Conservatives turn against Turkish leader
Referendum results reflect discontent with Erdogan’s autocratic style and pragmatic foreign policy.
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Last month’s constitutional referendum may have yielded a victory for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, enshrining vast powers for him and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, but the results were far closer than his supporters were expecting, largely because of growing discontent within Turkey’s conservatives.
Erdogan has counted on conservatives’ support for more than 14 years, but his authoritarian style of governance and his pragmatic foreign policy are pushing a segment of Turkey’s Islamists to turn against him.
“The AKP is no longer a humble party. It cannot hear any criticism, whether from its own members or from others,” said Abdullatif Sener, one of 74 people who founded the party in 2001 and who served as deputy prime minister under Erdogan until he quit in 2007. “Those critics still in the party have no power to direct it. Many are keeping quiet themselves, because they know if they criticize Erdogan, the next day they will be targeted.”
As dissenters like Sener have left the AKP’s ranks, those who have remained have taken a back seat to Erdogan. Former President Abdullah Gul and former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu — reportedly forced by Erdogan to resign last year — have not quit the party, but their reservations with Erdogan’s policies have left them largely sidelined.
“The AKP is a broad umbrella party that has amassed Islamists, less politicized religious conservatives and even traditional center-right voters who care about economic benefits,” said Mustafa Akyol, an expert on Turkey’s Islamist movements. “In the past four or five years, however, the party has been taken over by a cult of personality built around Erdogan.”
Erdogan’s Machiavellian ways, Akyol says, have put him at odds with Islamists on a range of foreign and domestic issues, and although the dissenting conservatives probably represent less than 4% of the electorate, the close margin of victory for Erdogan in April’s referendum indicates they could become an important demographic in Turkey.
Among the dissenting Islamist movements is the Saadet Party, made up of ultraconservatives that in some ways is the intellectual predecessor to the AKP, but whose leadership actively campaigned against last month’s constitutional changes. Saadet’s small but influential constituency of traditional Islamists, says Akyol, helped the “no” vote win in unexpected places, including Istanbul’s Uskudar district, where Erdogan lives and 53.3% of voters rejected the amendments.
But the Saadet Party represents just one facet of a growing faction of anti-Erdogan conservatives.
Fatma Bostan Unsal, another core AKP founder, was purged from the party last year over her views on how to deal with the country’s Kurdish insurgency.
“It should be normal for religious people to be critical of government policy,” Unsal said. “But now, if you are critical of the government, it turns into something ridiculous; it turns into a controversy.”
In the party’s early days, Unsal said, the priority for her and other Islamists was lifting restrictions on the head scarf, which kept her and millions of other women out of the public sphere. But over the next decade, Unsal realized Erdogan and the AKP were more interested in consolidating power than dealing with issues like the head scarf ban.
“I raised the issue at many closed meetings, I said we need to run candidates wearing the head scarf, and I and a group of maybe 150 women in the party threatened to start a public movement if this was not done.”
In response, Erdogan accused the dissenters of trying to abuse the head scarf issue. “After that, I kept attending party meetings, but I did not raise my voice,” Unsal said. It wasn’t until 2013 that the AKP allowed a head scarf candidate to run on a party ticket.
In January 2016, Unsal and more than 1,000 other academics were labeled “traitors” by Erdogan for signing a petition calling for a cease-fire in the Kurdish conflict. Unsal, a career academic, is now one of 145,000 public workers who have lost their jobs. Her passport has been revoked, and her signature on the peace petition could draw terrorism charges for allegedly supporting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party.
Erdogan’s foreign policy did not fit with what Unsal and the other dissenters expected, either. Whether it was the decision to support the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 or restore ties with Israel after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 — in which Israeli commandos stormed a Turkish ship off the Gaza Strip, leaving nine people dead on deck and one fatally injured — Erdogan seemed to stray from core Islamist views and strike a politically expedient path instead.
Turkey’s largest humanitarian organization, known as IHH, which organized the Mavi Marama attempt to enter Gaza, occasionally calls for protests to mark the deadly raid, but its attempts to pursue criminal cases against Israel in Turkish and international courts have been stifled by the AKP. Last month, one of Erdogan’s best-known supporters, columnist Cem Kucuk, called for the expulsion of “maniac” Islamists supporting the foundation from the AKP’s ranks. Outrage among Islamists prompted Erdogan to weigh in, saying no one but he and his staff spoke for his office.
While the foundation has weathered the storm so far, other Islamist civil society groups have not.
Mazlumder, one of Turkey’s best-known human rights monitoring groups, experienced a coup of its own in March: A court-appointed government trustee forced out the organization’s leadership, including its head, who left a seat as an AKP parliament member in 2013 to head the human rights group. All 16 of the organization’s offices in the Kurdish southeast were closed, and thousands of members deemed too critical of Erdogan were purged.