But maybe more importantly, the coup failed because Erdogan won the information battle on two fronts. The putschists staged a “1980s-style” coup, Cagaptay told me, proclaiming their takeover on the public broadcaster TRT, which isn’t widely watched in Turkey these days. “Erdogan goes on his smartphone, does a FaceTime interview, puts it on social media, millions saw it,” Cagaptay said. “It was a victory of digital over analog, in terms of communications styles.” (Turkish cellphone-service providers reportedly ramped up call, text, and data packages during the tumult.) [...]
Around the same time, according to Cagaptay, Erdogan urged imams to mobilize people as well, likely through communications channels maintained by the government’s religious-affairs directorate, which runs and funds Turkey’s 80,000 mosques. Mosque loudspeakers began issuing the call to prayer at an ungodly hour. “It would be the equivalent of church bells suddenly starting to toll all over the United States at 1:15 AM, and ringing for hours,” Cagaptay said. Erdogan was asking his political base, which includes many Islamists, to “flood the country.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Mehmet Gormez, the head of the religious directorate, “ordered thousands of imams to recite prayers known as ‘sela,’ ordinarily reserved for funerals and special religious occasions. When issued at other times, the prayers act as a call to arms for the Islamic community.” Within hours, people were clambering on top of tanks. The coup was a husk of its former self. [...]
The more likely scenario is that Erdogan capitalizes on his post-coup support to push constitutional amendments through parliament that change Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential one, with Erdogan at the helm. (Erdogan became president in 2014 after serving the limit of three terms as prime minister, though he has remained Turkey’s de facto leader even when occupying the ostensibly ceremonial presidential office.) This approach would be in keeping with Erdogan’s “pragmatic, gradualist” style, Cagaptay said. Erdogan has already amassed a great deal of power, Cagaptay noted, but he’s done so over 13 years, unlike Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist leader and former Egyptian president, who tried to consolidate authority all at once and was overthrown in a military coup as a result. [...]
All this is hard to stomach for Cagaptay, who just two years ago wrote a book titled, The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century’s First Muslim Power. Erdogan, he noted, has improved living standards in Turkey and fashioned Turkey into a middle-income country. But he never healed Turkish society’s most problematic schisms—between religious and secular Turks, between the government and the Kurds. In fact, those schisms have only grown more pronounced. Erdogan, Cagaptay told me, “is going to go down in history as the guy who transformed Turkey economically, and either messed it up politically or almost messed it up politically.”
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