Independent: I recognise Boris Johnson’s coup for what it is because I’ve seen this before – in Turkey

Britain is experiencing a slow-moving coup d’etat in which a right-wing government progressively closes down or marginalises effective opposition to its rule. It concentrates power in its own hands by stifling parliament, denouncing its opponents as traitors to the nation, displacing critics in its own ranks, and purging non-partisan civil servants. [...]

This new method of seizing power has largely replaced the old-fashioned military coup d’etat in which soldiers and tanks captured headquarters and hubs in the capital and took over the TV and radio stations. Likely opponents were rounded up or fled the country. The military leaders sought popular passivity rather than vocal support.

I first witnessed the new type of coup in action three years ago in Turkey when it took place in reaction to an old-fashioned military coup. Part of the Turkish army tried to stage a military putsch on 15 July 2016 and provided the then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with what appeared to him to be a heaven-sent opportunity to install an elective dictatorship in which subsequent elections and the real distribution of power could be pre-determined by control of the media, judiciary, civil service, security services and, if people still stubbornly voted against the government, by outright electoral fraud. [...]

Could the same thing happen here in Britain? This is one of the strengths of the Johnson coup: many people cannot believe that it has happened. British exceptionalism means that foreign experience is not relevant. Few knew or cared that Turkey had a strong tradition of parliamentary democracy as well as a grim record of military takeovers. But it is these slow-burn civilian coups which are such a feature of the modern world that we should be looking at – and trying to learn from – and nor what happened in Britain in the 1630s when Charles I sought to impose arbitrary government.

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Social Europe: Turkey’s New Regime And Its Neoliberal Foundations

A very important turning point for Turkey came with the June 24, 2018 elections. These brought a complete change in the Turkish political system. Turkey had gone through a referendum on April 16, 2017 to change its parliamentary system into a ‘superpresidential’ system, which resulted in a small majority (51.4/48.6%) in favour of the change. Later, the government called for early elections in June 2018 to put these constitutional changes into effect. Erdoğan again prevailed over his rivals and officially changed the Turkish regime into a despotic one-man rule. There may be some people who see this regression in Turkey as due to the Republic’s persistent democratic deficiencies since its inception, or this can be seen as simply an ordinary example of eastern despotism. However, I’d argue that the Turkish case should be examined rather in the context of the global rise of right-wing populism which is itself a consequence of failing neoliberal globalisation.

Neoliberal economic governance and the right-wing populist and the authoritarian currents it has generated are posing serious threats to democracies all around the world. Although this regressive trend was already in place, it intensified after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The countries with weak institutions and immature democracies, like Turkey, have been most severely affected by it. The origins of this trend should be sought in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the neoliberal form of capitalism began to emerge and destroy the balance established between the state and the market after the Second World War. [...]

After its 2001 economic crisis, Turkey implemented deeper neoliberal reforms which subsequently brought AKP to power. Since 2002, Turkey has been governed by AKP’s neoliberal regime which has acquired hegemonic characteristics. Although the party brought an end to the military’s tutelage in politics, Turkey radically shifted away from democracy over time. The society was already depoliticised and the organised sections of civil society were effectively neutralized, so it was not difficult for AKP to construct an authoritarian regime. In fact, with the accumulated negative effects of the neoliberal policies, Turkey was already a fertile ground for authoritarian populism. Therefore, AKP and Erdoğan should be seen both as products and promoters of neoliberalism.

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One year since Turkey’s attempted coup. 12 months of arrests, trials and closures of Turkish media

As Cumhuriyet Gazetesi journalists face trial today, we look at the state of Turkey's media. Protests Spread Across Morocco.
Posted by Facebook on July 24, 2017

Al Jazeera: Analysts: Leaks could threaten Emirati diplomacy

The latest email leaks from the Hotmail account of the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, could threaten Emirati diplomacy and strain regional relations, analysts say. [...]

On Saturday, hackers released what they claimed was the first in a series of emails taken from the inbox of Otaiba. The leaks have revealed a strong relationship between the UAE and think-tanks closely allied to Israel, along with Emirati efforts to tarnish the images of Qatar and Kuwait; Emirati involvement in the failed coup attempt in Turkey; and the UAE's fight against Islamist movements, particularly Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. [...]

Some of the leaked emails include a detailed agenda for a meeting scheduled later this month between officials from the UAE government and representatives of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think-tank. The agenda includes a joint assessment of the changes that have taken place in Saudi Arabia, which proposes a plan to support Saudi stability and its new policy directions.

The agenda also includes a review of internal Saudi policies, domestic challenges faced by the Saudi leadership, foreign policy and the kingdom's role in stripping legitimacy from worldwide "jihad".

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Political Critique: No Hope in Turkey

Those who followed Turkey’s tense constitutional referendum are looking high and low to find the silver lining. Unfortunately, there is none. Yes, President Erdoğan would have loved to carry the day with a much wider margin than 51.35 percent. The victory of the “No” vote in 17 out of 30 big urban centers, including Ankara and Istanbul where his own political career took off when he won the mayoral elections in 1994, must have hurt. But win he did and frankly, there is nothing to stop him now. Turkey has formalized the one-man political system that has been in the making for a good part of the 2010s. [...]

One should be aware that this referendum is not the end of the journey. The constitutional changes transferring all executive power into the hands of the president, abolishing the prime minister’s office and subduing parliament to the national leader, will come into force only after the next elections for the head of state, which will take place in the middle of 2019. Erdoğan will have to be returned to office by the voters. The likelihood of such an outcome is quite high. The 50 percent who oppose the current president are not a homogenous group and it would be a surprise if a candidate emerges who is capable of mounting a credible challenge. [...]

Worse still, there is a low-intensity war still going on in the southeast provinces. Erdoğan cannot win it, neither can the PKK. As things stand, it is bound to drag on for at least another generation and it is now fought in the big cities of western Turkey too. Across the border, Syria remains a mess and there is no end in sight. The “Euphrates Shield” operation is now officially over, but the Turkish military will be invading again in the future, to “mow the grass” and keep the Kurds at bay. Jihadis will continue to wreak havoc in Turkey. The strong president is meant to do away with the bad memories of the 1990s when the country was run by fractious coalition cabinets. Ironically, the PKK insurgency and Turkey’s exposure to the Middle East mark a sort of return to the turbulent 1990s.

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Jacobin Magazine: Just the Beginning

President Erdoğan, when faced with the fragmentation of the ruling power bloc — which became evident with the failed July 15th coup attempt organized by the Gülenists, his erstwhile allies — was obligated to form a fresh alliance with various other groups within the state apparatus. The basis of this new alliance was waging war against the Kurds in Turkey and Northern Syria, and especially, preventing the creation of a “Kurdish corridor” in Rojava. Erdoğan’s 180-degree turn on the Kurdish question gave him leverage in building new alliances and strengthening his position within the state, thereby expanding his social base. [...]

Those in government circles are concerned that some constituencies of the AKP and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which acts like a de facto coalition partner to the AKP, may not perform as expected in the referendum. The MHP’s supporters across Central Anatolia, who are known to vacillate between the AKP and the MHP, seem to skew strongly towards a “Yes” vote; however, a large part of its supporters in the Western and Southern coastal regions may opt for the “No” vote. It seems that even the AKP’s aggressive ground incursion in Northern Syria failed to create a drastic change of sentiment in this group. Nor did the government’s attempts to equate “No” voters with terrorists and traitors gain traction. Likewise, in the AKP constituency, there are some anxious pragmatists who may refrain from voting “Yes” even if they don’t vote “No,” who have started to express their opinions more openly. In contrast, the HDP’s massive meetings in celebration of the Nawroz festival have shown that the Kurdish party’s ties with its base remain strong despite claims to the contrary, and that the “No” may poll strongly in the Kurdish provinces. [...]

The various “No” campaigns have already brought about a certain strengthening of the social opposition, which seems to have overcome the passivity and trepidation of the past year. However, we must not forget that this mobilization is still relatively weak considering the challenge ahead, and that it is sometimes fraught with problematic political discourse, bordering on liberalism and even nationalism. Although the “No” campaigns have given the socialist left the chance to return to the streets and to political activity among the masses, the socialist left constitutes only a small fraction of the “No” campaigns. There has been a significant dip in the socialist left’s capacity to intervene in the political arena on a larger scale. As such, the question that remains is how the socialist left will compensate for this weakness after the referendum and once again become a considerable force in the political arena.

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The New Yorker: A Last Chance for Turkish Democracy

The last time I met Demirtaş, in September, it was at a tea shop in the trendy neighborhood of Taksim. He was surrounded by bodyguards. Things were going badly for him—not because he had given up on democratic politics but because he had succeeded so well; in 2015, the H.D.P. captured an astounding eighty seats in the Turkish parliament. The Party had even begun to attract non-Kurdish voters. Soon, however, Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, began cracking down on the Kurds. Thousands of members of the H.D.P. were detained. In November, two months after our last meeting, Demirtaş, who is forty-three years old, was arrested and jailed. Now, facing what appear to be preposterous charges—supporting an armed terrorist organization—he is facing a prison sentence of as long as a hundred and forty-two years. [...]

But Erdoğan is a master at self-preservation. He beat back his accusers and then, last July, in what must be regarded as a political gift from the heavens, elements inside the Turkish military tried to overthrow his government. Erdoğan—not without some justification—blamed the attempted coup on the movement of Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher who lives in exile in the United States. After successfully putting down the attempted putsch, Erdoğan launched a sweeping, and still ongoing, campaign to destroy the country’s democratic opposition. Since July, more than forty thousand people have been arrested, and a hundred thousand government employees—including judges, prosecutors, and academics—have been fired. Tens of thousands remain in prison, including more than a hundred and fifty journalists and media workers. The government has closed a hundred and seventy-nine newspapers, television stations, and Web sites. Turkey is now the most prolific jailer of journalists in the world. [...]

Polls show that the referendum has the support of only around fifty per cent of likely Turkish voters. A “no” vote would be a crushing rebuke to the Turkish President, and, in the short-term, could provoke a violent reaction from him. But, if the Turkish people are serious about stemming Erdoğan’s drive to dictatorship, this may be their last chance.

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The New York Review of Books: Turkey: The Return of the Sultan

On April 16, Turks will vote in a national referendum that will, if successful, give President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan increased powers over parliament, the judiciary, and other parts of the civil bureaucracy. The offices of head of government and head of state will be unified in the person of Erdoğan, and the clock will also restart on his presidential tenure; he could stay in power until 2029. To many Western observers, this will be but the latest step in a return to the kind of authoritarianism that is common to many countries of the Middle East. It also seems to accord with the increasing turn away from democratic practices in many parts of the world, from Putin’s Russia to Trump’s America.

On closer inspection, however, what is happening in Turkey shows distinct traces of an earlier phase of Islamic-minded autocracy in the country’s history. Coming after an era of pro-Western democratization early in Erdoğan’s tenure, the recent shift toward Islamist rule under an unassailable ruler is a reaction to the Turkish Republic’s secular, rationalist twentieth-century founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as well as to the pluralist strain of modernization that more liberal Turks have advocated. Furthermore, it derives much inspiration from the late Ottoman Empire under Abdülhamid II, who ruled for more than thirty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [...]

In recent years, Abdülhamid has been the prime beneficiary of this revisionist current. He is spoken of with admiration by government ministers, who refer to him as the “Great Emperor” and—again in reaction to Atatürk, whose campaign of language reform removed many Arabic words from the Turkish lexicon—couch his name with reverential, Arabic adjectives. In stark contrast to the generally hostile silence surrounding the Ottoman ruler as recently as fifteen years ago, he is now remembered in events such as concerts and exhibitions, and an Istanbul hospital was recently renamed after him. On February 24, the state broadcaster aired the first episode of a major new series recounting the last thirteen years of the sultan’s reign, which shows him to be a steadfast, honorable, and pious ruler beset by scurrilous courtiers, iniquitous foreign powers, and a youthful Theodor Herzl scheming for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. The descendants of the Ottoman royal family, who were exiled from Turkey when Atatürk abolished the dynasty in 1923, have been welcomed back onto ancestral soil. One of these ex-royals, Nilhan Osmanoğlu, recently articulated the nostalgia felt by many Turks when she said, “When we look at the confusion in the Middle East…we see how well the Ottomans administered this part of the world.”

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Foreign Policy: Is Turkey Still a Democracy?

The spat with Germany and the Netherlands is just one example. On a range of issues — from the state of Turkey’s democracy to the Turkish role in Syria to Turkey’s extradition request for the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom it accuses of planning last summer’s coup attempt — Western countries have refused to adopt Ankara’s views.

Ankara is partially responsible for its own alienation. Consider last week’s trip to Turkey organized for more than a dozen American journalists from outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal by Ankara Mayor Melih Gokcek. The event was billed as a chance to meet with the country’s top officials, including President Erdogan, to hear their narrative of the coup attempt and why the United States should extradite Gulen.

The meetings, however, failed to materialize, and reporters were treated to a four-hour meeting with Gokcek himself. The majority of reporters left the meeting in protest. During the talk, Gokcek failed to present a single piece of evidence implicating Gulen in the coup and instead laid out his own conspiratorial worldview. [...]

Government officials, however, contend that the package would actually enhance the separation of powers in Turkey by dividing parliament’s existing powers with the office of the presidency. Parliament would maintain the power to approve the president’s budget, ratify international treaties and declarations of war, and overrule a presidential decree through legislation.

The legal merits of the constitutional changes aside, government officials also portray a “yes” vote as a victory against their domestic opponents — most prominently, the supporters of Gulen and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long insurgency against the state.

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