It is difficult to say whether the president and prime minister really didn’t know about the coup in advance. It is also possible that the government, or other state institutions such as the MIT, convinced some factions of the putschist bloc to step back and support the government. Even if many generals did not give up immediately, this might have weakened the attempt fatally.
This may also partly explain why the vast majority of high-ranking generals and commanders remained silent for at least a couple hours after the plotters sprung into action, and why they acted very slowly even after they declared loyalty to the elected government. Alternatively, perhaps Erdoğan, the MIT, and/or the prime minister allowed the coup attempt to be carried out, confident it would fail and could then be used to deal a comprehensive blow to the Gülenist and other intra-state opposition. [...]
With France in a state of emergency, it may well be that Austria accepted the role of bad cop and German chancellor Angela Merkel that of good cop, insisting on upholding more or less good relations and the refugee deal while at the same time increasing pressure on Ankara through other channels. Following the comments from Austria, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, declared that halting membership talks would be a political mistake, and German officials later made similar statements. [...]
Attempts to build a broad democratic front of Kurds, leftists, Alevis, feminists, LGBTQ people and other oppressed people, and left forces in the CHP had been pursued before the coup, and some left organizations have been the driving forces. Yet the coup attempt showed that the Left was incapable of effectively building such a front. In the days after the coup, the Left was paralyzed, unable to put its position of “neither coup nor countercoup, but a people’s democratic alternative” into practice. This allowed the CHP to take charge and hold the aforementioned rally in Taksim, among other things.
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