The rise of Erdogan and how he neutralised the military
Whatever his failings, enough Turks love the president to confront troops and tanks
CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT PRESIDENT Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won five elections and dominated Turkey for almost 14 years, yet his throne tottered as never before during a night of turmoil in Istanbul and Ankara.
What appears to have saved this sombre and authoritarian leader was a crucial split in the armed forces – with many in the high command opposing the attempted coup – and the president’s unparalleled ability to bring thousands of followers onto the streets.
Put simply, Mr Erdogan was still able to mobilise enough popular support to survive this challenge.
Understanding why this polarising figure could triumph over his foes requires delving into the life story of a leader who sold buns and lemonade on the backstreets of Istanbul as a boy, before rising to become a head of state with such power and ambition that he was routinely compared to one of Turkey’s old sultans.
Mr Erdogan, 62, grew up beside the Black Sea as the son of a coastguard. His family moved to Istanbul when he was 13, where the young Mr Erdogan worked as a street-seller to supplement their finances. He studied at an Islamic college and developed a passion for football, becoming a semi-professional player.
But Mr Erdogan’s roots were in the conservative, deeply religious heartland of Turkey. This is the solid base of support that he has always retained. His people are the poor and the lower middle class, especially in rural Anatolia, whose profound attachment to Islam makes them feel estranged from the urban secular elite.
It was entirely natural that Mr Erdogan should have started his political career as a follower of the various Islamist parties that skirted on the fringe of legality under the secular constitution bequeathed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
He began as a member of the neo-Islamist Welfare party and achieved national fame as a successful mayor of Istanbul between 1994 and 1998.
Yet the tension between Mr Erdogan’s brand of politics and the secular character of the Turkish state was demonstrated by what happened next. The Welfare party was banned, military officers helped to remove him from office as mayor and Mr Erdogan himself spent four months in jail in 1999.
His offence was to have read out a nationalist poem at a public rally, including the line: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”
This was interpreted as a direct threat to the fabric of the secular state. In the eyes of his critics, Mr Erdogan has posed such a threat ever since.
After the Welfare party was banned, Mr Erdogan helped to found a replacement called the Virtue party. When that was also suppressed in 2001, he co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP), turning this into a formidable political machine.
In 2002, Mr Erdogan won his first election and became prime minister. His longevity in power owed everything to his success in building a unique coalition of support.
By advocating free-market economics, Mr Erdogan won over the traditional mercantile elite. By taking on the army, whose generals saw themselves as guardians of the secular constitution, and asserting civilian control over the military, he even attracted some support from the urban liberals.
When this was joined together with his traditional constituency among the faithful of rural Anatolia, Mr Erdogan created an unstoppable electoral force. The AKP has won five elections in a row since 2002, helped by the failings of a divided and ossified Republican and nationalist opposition.
But Mr Erdogan has begun shedding his followers. When the economy boomed during his first decade in power, the mercantile elite backed him. Now that growth has slumped and Turkey’s relations with vital trading partners like the European Union are in crisis, many have turned against him.
The urban liberals rejoiced when Mr Erdogan took on the army, but they were aghast when he began acting on his Islamist rhetoric by, for example, lifting the ban on wearing the veil in state institutions and urging Turkish women to have at least three babies.
Mr Erdogan has responded to pressure by becoming more authoritarian. Under his rule, Turkey is a world leader in the business of jailing journalists and closing down newspapers. Any public criticism of the leader has to be carefully weighed and phrased.
When the law prevented him from staying on as prime minister in 2014, Mr Erdogan neatly side-stepped this by becoming president instead.
Under the little matter of the constitution, the Turkish presidency is supposed to be ceremonial. But Mr Erdogan has retained his old dominance, manoeuvring a placeman, Ahmet Davutoglu, into the job of prime minister – and then sacking him when he showed faint flickers of independence. The new prime minister, Binali Yidirim, is firmly under the president’s thumb.
Just to make sure, Mr Erdogan wants to rewrite the constitution to create an all-powerful imperial presidency.
For now, AKP lacks the votes in parliament to deliver that ambition, but after the coup, Mr Erdogan is likely to press ahead with that driving goal.
In case anyone fails to get the message that the presidency is now the dominant institution in Turkey, he has the biggest palace in the world with a floor area four times that of Versailles.
Meanwhile, criminal cases have been brought against no less than 1,800 people for the crime of “insulting the president” and two newspapers were shut down March.
Mr Erdogan has become the most polarising figure in the history of the Turkish republic. But just as he is hated, he is also loved. His success in overcoming the coup provides compelling proof that enough Turks love him to keep him in office – even against a challenge that comes in the form of tanks and helicopter gunships. during a single week in