The New Old World (78 page)

The novelty of AKP rule, widely acclaimed in the West, is not an illusion. But between the standard image, to be found in every
bien-pensant
editorial, opinion column and reportage in Europe, let alone America—not to speak of official pronouncements from Brussels—and the reality of what is new about it, the distance is considerable. The party is an heir, not a founder, of its fortune. When the ban on pre-1980 politicians was lifted in 1987, the landscape of the late seventies re-emerged. Özal and Demirel disputed the mainstream Centre-Right vote, traditionally hegemonic, but weakened in the seventies by the rise of fascist and Islamist parties on its far flank. These now duly reappeared, but with a difference. Türkes had dropped much of his earlier ideological baggage, his party now touting a synthesis of religion and nation in the style of a more generic Turkish chauvinism, with somewhat greater—though still quite limited—electoral success as time went on.

Erbakan, on the other hand, became a major force. The popular constituency for Islamism was much larger, and he proved a formidable shaper of it. By 1994 he had created far the best grass-roots organization of any party, based on local religious networks, powered by modern communications and data systems. In that year, his—renamed—Welfare Party showed its mettle by capturing Istanbul, Ankara and a string of other cities in municipal
elections.
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Town halls had never been of much importance in the past, but the new Welfare mayors and their councillors, by delivering services and charitable works to communities that had never previously known such attention, made them into strongholds of popular Islamism.

Behind this success lay longer-term changes in society. Outside the state education system, religious schools had been multiplying since the fifties. In the market, the media were moving steadily downscale, the tabloid press and commercial television propagating a mass culture that was, as everywhere, sensationalist and consumerist, but with a local twist. By dissolving the distinctions on which the Kemalist compression of Islam had depended, between private life—and fantasy—and admissible public ideals or aspirations, it favoured the penetration of religion into the political sphere. The post-Ottoman elites could afford to look down on a popular culture saturated with folk religion so long as the political system excluded the masses from any real say in the government of the country. But as Turkish society became more democratized, their sensibilities and beliefs were bound to find increasing expression in the electoral arena. The Muslim vote had existed for nearly fifty years. By the mid-nineties it was much less inhibited.

On the heels of its municipal triumphs, the Welfare Party got a fifth of the national vote in 1995, making it the largest party in a fragmented Assembly, and soon afterwards Erbakan became premier in a precarious coalition government. Unable to pursue the party's agenda at home, he attempted to strike a more independent line abroad, speaking of Muslim solidarity and visiting Iran and Libya, but was rapidly called to order by the foreign policy establishment, and within a year ousted under military pressure. Six months later the Constitutional Court proscribed the Welfare Party for violating secularism. In advance of the ban, Erbakan formed the Virtue Party as its reincarnation. In the summer of 2001, that in turn was banned, whereupon—never short of inspiring names—he formed the Felicity Party to replace it.

This time, however, he could not carry his troops with him. A new generation of activists had come to the conclusion that Erbakan's erratic style of leadership—veering wildly between
firebrand radicalism and unseemly opportunism—was a liability for their cause. More importantly, the repeated crack-downs on the kind of Islamism he represented had convinced them that to come to power it was essential to drop his anti-capitalist and anti-Western rhetoric, and present a more moderate, less explicitly confessional face to the electorate, one that would not affront the Kemalist establishment so openly. These cadres had already challenged Erbakan for control of the Virtue Party, and in 2001 were ready to break away from him completely. Three weeks after the creation of the Felicity Party, the AKP was launched under the leadership of Tayyip Erdo
ğ
an. Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998, he had been briefly jailed for an inflammatory verse and was still ineligible to run for Parliament, but few doubted the practicality of his ambitions. His proven skills as orator and organizer assured his domination of the new party.

The spectacular scale of the AKP's victory in 2002, catapulting it into power, was an effect of the electoral system rather than of any overwhelming support at the polls. The party got no more than 34 per cent of the vote, far below the scores achieved by Menderes, Demirel or Özal at their height. This was transmuted into 67 per cent of seats in the Assembly by the number of other parties that fell below the 10 per cent bar—only the still-extant Kemalist RPP clearing it, with 19 per cent. The result was more a verdict on the kind of democracy the Constitution of 1980 had installed in Turkey than a tidal vote of confidence in the AKP: a combined total of no less than half the electorate was disenfranchised by the threshold for representation in Parliament.

Yet the party's disproportionate control of the legislature also corresponded to a new reality. Unlike any of its predecessors, it faced no credible opposition. All the parties associated with the debacle of the later nineties had been wiped out, other than a hastily resuscitated RPP, without any positive programme or identity, surviving on fears that a neo-Islamism was about to take over the country. A new cycle of Centre-Right dominance had begun, not discontinuous with the past, but modifying it in one crucial respect. From the start, though it mustered less numerical support than its forerunners at a comparable stage of the cycle, the AKP enjoyed an ideological hegemony over the whole political scene that none of them had ever possessed. By a process of elimination, it was left in all but sole command of the stage.

This structural change was accompanied by an alteration in the character of the ruling party itself. Since its roots in the Islamism that arose outside the establishment after 1980 were plain, and its turn towards a more moderate stance in coming to power was no less clear, the AKP has been widely described by admirers in the West as a hopeful Muslim equivalent of Christian Democracy. High praise in Europe, the compliment has not been well received by the AKP, which prefers the term ‘conservative democracy', as less likely to provoke Kemalist reflexes.
⁶²
But the comparison is mostly misleading in any case. There is no Church for the AKP to lean on, no welfare systems to preside over, no trade-unions in its tow. Nor does the party show any sign of the internal democracy or factional energies that were always features of post-war German or Italian Christian Democracy.

Still, there are two respects in which the AKP could be said to correspond,
mutatis mutandis
, to them. If its electoral base, like theirs, includes the peasantry, which still comprises 30 per cent of the population in Turkey, it draws more heavily on a teeming under-class of urban slum-dwellers, which scarcely existed in post-war Europe. But the dynamic core of the party comes from a stratum of newly enriched Anatolian entrepreneurs, completely modern in their approach to running a profitable business, and devoutly traditional in their attachment to religious beliefs and customs. This layer, as distinct from the big conglomerates in Istanbul as local notables in the Veneto or Mittelstand in Swabia were from Fiat or the Deutsche Bank, is the new component of the Centre-Right bloc commanded by the AKP. Its similarity to the provincial motors of the CDU, or DC of old, is unmistakeable.

So too is the centrality of Europe—the Community then; the Union now—as ideological cement for the party. In Turkey, however, this has been much more important, politically speaking, for Erdo
ğ
an and his colleagues than it was in Germany or Italy for Adenauer or De Gasperi. Entry into the EU has, indeed, to date been the magical formula of the AKP's hegemony. For the mass of the population, many with relatives among the two million Turks in Germany, a Europe within which they can travel freely represents hope of better-paid jobs than can be found, if at all,
at home. For big business, membership in the EU offers access to deeper capital markets; for medium entrepreneurs, lower interest rates; for both, a more stable macro-economic environment. For the professional classes, commitment to Europe is the gauge that Islamist temptations will not prevail within the AKP. For the liberal intelligentsia, the EU will be the safeguard against any return to military rule. For the military, it will realize the longstanding Kemalist dream of joining the West in full dress. In short, Europe is a promised land towards which the most antithetical forces within Turkey can gaze, for the most variegated reasons. In making its cause their own, the AKP leaders have come to dominate the political chequerboard more completely than any force since the Kemalism of the early Republic.

To make good its claim to be leading Turkey into Europe, the AKP took a series of steps in the first two years of its rule to meet norms professed by the Union. A reduction in the powers of the National Security Council, underway before it came to office, and of the role of the military in it, was in its own interest, as well as that of the population at large. Of more immediate significance for ordinary citizens, the State Security Courts that were a prime instrument of repression were closed down. The state of emergency in the south-east, dating back to 1987, was lifted, and the death penalty abolished. In 2004, Kurdish MPs jailed for using their own language in Parliament were finally released. Warmly applauded in the media, this package of reforms secured the AKP its European legitimacy.

The larger part of the new government's popularity came, however, from the rapid economic recovery over which it presided. The AKP inherited an IMF stabilization programme as a condition of the large loan Turkey received from the Fund in late 2001, which set the parameters for its stewardship of the economy. The ideology of the Welfare Party from which it emerged was not only anti-Western, but often in rhetoric anti-capitalist. The European turn of the AKP purged it of any taint of the first. Still more demonstratively, it put all memories of the second behind it, adopting a neo-liberal regimen with the fervour of a convert. Fiscal discipline became the watchword, privatization the grail. The
Financial Times
was soon hailing the AKP's ‘passion for selling state assets'.
⁶³
With a primary budget surplus of 6 per cent, and real interest rates at 15 per cent, subduing inflation to single
figures, business confidence was restored, investment picked up, and growth rebounded. From 2002 to 2007, the Turkish economy grew at an average rate of some 7 per cent a year. Drawn by the boom, and fuelling it, foreign capital poured into the country, snapping up 70 per cent of the Istanbul stock market.

As elsewhere, the end of high inflation relieved the condition of the poor, as the price of necessities stabilized. Jobs, too, were created by the boom, even if these do not show up in official statistics, where the rate of unemployment—over 10 per cent—appears unaffected. But jobless growth in the formal sector has been accompanied by increased employment in the informal sector, above all casual labour in the construction industry. Objectively, such material gains remain rather modest: real wages have been flat, and—given demographic growth—the number of paupers has actually increased. Ideologically, however, they have been enough, so one acute observer argues, for the AKP to make neo-liberalism for the first time something like the common sense of the poor.
⁶⁴

But how deep does popular belief that the market always knows best ultimately run? Fiscal discipline has meant cutting social spending on services or subsidies, making it difficult for the AKP to repeat at national level the kind of municipal philanthropy on which its leaders thrived in the nineties, when the Welfare Party could deliver public benefits of one kind or another directly to its constituents. The Turkish state collects only about 18 per cent of GDP in taxes—even by today's standards, a tribute to the egoism of the rich—so there is anyway little government money to go around, after bond-holders have been paid off.
⁶⁵
To hold the mass of its voters in the cities, the AKP needs to offer something more than the bread—it is not yet quite a stone—of neo-liberalism. Lack of social redistribution requires cultural or political compensations. There were also the party's cadres to be considered: a mere diet of IMF prescriptions was bound to leave them hungry.

The pitfalls of too conformist an adherence to directives from abroad were illustrated early on, when the AKP leadership attempted to force a vote through Parliament inviting American
troops across Turkey to attack Iraq, in March 2003. A third of its deputies rebelled, and the motion was defeated, to great popular delight. At this stage, Erdo
ğ
an was still outside Parliament, having yet to get round the previous ban on him. Possibly harbouring a residual sense of rivalry with him, his second-in-command, Abdullah Gül, acting as premier, may not have pulled out all the stops for compliance with the US on his behalf.
⁶⁶
Two months later, Erdo
ğ
an had entered Parliament and taken charge. Once premier, he rammed through a vote to dispatch Turkish troops themselves to take part in the occupation of Iraq. By this time it was too late, and the offer was rejected by the client authorities in Baghdad, nervous of Kurdish reactions. But Erdo
ğ
an's ability to impose such a course was an indication of the position he has come to occupy in the AKP's firmament.

In his person, in fact, lies a good deal of the symbolic compensation enjoyed by the mass of the party's electorate for any material hardships. Post-modern political cultures, ever more tied to the spectacle, have spawned a series of leaders out of the entertainment industry. Erdo
ğ
an belongs in this respect with Reagan and Berlusconi: after an actor and a crooner, what could be more popular than a striker? Product of a working-class family and religious schools in Istanbul, Erdo
ğ
an started out life as a professional footballer, before moving up through the ranks of the Welfare Party to become mayor of the city at the age of forty. Along the way, he found time to burnish his private-sector credentials, amassing a tidy fortune as a local businessman. Neither humble origins nor recent wealth are new for leaders of the Centre-Right in Turkey. What distinguishes Erdo
ğ
an from his predecessors is that unlike Menderes, Demirel or Özal, his route to power has not been through bureaucratic preferment from above, but grass-roots organization from below. For the first time, Turkey is ruled by a professional politician, in the full sense of the term.