President, he has forcefully sought the re-Islamisation of Turkish society. This has been pursued in various ways - partly through the normalisation of the hijab (headscarf) in government offices since 2013 or more recently the campaign to create, in Erdoğan’s own words, a “pious generation”, schooled in madrassas that receive generous public funding, even though their educational output has been far behind that of ordinary secular schools. At the same time, Erdoğan has made Turkey less democratic, particularly by his crackdown on an independent media, judiciary and civil service. All of these things would be prerequisites for EU membership, once a coveted aspiration of Turkish leaders, now a distant and increasingly remote possibility. Indeed, Erdoğan has courted popularity in the Arab world - where his Islamist politics and social conservatism are an immediate hit…
