Turkey’s new sultan
Democracy, as Turkey’s President Erdogan once famously remarked, “is like a train; once you reach your destination, you get off”. And this Sunday, Erdogan got off the train, said Douglas Murray in The Spectator. His slender victory in the referendum means that the secular republic founded by Kemal Atatürk in 1923 “has been snuffed out”. Turkey as we know it “is history”, said Yavuz Baydar in The Guardian. Erdogan now has a mandate to amend the constitution. By 2019, the office of the prime minister will be abolished; the president (Erdogan) will have sole prerogative to appoint senior bureaucrats and 12 of the top court’s 15 judges, to issue decrees with the force of law, and to exercise even more control of the armed forces. Turkey, said The Independent, has become an “elective dictatorship”. It has seceded from the democratic world.
It is a “catastrophe” for the West and for global stability, said Owen Matthews in the Daily Mail. Europe now has another authoritarian leader on its Eastern flank. And what hope for the rest of the Middle East region if Turkey, once seen as a model for Muslim nations to follow, can’t sustain a functional democracy? The worst of it is that Erdogan stole the vote, said Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. His AKP party only won (with just 51.4% of the vote) thanks to blatant electoral fraud: opposition rallies were smothered; after many ballots had been cast, Turkey’s election board decided to accept ones that didn’t bear the official stamp required. All this, without even taking into account the jailing, after July’s failed coup, of a dozen MPS and 80 journalists, and the closing of 158 media outlets. Let’s not overdo the end of democracy stuff, said Gulnur Aybet in The New York Times. The truth is that democracy has never come easy for Turkey: its present constitution was written in 1982 by the generals who had carried out a military coup (the military has intervened in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997). They left Turkey with a system in which both president and PM were elected by popular vote, a recipe for “deadlock and political crisis” whenever a major dispute over policy arose.
That’s why I don’t share the anxiety over Turkey’s “swaggering sultan”, said Roger Boyes in The Times. A stronger Erdogan, no longer terrified that the deep state (of army officers, judges and intelligence officers) is out to get him, and confident enough not to dismiss all his critics as terrorists, may well provide the kind of stability the region needs. He may not be the kind of democrat beloved of metropolitan liberals, but he’ll keep the country together. Don’t be too sure, said Soner Cagaptay in The Wall Street Journal. Turkey is fatally polarised into two camps: an Islamist, conservative, right-wing coalition who believe the country “is a paradise”; and a loose group of leftists, secularists, liberal Muslims and Kurds “who think they live in hell”. A majority in each of the three big cities – Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir – voted No in the referendum. Rural Anatolia voted “yes”. The best that Turkey can hope for, under the newly empowered Erdogan, is a permanent state of crisis.