Erdogan and Turkey at the cusp of a new era

Turkey is a political curiosity: it straddles the continents of Europe and Asia and is the legatee of an empire that at its peak contained large parts of Southeast Europe, the Trans-Caucasus region and all of West Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.

After the First World War, its leader, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, the father of the Turkish people, not only shaped the modern state that emerged from the debris of defeat in the war, but he also appeared to reject every aspect of the people’s past. Ataturk plaaced the principle of secularism at the heart of the new order.

This changed with the accession of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to power fifteen years ago – first as prime minister from 2003 and then as president from 2014. His original political base was the Islamist Welfare party. In 1998, he was banned from active politics and imprisoned for reciting a poem that spoke of the centrality of religion in government. He then gave up this robust Islamic approach to politics and in 2001 set up the moderate Justice and Development Party (AKP, in its Turkish acronym).

Last year, Erdogan obtained popular support for major changes in the country’s constitutional set-up: the country will now have a presidential rather than a parliamentary system; the strength of the national assembly will increase from 550 to 600, and the voting age would now be 18 years instead of 25 years earlier. Erdogan’s critics at home and abroad saw in these changes an attempt by the president to consolidate his authoritarian rule in the country.

In May this year, Erdogan called for snap elections on 24 June, nearly a year and a half before they were due in November 2019. Opposition parties made a major effort to present a united front: though there were six presidential candidates, Erdogan’s principal opponent was Muharrem Ince who headed the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and campaigned on a secular platform.

The other candidates were Meral Aksener of the newly setup IYI (Good) party and Selahattin Demirtas of the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), who has been in prison since 2016 for backing the Kurdish insurgency.

The opposition campaign consisted of severe criticisms of the president’s dictatorial approach and a promise to return to parliamentary rule, end the state of emergency and, in the case of the Kurdish candidate, establish local democracy in place of strong central rule.

In the event, in a voter turnout of 87 per cent, Erdogan obtained 53 per cent of the vote, while Ince got 31 per cent. In parliament, the AKP got 295 seats, just short of a majority. However, his electoral ally, the rightwing Nationalist Action Party (MHP) got 48 seats, giving Erdogan a comfortable majority in parliament. The CHP and Meral’s IYI party got 146 and 43 seats, respectively. The Kurdish party did well to get 67 seats.

Erdogan’s success has been ascribed to his ardent nationalism and his military forays in Syria to confront the expanding territorial gains of the Kurds, while standing up to the Americans who were backing them.

The results have exposed the hostility that sections of the western political establishment and media have for Erdogan personally, projecting him as a hardline Islamist.

A month before the elections, the London Review of Books published a long essay by a commentator on Turkey, Ella George, where she spoke of “repression and fear” in Turkey, the “capriciousness of arbitrary power” exercised by Erdogan, and the “deeply traumatised society” he had created.

Despite such dire warnings from some observers, Erdogan is unlikely to be either capricious or dictatorial: his authoritarian instincts will be restrained by his dependence on an ally for majority support, the strong presence of the opposition in parliament, and the democratic values of the Turkish people.

There are formidable challenges before the newly elected president. Erdogan will need to urgently address the economy, where the currency has lost its value and inflation and unemployment have dealt serious blows to the very people who see him as “our father”.

Erdogan will also need to heal the divisions in his country – mainly between his government and the Kurds. He has for long seen their aspirations for political, economic and cultural space in their country as a security threat, without accepting that perhaps his own highhanded policies could have added to their sense of alienation.

Erdogan commences his new stint as president at a time when significant changes are emerging in the world order. These are epitomised by the rise of China as an economic power with global influence, the increasing affinity between China and Russia, and the challenge they together pose to the West-dominated international system.

These two countries are today spearheading the idea of “Eurasia”, the economic, logistical and political blurring of the Europe-Asia divide, propelled by the economic development of Japan, South Korea, China and India; the re-emergence of an assertive Russia seeking an influential place in global councils, and the logistical connectivity projects being promoted across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean by China and India, accompanied by a simultaneous decline in US influence and credibility in world affairs.

Turkey’s history, geopolitics and contemporary interests facilitate its special place in the “Eurasia” project. Ataturk had said that Turkey has an eye and arm in Europe, while remaining an Asian country. But, Turkey has long struggled to reconcile its Islamic, European and Central Asian legacies. The nascent idea of “Eurasia” now provides it with the perfect platform to shape its national identity that would draw from the tapestry of its complex history and equip it to shape its national role in this new context.

We will know very soon if Erdogan uses his new mandate to further polarise his country with divisive and confrontationist politics or emerges as the stateman he can be who, nearly a hundred years after Ataturk, makes his nation a major role-player in the new world order.

The author is a former Indian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE.