The New Old World (79 page)

On the platform, Erdo
ğ
an is a figure of pregnant native charisma. Tall and powerfully built, his hooded eyes and long upper lip accentuated by a brush moustache, he embodies three of the most prized values of Turkish popular culture. Piety—legend has it that he always prayed before bounding onto the pitch; machismo—famously tough in word and deed, with subordinates and enemies alike; and the common touch—manners and
vocabulary of the street-stalls rather than the salon. If no trace of democracy is left in the AKP, whose congresses now rival United Russia in acclamations of its leader, that is not necessarily a black mark in a tradition that respects authoritarianism as a sign of strength. The weaknesses in Erdo
ğ
an's public image lie elsewhere. Choleric and umbrageous, he is vulnerable to ridicule in the press, suing journalists by the dozen for unfavourable coverage of himself or his family, which has done well out of the AKP's years in power. A son's gala wedding adorned by Berlusconi, a daughter's nuptials glad-handed by Musharraf, have been capable of shutting down half of Istanbul for their festivities. A son-in-law's company has been handed control of the second-largest media concern in the country. At the outset, the AKP enjoyed a reputation for probity. Now its leader risks acquiring some of the traits of a tabloid celebrity, with all the attendant ambiguities. But the personality cult of Erdo
ğ
an remains a trump card of the party, as that of Menderes, no less vain and autocratic, was before him. Simply, the audience has moved from the countryside to the cities.

When elections came again in 2007, the ranks of the AKP had been purged of all those who had rebelled against the war in Iraq, relics of a superseded past. Now a homogeneous party of order, riding five years of growth, a magnetic leader in charge, it took 47 per cent of the vote. This was a much more decisive victory than in 2002, distributed more evenly across the country, and was treated in the West as a consecration without precedent. In some ways, however, it was less than might have been expected. The AKP's score was six points lower than that of Demirel in 1965, and eleven points below that of Menderes in 1955. On the other hand, the ex-fascist MHP, flying crypto-confessional colours too, won 14 per cent of the vote, making for a combined vote for the Right of 61 per cent, arguably a high tide of another kind. Indeed, although—because of the vagaries of the electoral threshold—the AKP's share of seats actually fell, despite the increase in its vote by more than a third, the MHP's success handed the two parties, taken together, three-quarters of the National Assembly: more than enough to alter the Constitution.

In its second term of office, the AKP has altered course. By 2007 entry into the EU was still a strategic goal, but no longer the
same open-sesame for the party. For once the Anglo-American plan to wind up the Republic of Cyprus had failed in 2004, it was faced with the awkward possibility of having to end Turkish military presence on the island, if it was itself to gain entry into the EU—a price at which the whole political establishment in Ankara has traditionally balked. So, after its initial burst of liberal reforms, the party decelerated, with few further measures of real significance to protect civil rights or dismantle the apparatuses of repression, testing the patience even of Brussels, where officialdom has long been determined to look on the bright side. By 2006 even the Commission's annual report on Turkey, typically a treasury of bureaucratic euphemisms, was here and there starting to strike a faintly regretful note.

Soon afterwards, in early 2007, Hrant Dink, an Armenian–Turkish journalist repeatedly prosecuted for the crime of ‘denigrating Turkishness'—he spoke of the Armenian genocide—was assassinated in Istanbul. Mass demonstrations protested his murder. A year later, the extent of the AKP's response was to modify the charge in the penal code under which Dink had been prosecuted with a grand alteration, from ‘denigrating Turkishness' to ‘denigrating the Turkish nation'. Twenty-four hours after that change had been made, on May Day 2008, its police launched an all-out assault on workers attempting to commemorate the 1977 killing of trade-unionists in Taksim Square, after the AKP had banned the demonstration. Clubs, tear-gas, water cannon and rubber bullets left thirty-eight injured. Over five hundred were arrested. As Erdo
ğ
an explained: ‘When the feet try to govern the head, it becomes doomsday'.

Shedding liberal ballast, once Europe moved down the agenda, has meant at the same stroke pandering to national phobias. In its first term, the AKP made a number of concessions to Kurdish culture and feeling—allowing a few hours of regional broadcasting in Kurdish, some teaching of Kurdish in private schools. These involved little structural change in the situation of the Kurdish population, but combined with selective use of state patronage in Kurdish municipalities, and a more ecumenical rhetoric, were enough to treble the party's vote in the south-east in 2007, taking it to the national average. Since then, however, the government has tacked heavily towards the traditional military approach to the region. Soon after its failure to get the scheme it wanted in Cyprus, it was confronted in the summer of 2004 with a revival of PKK guerrilla actions. On a much smaller scale than in the
past, and more or less disavowed by Öcalan,
⁶⁷
these now had the advantage of a more secure hinterland in the de facto autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan, after the American march to Baghdad.

In time-honoured fashion, the Turkish high command responded by stepping up repression, throwing more tanks and gendarmes into the south-east, and pressing for cross-border attacks into northern Iraq. Mobilization of state and para-state agencies to crush the guerrillas was accompanied by a hurricane of nationalist hysteria in civil society, fed by fears of the long-term example of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, resentments that for the first time in a century the country was having to give an account of itself to opinion in Europe, and the miseries of provincial life for unemployed youth, a prime recruiting-ground of the MHP. In this storm, Erdo
ğ
an and his colleagues took the same course as Demirel, accommodating the military—Turkish jets and troops were soon attacking across the frontier into Iraq—and upping chauvinist rhetoric. By the winter of 2007, Turkish cities were draped from one end to the other with national flags hanging out of windows or balconies; youngsters were replacing photographs of themselves with the crescent on a red field in Facebook; night after night, television news was reduced to solemn images of Erdo
ğ
an and Gül, at the head of a phalanx of army commanders, presiding at the funeral of soldiers killed in the south-east, mothers sobbing over their coffins, intercut with troops high-stepping through Diyarbakir to stentorian chants of ‘One Flag, One Nation, One Language, One State'. A comparable intensity of integral nationalism has not been seen in Europe since the thirties.

The AKP's embrace of this jingoism involves no renunciation of its own objectives. If nation continues to trump religion as the master discourse of society, without contradicting it, the party has much to gain and little to lose by doing so. Tactically, its adjustment has an obvious logic. The economic outlook for Turkey is worsening. The trade deficit is huge, the influx of foreign funds covering it is mostly hot money that could exit at the first sign of trouble, inflation is in double digits again. Should the boom evaporate,
showing muscle on the security front is a well-tried electoral alternative. Strategically, so this calculation goes, giving the military all it wants in the battle against terrorism can enable the party to work towards its own goals on other terrain. These have been two-fold: to bend society into a more consistently observant mould, and to capture the branches of the state that have resisted this. The priority given to these underlying aims, at the expense of liberal reforms, can be seen from the AKP's determination to control the presidency, by installing Gül in the post. The move raised military and bureaucratic hackles, put down with the easy electoral victory of 2007. Its political significance lay in the party's refusal to nominate any independent personality with democratic credentials, which would have yielded it political gains of another kind, in which it was not interested. Its attempt to plant a pious incompetent as governor of the Central Bank failed, but indicates its general line of action—colonization of the state by trusted minions, which has been proceeding apace at lower levels. Operating in parallel, the movement led by the exile mystagogue Fethullah Gülen—preaching an Islam impeccably pro-business, pro-modern, pro-American—has created an Opus Dei–like empire, not just controlling newspapers, television stations and hundreds of schools, but now permeating all ranks of the police.
⁶⁸

Bids to bend civil society to the will of the ruling party have followed a similar pattern. Rather than making any effort to rescind the mass of punitive articles in a penal code still modelled on that of Italian Fascism, Erdo
ğ
an tried to pass a law criminalizing adultery—three years in jail for straying from the marriage bed, desisting only when it became clear that this was too much for even his warmest admirers in Europe. The battle-front has now shifted to female head-gear. After failing to secure a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that the Turkish ban on headscarves in public buildings, including universities, was a violation of basic rights, the AKP–MHP bloc passed two constitutional amendments abolishing it last February. The Constitutional Court has since struck these down, and the ruling party now faces formal charges of attempting to subvert the secular basis of the state. If upheld, these would lead to its
closure and the exclusion of Erdo
ğ
an, Gül and other leaders from all political activity for five years.

The issue of scarves, trivial enough in itself, offers a perfect illustration of the warped dialectic between state and religion in the Turkey bequeathed by Kemal. Denial of the right of young women to wear on campus what they want is an obvious discrimination against the devout, excluding them from public higher education. Licensing the headscarf, as any secular girl from a provincial background will tell you, prompts fears of the reverse: brutal social pressure to wear it, on pain of ostracism or worse. The AKP is in no position to dispel such fears, since its record in office and the style of its leadership have been so persistently arrogant and bullying. Likewise, contemporary Kemalism is in no position to claim that the state must be kept inviolate from any expression of religion, since it maintains at public expense a vast directorate propagating just one faith, Islam, while curtailing the activity of all others. The successive waves of political pietism that have surged up since the fifties, of which the AKP is only the latest, are the logical revenge on its own duplicity. A genuine secularism would have cut the cord between state and religion cleanly and completely, creating a space for the everyday rejection of all supernatural beliefs. How far it has failed to do so can be judged from the verdict of one of the most sympathetic analysts of Turkish faith and society, not to speak of the statesmanship of Erdo
ğ
an himself: ‘There is not the slightest doubt that it is now dangerous for a man or woman to deny openly belief in God'.
⁶⁹
The army itself, supposed bastion of secularism, regularly describes those who have fallen in its counter-insurgency operations as ‘martyrs'. Nation and religion remain as structurally interdependent in latter-day Kemalism as they were when the
Gazi
first established the state.

But because that interdependence could never be openly acknowledged, a tension was created within the Turkish political system, between an elite claiming to be secular and movements claiming to be faithful, each side accusing the other of want of tolerance, that has yet to abate. The AKP has not broken, but reproduced, this deadlock. Before taking office, Erdo
ğ
an famously told his followers that democracy was like a tram: we will take it to our destination, and then get off.
⁷⁰
The remark has sometimes
been interpreted as a revelation of the hidden intentions of the AKP to use a parliamentary majority to install a fundamentalist tyranny. But its meaning can be taken as something more banal. Power, not principle, is what matters. Erdo
ğ
an is no doubt as devout an individual as Blair or Bush, with whom he got on well, but there is little reason to think that he would risk the fruits of office for the extremities of his faith, any more than would they. An instrumental attitude to democracy is not the same as either hostility or commitment to it. Elections have served the AKP well: why abandon them? Religious integrism would bar entry to Europe: why risk it?

The temptations, and pitfalls, for the party lie elsewhere. On the one hand, the AKP is under pressure from its constituency—above all the dedicated core of its militants—to show results in the long-standing struggle of the believers for more public recognition of their faith and its outward symbols. Its credibility depends on being able to deliver these. On the other hand, the unprecedented weakness of any opposition to it within the political system has given its leaders a giddy sense that they enjoy a new freedom of action. The military and the bureaucracy, certainly, remain a potential threat: but would the army dare to stage a coup again, now that Turkey is on the threshold of the Union, and all Europe is watching? The outcome of the current crisis, pitting the Court against the Assembly, will show how well the AKP has judged the new balance of forces in Turkey. A triumphant appeal to the electors, sweeping away the Constitution of 1980, is one possibility. The hubris that took Menderes to his end is another. What is clear is that the latest cycle of Centre-Right rule in Turkey is approaching a critical moment, at which its precursors stumbled.