When Rifts And Backstabbing Are Afoot, It Must Be Election Season
October 3, 2012 § 1 Comment
Days like today are my favorite kind here at O&Z, when the symmetry of politics in Israel and Turkey allows me to write one blog post that covers both countries simultaneously and satisfy all of my blog constituencies at once. Over the last 48 hours or so the prospect of elections in Israel and Turkey have caused rifts at the top of both countries with fighting and accusations of perfidy, some subtle and some decidedly unsubtle, between top government officials. Genuine friendships and relationships of convenience are both nearing the breaking point, which just goes to show you that democratic politics can be both beautiful and ugly at the same time.
Let’s start with Israel, where the Netanyahu-Barak bromance is now officially over and the fighting is out in the open in a very public and nasty way. Yesterday Netanyahu accused Barak of attempting to sabotage U.S.-Israel relations even further for the purpose of then coming across as the reasonable moderate who could repair damaged ties, a charge that Barak promptly denied (shameless plug #1: if you read O&Z last week, this news will not have surprised you). Amir Mizroch does his usual good job of summing up the situation but the upshot is that I don’t see how these two can continue to work together. I am sure that Barak did indeed try to throw Bibi under the bus while he was doing his tour around the U.S. and I am also sure that Netanyahu is busy trashing Barak behind the scenes to his friends in Likud. Barak is pretty clearly flailing around here in an attempt to increase his vote share before the elections and is just hoping that something will stick, whether it be his potshots at Avigdor Lieberman or his rapid backing away from Netanyahu. Given how little of a threat that Barak poses from a political standpoint, I’m not quite sure why Netanyahu is even engaging him rather than just ignoring him since I don’t see any potential upside for Bibi in getting dragged down into a brawl in the mud. In any event, like I wrote last week, I will be surprised if Barak finishes out his term as defense minister (and friend of O&Z Dov Friedman has one-upped me by predicting that Barak will be fired rather than quit). I should also reiterate that unless this is part of history’s most elaborate and well-executed long con, a strike on Iran is simply not in the cards right now. If it were, there would be zero public daylight between Netanyahu and Barak rather than all too public sniping.
Moving along to Turkey, the impending inaugural direct election for president is causing some interesting backstabbing as well, but in a much less public way that requires some reading between the lines. Prime Minister Erdoğan is widely believed to covet the top post, which will be infused with newfound power after the AKP replaces the current Turkish constitution with a new version, but current president Abdullah Gül has little desire to vacate the spot. Erdoğan is banking on the fact that he remains a popular figure credited with leading Turkey during a time of unprecedented economic growth and global prestige, but he also knows that he needs a way to sideline Gül so that Gül won’t stick around as prime minister. In this vein, he has been promoting his erstwhile ally (and new AKP member) Numan Kurtulmuş, adding him to the party’s Central Decision and Executive Council and is likely to name him deputy chairman as well (shameless plug #2: if you have been reading O&Z for the past few months, this news will not have surprised you). Gül, however, is showing signs that he will not be pushed aside so easily. In his opening address to parliament this week, Gül implicitly criticized Erdoğan without mentioning him by name in castigating the government on the imprisonment of elected BDP deputies, calling for more joint positions and joint contributions across political party lines (which is squarely aimed at what is taking place during the constitutional drafting process), and then taking a clear shot across the bow on the issue of press freedoms:
The reputation of a country grows when its writers, thinkers, opinion leaders are able to share their views without fear. In the same way, it is fundamental that journalists, newsmen and members of the media as a whole should face no obstacle in fulfilling their responsibility for informing the public. No one should be imprisoned because of expressing their views through the media. A clear distinction must be observed between those who incite violence and those who express an opinion.
This is the opening salvo in what I expect will be some more overt tension to come between Erdoğan and Gül. Turkey’s constitution is going to provide for a newly powerful president, and one of these two men is going to get the job. This relationship is a genuine one though of friendship and mutual respect, unlike the one between Netanyahu and Barak, and so the question that remains to be seen is how nasty things are going to get when all is said and done.
Erdoğan Stays Home
September 24, 2012 § 1 Comment
Prime Minister Erdoğan, who was supposed to be traveling to New York for the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly, has canceled his trip and will instead be staying home. According to Hürriyet Daily News, “The ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) fourth congress on Sept. 30, the prime minister’s hesitation at going abroad amid increased militant activity, as well as the lack of a chance to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama, were all cited as three reasons for Erdoğan’s last-minute cancelation, according to a source from the Prime Ministry.” I have no doubt that all of these reasons are true to one extent or another, but the decision to skip the UNGA is nevertheless a curious one. With the AKP congress coming up, I wonder if Erdoğan is feeling some political heat for the first time during his decade-long tenure as prime minister given events at home.
There is really no overstating just how serious of a problem the government’s Syria policy has become. I know that I have written about this a lot, but it is putting nearly all of Erdoğan’s and the AKP’s accomplishments at risk. The fighting next door and the influx of refugees into Turkey has placed an economic burden on the country, not to mention the loss of trade with Syria and the general instability that makes Turkey a slightly less attractive target for foreign investment. It is no coincidence that Turkey’s 2012 growth forecast was just cut or that its GDP growth last quarter was lower than expected, and as the economy slows, Erdoğan has a lot less room for error. Foreign policy missteps could be papered over when the economy was making all stumbles seem more trivial, but this is no longer the case. The government has badly mismanaged Syria from the beginning, lurching from supporting Assad and hoping that he would reform long after the dye had been cast, to threatening to create buffer zones or even launch an invasion of Syria when it was clear that this would never happen, to supporting and arming opposition groups in Syria no matter how murky their provenance or motives. Turkey is now basically in the worst possible position, having taken a clear side in the Syrian civil war without getting involved enough to really affect the outcome. It’s no wonder that Erdoğan came off as highly defensive and testy in an interview with Lally Weymouth in the Washington Post, which is par for the course with Turkish interviewers but somewhat unusual for interviews with big American newspapers. The Syria policy is highly unpopular with the Turkish public and is an unmitigated disaster and that is dragging down Ahmet Davutoğlu’s entire foreign policy with it.
Relatedly, as I predicted back in May, this has been a horribly unstable and bloody summer when it comes to PKK violence, and it is clear that this is another area in which Erdoğan has made a bad miscalculation. The idea that the PKK could be quashed militarily and that would be the end of Turkey’s “Kurdish problem” was always suspect, but as the PYD has carved out its own territory along the Turkish border and as de facto Kurdish autonomy becomes a reality in both Iraq and Syria, Ankara’s dream of rolling along with the status quo in its own Kurdish-dominated southeast has become even more untenable. The army, while inflicting plenty of damage on the PKK, is taking bad losses of its own, and when parliament deputies are kidnapped in broad daylight and the government has to seal off entire districts to the outside world in order to fight effectively, it is tough to argue that Erdoğan is prosecuting the war successfully or that his overall Kurdish policy is anything but a disaster.
Finally, there is the recently concluded Sledgehammer trial in which 331 of the 365 defendants were sentenced to time in prison, including 20 year sentences for three former service chiefs. There have been signs that Erdoğan realized that the trial went too far, and the military cannot be happy at the visual of so many officers being sent to jail amid serious allegations of forged documents and falsified evidence. The chances of a coup in Turkey at this point are extremely slim to the point of non-existence, but if I were a prime minister running a country that suffered through four military hard or soft coups in as many decades and a trial just concluded that was seen in many quarters as a witch hunt targeting the army, I might be a little paranoid.
All of this backdrop must be taken into account with the news that Erdoğan is sticking to his home base. If ever there was a time for him to show up at the UN and try to wrangle up some support for intervention in Syria, this would be it, yet he has decided that there are more urgent matters to take care of. I think that there must be some grumbling going on behind the scenes, and that Erdoğan knows that his dream of becoming Turkey’s first directly elected president is in danger. This is the last AKP congress in which Erdoğan is running as party leader, and the fact that he is acting so risk-averse to the point of not even daring to leave the country may be a sign that all is not right in AKP land.
