openDemocracy: Turkish centre-right: soon over-crowded?

Erdoğan’s managerial genius has allowed him to survive several political crises that would uproot most governments. In each crisis, he strengthened and personalized his grip on power. Creating political scenarios reminiscent of Agamben’s state of exception, he targeted the group at the centre of any crisis, turning them public enemies by dehumanizing them in the eyes of his electorate. For the Gezi protests, he blamed secular-leftist groups for organizing a revolt against the elected government, working with – several – foreign governments to this end. For the corruption scandal that followed the Gezi protests, he blamed the Gülenists, his former ally, whom he then subjected to radical recriminations and effectively annihilated. For the resurgence of the decades-old Kurdish issue, he threw the pro-Kurdish and liberal-leftist HDP, a legal political entity in the Turkish Parliament, into the fire. He took on several western governments and portrayed them as global powers with sinister plans on Turkey. In order to exercise political influence he has also instrumentalised some transnational state apparatuses, such as the Diyanet, in many countries.

All in all, Erdoğan survived in power but with the cost of sacrificing major elements of moderate politics and almost all of his former allies. Infusing Islamist and ethno-nationalist elements with his ever-green populism, he skilfully re-positioned himself further on the right and carried – or rather dragged – most of his electorate with him. Yet, Erdoğan has to sustain a huge effort to keep his electoral base in their new position. To consolidate this, he has used illusions of an augmented grandeur and its enemies (including domestic collaborators). [...]

Four potential rivals can be anticipated in forthcoming general elections. Two of them are the established opposition to the AKP, while the other two are from an internal opposition. Let’s start with the latter. As President Erdoğan elevated himself to the status of undisputed leader, he side-lined old comrades but kept them on a leash for quite some time. Yet, not all of them have been terminally silenced. A former president and one of the founding trio of the AKP, Abdullah Gül, together with the former minister of economy, Ali Babacan, having maintained their credibility both in the eyes of the voters and business circles at home and abroad, are on the cusp of forming a political party. Recently Babacan resigned from the party of which he was a founding member, and publicly declared that party policies in recent years were in clear contradiction with the principles to which he had subscribed. Babacan’s resignation is likely to prompt others to follow, yet it is difficult to know how many. The problem for Erdoğan is that Babacan has been at the steering wheel of the Turkish economy during the successful years of the AKP. If the economy is now Erdoğan’s Achilles’ heel, the Babacan-Gül duo will be shooting right at it.

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Bloomberg: Turkey’s President Doubles Down After Defeat

You can’t keep a good autocrat down. After his humiliation in the Istanbul mayoral election last month, Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed chastened. Speaking to legislators of his AK Party, Turkey’s president said, “We don’t have the luxury of turning a deaf ear and ignoring the messages given by the people.”

He since seems to have changed his mind. Notwithstanding an election result that most analysts agree was a vote of no confidence in his management of Turkey’s economy, which is in acute crisis, the president has decided that Turks want more of the same. [...]

Babacan’s defection is potentially the most damaging: he was minister of economic affairs during 2002-07, when he steered the country out of an economic crisis. He is credited with the huge growth that followed. He has been muted in his criticism of Erdogan’s more recent economic policies, but will now feel free to open up. Like Davutoglu, he is thought to be especially critical of Erdogan’s decision to appoint his son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, as treasury and finance minister, a year ago.

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Reuters: Former Turkish PM Davutoglu slams Erdogan's AKP after Istanbul defeat

Ahmet Davutoglu, who served as prime minister between 2014 and 2016 before falling out with Erdogan, has criticized the president and his policies before.

But his latest comments come as former deputy prime minister Ali Babacan and former president Abdullah Gul, both founding members of the AKP, plan to launch a new rival party this year. [...]

“If we lose an election that we first lost by 13,000 votes again by 800,000 votes, as was the case in Istanbul, the one responsible for this is not a prime minister who delivered a clear parliamentary majority (in last year’s general election), but rather those who have caused a serious slide in rhetoric, actions, morals and politics.” [...]

Davutoglu had been rumored to be joining the breakaway party. Last week, a source close to him said he was planning a ‘new step’, but did not plan to join Gul and Babacan for now.

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Los Angeles Times: How will Turkey’s authoritarian president react to opposition’s big win in Istanbul mayoral race?

Ekrem Imamoglu of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, won 54% of the vote, soundly beating the AKP’s Binali Yildrim, who took 45%. It was a far wider margin of victory than Imamoglu achieved in the original March 31 vote.

Turnout was very high — 85% — in part reflecting public unhappiness over the recount that was ordered on technical grounds by the country’s highest electoral body, widely suspected of acting at the president’s behest.

Erdogan offered congratulations to Imamoglu, and Yildrim conceded graciously even before the votes had all been tallied. But in a sign some read as ominous, Monday-morning headlines in pro-government newspapers made no reference to the opposition victory, instead merely noting that the vote had taken place. [...]

The central government could take steps to sap Imamoglu’s administrative powers, or even invent a reason to charge him personally with a criminal offense of some kind, a fate that has befallen many of the president’s foes. [...]

Criticism of the president, once rare, burst into the open. Mustafa Yeneroglu, an AKP parliament member from Istanbul, tweeted: “We lost Istanbul because we lost moral superiority.”

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The Guardian: Erdoğan’s loss in Istanbul could transform Turkish politics

First the established opposition parties will be emboldened by his win. The opposition is now in control of cities accounting for almost 70% of Turkey’s GDP. Nine out of the 10 biggest urban areas in the country will be ruled for the next five years by a mayor linked to the opposition, the exception being the industrial province of Bursa. The opposition will have the opportunity to dismantle and then restructure the patronage networks that have helped the AKP to establish itself so successfully at the helm of Turkish politics. [...]

More importantly, Sunday’s result is likely to lead to a rethink by the AKP leadership. The shock must be momentous. It is surely the most severe interruption in Erdoğan’s electoral winning electoral streak. The future of Turkish politics will depend on how this result will be interpreted by Erdoğan himself and the lessons that this experienced and able politician will draw from this reversal of his political fortunes.

At stake may be the future of the AKP’s alliance with the Nationalist Movement party (MHP). One conclusion could be that this coalition has become too constraining for Erdoğan. For instance, the overhyped nationalism influencing the conduct of Turkish foreign policy is a byproduct of this political arrangement and so is the hardline approach to the Kurdish question both domestically and in Syria. Even more importantly, the political leadership may be compelled to question the benefit of the extreme centralisation of power ushered in by the transition to a presidential system a year ago. For a majority of the Turkish population, the presidential system does not seem to be functioning as advertised.

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Foreign Affairs: Have Turkey’s Elections Produced a Challenger to Erdogan?

Imamoglu and his rival, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, have both declared themselves Istanbul’s mayor-elect. Less than 0.2 percent of the more than eight million votes cast separates them. A recount has entered its second week, and anxiety is mounting within the opposition over whether the AKP will relinquish its quarter-century hold on Istanbul should the final tally confirm Imamoglu’s victory. [...]

Before the election, Imamoglu was a largely unknown district mayor of a far-flung Istanbul suburb. His campaign addressed everyday grievances, such as traffic congestion and job creation. Since the vote, he has shown a tougher side, holding impromptu press conferences to accuse the AKP of “acting like they’ve had their toys taken away,” although he has also tried to project a sense of normalcy to reassure a nervous public. [...]

Despite Erdogan’s theatrics, many voters went ahead and punished the AKP for policies that have unleashed soaring inflation and unemployment. Although Imamoglu refrained from attacking Erdogan, who remains Turkey’s most popular politician, he hammered a ruling elite ensconced in “their palaces” while “Istanbul is in a spiral of hunger, poverty, and unemployment.” Largely ignored by the media, Imamoglu took to Facebook to livestream visits to street markets, where he hugged fans and politely engaged AKP supporters who refused to shake his hand.

Pious voters have long shunned the centrist CHP, repelled by its rigidly secularist ideology and stodgy, elitist image. But nominating Imamoglu, a practicing Muslim who scheduled time on the campaign trail to attend Friday prayers, allowed the CHP, humbled by so many years in the political wilderness, to broaden its appeal. It last ran Ankara and Istanbul in the 1970s, and has been in the opposition in parliament since then as well.

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The New York Review of Books: Divorce Turkish Style

Turkey, in particular, is seeing a record number of divorces, as both women and men are looking for a way out of unhappy and sometimes abusive marriages. Over the past fifteen years, the divorce rate has risen from under 15 percent of marriages to nearly a quarter of them. Domestic violence is almost always cited as a leading reason by Turkish women seeking a divorce. This is true even outside urban areas, which have also seen a slight growth in divorce cases; increasingly, women are willing to seek divorces in smaller, religious towns such as Konya, in central Anatolia, where Nebiye was raised. More of these girls and women also now have access to education and online information.

Ipek Bozkurt, an outspoken women’s rights activist and Istanbul-based divorce lawyer, told me that one reason for this change in social norms is that more women are working, and they are more aware of their rights. “They’re so fed up with their marriages and the treatment they receive, the treatment their kids receive, all the physical and psychological pressure that they have suffered,” she said. “They’re just willing to let that marriage go.” [...]

In November, speaking to a roomful of his women supporters at a “gender justice” summit, Erdoğan boasted of presiding over an increase in the proportion of women in the workforce, up from 28 percent in 2002 to 38 percent today. At the same conference, Zehra Zümrüt Selçuk, the minister of family, labor, and social services, insisted that the government was working hard to encourage marriage and prevent divorce, but she balanced her message with an appeal to women’s growing desire for independence. “Our primary goal,” she said, “is to minimize and solve the problems encountered by the family and to protect its unity without ignoring the rights of the individuals.” [...]

It is true that femicide has grown steadily in Turkey over the last decade, with more than 2,000 women killed by their partners. Feminists say that the number of murders is up because more women are resisting inequality and abuse in their marriage, and reporting domestic violence more. Unfortunately, some men are retaliating with deadly violence, said Gülsüm Kav, the co-founder of We Will Stop Femicides, a women’s group that advocates for victims’ families and independently counts women homicides in Turkey. But the solution, activists argue, is not what the government says—that women should stay in abusive marriages and try to work things out with their husbands—but legal reform.

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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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Politico: EU should keep Turkey close and Erdoğan even closer

Today, Turkey’s prospects for joining the EU are the lowest they have been since talks began in 2005. Indeed, one of the few things Europeans and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can agree on is that for the moment, EU membership is out of question.

And, yet it would be a mistake for the EU to turn its back on its southeastern neighbor. Not only does Turkey remain an important partner when it comes to energy, security and trade; a rapid deterioration would strengthen — rather than weaken — the country’s increasingly authoritarian president. [...]

The EU is still by far Turkey’s dominant trading partner. The bloc takes in close to half of Turkey’s exports and provides about two-thirds of the foreign direct investment going into the country. And when it comes to matters of international trade — for instance, U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel — Turkey would be far worse off fighting alone, rather than in coordination with the EU, with which it has been bound in a customs union since 1996.

The EU needs Turkey too. Notwithstanding the election results, the European Council agreed on June 29 to release the second tranche of €3 billion in financial assistance for Syrian refugees. Imperfect as it is, the EU-Turkey refugee deal reached in March 2016 to stem the tide of asylum seekers has stuck. With migration remaining a burning political issue in key EU countries like Germany, the partnership with Ankara is set to endure. [...]

If the EU were to pull the plug on membership talks, that would be a gift to the Turkish president. He will whip up nationalism and lay blame for whatever problems the country confronts — be it inflation spiraling out of control or an uptick of violence in the Kurdish-populated south-eastern provinces — at Europe’s feet. Far better to let Erdoğan to take this momentous decision, and deal with its consequences domestically.

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Deutsche Welle: Turks in Germany praise 'our leader' after two-thirds vote for Erdogan

Nearly two-thirds of votes cast by the Turkish community in Germany went to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sunday's election, far more than the support he averaged in Turkey, according to initial results. [...]

"Let's face it: The celebrating German-Turkish Erdogan supporters not only celebrate their autocrat, but also express their rejection of our liberal democracy. Like the AfD. We must worry about this," he wrote on Twitter, referring to the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). [...]

Erdogan had 65.7 percent of the vote in Germany with 80 percent of votes counted, compared to a projected 52.6 percent in Turkey.

Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) had 56.3 support among the Turkish community in Germany, versus 42.5 percent in Turkey.

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Al Jazeera: Who will Kurds vote for in key Turkey elections?

For the first time, voters in Turkey will cast ballots on Sunday in simultaneous presidential and parliamentary polls. The process is in line with last year's constitutional changes that will transform the country's parliamentary system to an executive presidential one by granting the top office increased powers. [...]

Demirtas, along with several other former HDP members of parliament, has been in jail since November 2016, accused of having links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). His trial began in December last year and, if convicted, he faces up to 142 years in prison. Demirtas denies the charges. [...]

Opinion polls have suggested that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party might not achieve a parliamentary majority if the HDP manages to gain more than 10 percent of votes on Sunday, which is the unusually high threshold required for a party to enter the 600-seat assembly. [...]

Etyen Mahcupyan, a columnist and former adviser to the AK Party leader, said that secular voters might back the HDP at the ballot box to make sure that AK Party loses its majority in parliament - as it did in June 2015. [...]

"There is an increasingly widespread view that the HDP will surpass 10 percent of the votes. And this might decrease the number of the CHP voters changing their votes for the HDP," added Mahcupyan, who added that Kurds represent about 15 percent of the electorate in Turkey.

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Haaretz: How the anti-Erdogan Opposition Can Win Sunday's Elections in Turkey

This newfound political horizon is neutralizing the key obstacle that has plagued the opposition, especially the CHP, since the rise of Erdogan and his AKP party in 2002: The we-never-can-win syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by the belief that no matter what happens, no matter how good the CHP might perform, it is doomed to remain the opposition forever.

The flip-side of the we-never-can-win syndrome, is the co-option of the assumption that Erdogan is electorally invincible, and that no matter how bad his rule might be, or how deep the economy sinks, overall, he has been "good" for the country. This is coupled with the belief that his authoritarian ways still reflect the will of the majority which legitimizes them – and casts a shadow of supposed delegitimacy on opponents of that creeping authoritarianism. [...]

But after that rise, the CHP plateaued. Part of that was thanks to constituencies of potential voters it had consciously excluded. Even though Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, founded the party, it had a long history of excluding Kurds and religious Muslims, among other groups. It would take the CHP a whole decade to revamp itself, and when Kemal Kilicdaroglu was elected party leader in 2010, the party expanded its base from 20% to 25%., Yet since then it has been unable to chisel away at Erdogan’s consolidated support of 42-49% - and has fallen into its normal mode of inertia. [...]

Everyone remembers the elections of June 2015, when the HDP did cross the threshold, the AKP lost its majority – but the opposition failed to unite, and that led Erdogan to declare new elections and to run them out of town. This time, it seems that even the nationalist Iyi party has been persuaded of the necessity of a tactical understanding with the HDP, to whom they are politically antagonistic, because without that understanding, the opposition’s chance of countering the AKP in parliament is nonexistent.    

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BBC: The young Turks rejecting Islam

In the 16 years that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party has been in power, the number of religious high schools across Turkey has increased more than tenfold. [...]

But over the past few weeks, politicians and religious clerics here have been discussing whether pious young people have started to move away from religion.  [...]

While there are no statistics or polls to indicate how widespread this is, anecdotal evidence is enough to worry Turkey's leaders. [...]

Turkey's top religious cleric, the head of Religious Affairs Directorate Ali Erbas, has also denied the spread of deism and atheism among the country's conservative youth. "No member of our nation would ever adhere to a such a deviant and void concept," he said.

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Haaretz: Are Official Bans and Slurs the Start of Full-on Persecution for Turkey's LGBT Community?

A week ago, the governor of Turkey’s capital city banned all events - "cinema, theater, panels, interviews, exhibitions" - relating to the gay, lesbian and transgender community from taking place in the nation’s capital in the name of the wider "community’s public sensitivity [and] to provide peace and security." [...]

It was only a matter of time until the ban reached Istanbul. And so it was: days later an LGBT-related film screening, to be held at the Pera Museum, was also banned by the Istanbul governor’s office, who claimed that the organizers had failed to submit the proper authorization papers.  [...]

Defying the ban, students at Ankara’s prestigious Middle East Technical University screened a gay-oriented film. The university cut the electricity in order to stop the screening. Fortunately, the Turkish police opted not to use force against the students, who went on to march and chant slogans supporting LGBT rights. [...]

The LGBT ban should be seen in the wider context of Turkey’s ongoing clampdown on civil society. The first spike came during the Gezi Park protests, but accelerated since last year’s failed coup, when Turkey came under a State of Emergency that continues up to today. [...]

For the ruling AKP, LGBT issues for years were too much of a taboo to address, both among the party leadership and its constituency. During its long rulethere have been plenty of of homophobic slurs by AKP members. However, these spiked as the LGBT community became more politically ambitious, as was evident during the 2015 parliamentary elections. 

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Salon: Is the world ready for “Kurdexit”? Referendum among Iraqi Kurds has Middle East on edge

This arrangement has its limits. From the perspective of the Kurds, the Iraqi leadership in Baghdad is determined to keep the KRG weak. In Iraq’s system of spoils, the Kurds are supposed to receive 17 percent of government revenues. According to officials in the Kurdish capital, Erbil, Baghdad has consistently shortchanged the Kurds of this constitutionally mandated share of government revenues. This accounting spat has exasperated both Kurds and Arabs and has compelled Kurds themselves to ignore agreements with Baghdad as they see fit. The best example of this is the Kurdish decision to sell oil independent of the Iraqi government. At one point in 2014, the fight over the KRG’s proposed oil trade required then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden to intercede. American officials helped negotiate an agreement in December 2015, but that quickly faltered, leading the Kurds to sell oil without the consent of Baghdad in 2015. Then, of course, there was the Islamic State’s invasion and the performance of the Iraqi security forces, which convinced Kurdish leaders that Iraq was irredeemably broken.  [...]

The Turks are opposed to KRG independence because they are worried about Syrian Kurdish independence and they are currently engaged in a fight with the separatists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a terrorist group. Yet Turkey is also the KRG’s largest investor, and Barzani’s KDP has developed strong ties to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party. The Kurds are hoping that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s appropriation of the anti-Kurdish nationalist right will not affect their aspirations to statehood. Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, it is hard to imagine the Turkish military invading Iraq to snuff out Kurdish independence there. Its foray into Syria has demonstrated the limits of a military that seems far less fearsome than many imagined from the second largest army in NATO.

The real problems the Kurds have lie in Tehran and Baghdad. The Iranians are opposed to the referendum for similar reasons as the Turks. They have their own Kurdish population that exists uneasily within the dominant Persian political and cultural milieu. The Iranians have more of a capacity to make mischief for the Kurds, which is why officials in Erbil are angry that the United States has counseled a referendum delay. They believe this has only emboldened the Iranians to threaten the Kurds. From their perspective, the American position is bewildering. The Trump administration was supposed to roll back Tehran’s influence, not enable bad Iranian behavior.

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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

Jacobin Magazine: The American AKP

In drawing such parallels, we should be careful not to over-egg the pudding. Erdoğan, for all of his autocratic brutishness, has genuine ideological commitments and cultural and political ties with his base that Trump does not. Erdoğan grew up poor and even spend time in jail for his religious beliefs (a situation you could see befalling Trump, but not out of any political principle).

However, we shouldn’t let personality politics obscure the similar social and political forces driving the type of faux-populism that Trump and Erdoğan represent. They were not created in a vacuum, nor are they sustained by force of personality alone. We must also look to their enablers. [...]

In terms of their mass base, the two parties are similar in that they both draw substantial electoral support from non-elites in districts far from the centers of cultural, economic, and political power. In the US, it’s whites in rural and suburban areas, often religious and often skittish about the country’s demographic changes; in Turkey, it’s pious Muslim Turks of small town Anatolia, resentful of the Westernized cultural and political elite that historically dominated Turkish society as well as the Kurdish minority, who they deplore for supposedly destroying the unity of the Turkish republic.

Both parties mix conservative religious ethics — whether it’s “Judeo-Christian values” or “Muslim morals” — with elite-friendly economic policies. Both peddle xenophobic nationalism served with a hefty dose of conspiracy. [...]

However, at the same time their colleagues in Congress condemn Erdoğan’s assault on protesters and wax lyrical about the sanctity of the First Amendment, GOP lawmakers are busy trying to undermine people’s right to protest at the state level. Across the country, Republican lawmakers have proposed imposing draconian fines on demonstrators, banning masks at protests, and even indemnifying drivers who drive into protesters. In Arizona, legislation introduced this past winter would allow protesters to be charged with racketeering.

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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 York Times: The Failure of a Neo-Ottoman Foreign Policy

Mr. Erdogan, the country’s leader for 14 years, is the one chiefly responsible for putting the Ottoman Empire at the center of Turkey’s collective imagination. The Ottoman sultans doubled as the caliphs of the Muslim world, which is not lost on the supporters of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P. The chairman of the A.K.P.’s youth wing recently declared Mr. Erdogan “president of all the world’s Muslims.” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent Qatar-based cleric associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, similarly regards Turkey’s president as “the hope of all Muslims and of Islam.”

These ambitions seem to have an especially pronounced effect on Turkey’s Middle East policy. After Syria’s civil war began in 2011, Ankara sought to replace the regime of President Bashar al-Assad with Islamist allies. To that end, it sponsored armed groups that would do its bidding in Syria, groups named for Ottoman rulers like the Sultan Murad Brigade and the Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror Brigade. [...]

But the reality on the ground may not comport with Mr. Erdogan’s visions. There is little reason to believe that he can recreate the prestige and the expanse of the Ottoman Empire in a 21st-century world. [...]

Even the deputy prime minister for economic affairs recently admitted that Turkey is going through “its toughest period since the end of the First World War,” when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The Turkish people cannot be lulled to sleep forever with fictions of an Ottoman revival. Soon, they will have to wake up and face the unpleasant reality.

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