Is Turkey’s Future A Liberal One?

August 14, 2014 § 6 Comments

Now that Prime Minister Erdoğan is set to take over as President Erdoğan, analysts are pivoting to figure out what comes next. While many are speculating about who the next PM will be (I still think it comes down to Ahmet Davutoğlu or Numan Kurtulmuş), Soner Cagaptay has an op-ed in the New York Times looking at a much longer time horizon. He argues that Turkey’s future after Erdoğan will be a liberal one because the AKP’s support has peaked, and while the last great wave to sweep over Turkish politics was a conservative religious one, the next wave will be a liberal one. Thus, Cagaptay predicts that once the younger and more liberal generation turns its grassroots angst into political power, the AKP’s time at the top will be over.

It’s a compelling theory, and certainly one for which I am hopeful, but I’m not entirely convinced just yet. For starters, Cagaptay relies on the fact that the AKP has plateaued in order to argue that it will be replaced, and he cites the fact that 48% of the country voted against Erdoğan on Sunday as a measure of the country’s polarization. I agree that the AKP has almost certainly reached the apex of its support and that the only direction in which its voteshare can go is down, but the relevant question is not whether more people are going to start voting for someone else; it’s whether enough people will start voting for the same someone else. Based on the presidential vote, Turkey is not close to being at that point. The 48% who were opposed to Erdoğan voted for two candidates from three parties, with CHP/MHP candidate Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu receiving 38% and HDP candidate Selahattin Demirtaş receiving 10%. There is still a 14% gap between Erdoğan and Ihsanoğlu, which is obviously lots of ground to make up. Furthermore, CHP and MHP do not see eye to eye on a number of issues and banded together for this election, but the parties are not going to merge and are going to fragment the opposition vote even further come parliamentary elections in 2015. So while 52%-48% makes it sound like the AKP could be imminently be in trouble, the real story is quite different.

The crux of Cagaptay’s argument though is that the next big trend in Turkish politics will be liberalism as a response to AKP rule, and I partially agree with him on that count. Many Turks are fed up with AKP authoritarianism and demagoguery, and at some point soon the economy is going to crater thanks to Erdoğan’s bizarre ideological obsession with low interest rates, which will cut hard into the AKP’s electoral support. Much as the conservative and religious wave that the AKP rode to victory was a logical response to Turkey’s history of military coups and enforced secularism, a liberal backlash to AKP rule makes sense in a host of ways. The question, however, is whether this liberal wave will be enough to overcome Turkey’s religious and conservative majority. As I wrote with Steven Cook last week, the notion of Muslim-ness is well-entrenched in Turkey and the AKP is the only party poised to capture the gains from this dynamic. While a liberal opposition can tap into discontent on other fronts, I find it difficult to imagine a liberal party easily grappling with the majority of Turks who strongly feel this Muslim identity. While secularism and liberalism do not always go hand in hand – and in fact, they traditionally have not in Turkey – let’s not forget that the CHP in its current incarnation has attempted to meld these two together and has failed miserably.

Let’s set this aside for the moment and assume that a liberal party can manage to appeal to strongly self-identified Turkish Muslims. There is the larger problem of turning this liberal undercurrent that has mobilized for protests into concrete political action. Cagaptay’s conclusion is instructive here:

The liberals do not yet have a charismatic leader or a party to bring them to power, as Mr. Erdogan and the S.P. eventually did for Islamists in the 1990s. The country’s opposition, the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., is a mix of secularists and die-hard leftists. It needs to undergo a metamorphosis to become a real force. And although the Kurdish-led People’s Democratic Party, or H.D.P., has promoted a decidedly liberal message and increased its share of the national vote from 5 to almost 10 percent, it’s still a small party and having violent Kurdish nationalists among its ranks won’t help win broader support.

Turkey’s future liberal movement will have to bring together liberal Kurdish nationalists and liberal secular Turks. Its leader is yet to emerge. But the energy and ideology are there, and he or she will one day step forward to transform Turkish politics the same way Mr. Erdogan revolutionized the country after surfacing from the youth branch of his party.

He will go down in history as the leader who transformed Turkey economically, but the liberals will transform it politically.

There is an enormous gap right now between energy and action. I see it with my Turkish friends, who are primarily young, secular, liberal, and outraged at Erdoğan and the AKP, but do not know how to translate that into political power, or even political change. Some vote for the HDP despite not being Kurdish because they view that as the only appropriate way of expressing their electoral liberalism, but a plurality of Turks are never going to vote for a Kurdish party with a history of too-close ties with the PKK. Most simply express apathy with the entire system. Translating energy into action is the phase where protest movements and nascent political groundswells die. Look at Egypt, where millions of Egyptians went into the streets to oust Hosni Mubarak – and where a vast majority of protestors were not affiliated with or supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood – and yet could not translate that into political organizing or electoral victory. Think about the dearth of new parties right here in the U.S., where granted the barriers to electoral victory for a new party are enormous due to the first-past-the-post voting system, yet massive discontent with both parties has not turned into a serious third party organizing effort. It is one thing to be outraged, another to spend all of your time recruiting candidates, writing party platforms, organizing voter drives, raising campaign money, building support, amassing a party organization of professionals and volunteers, and on and on.

I think Cagaptay is correct to highlight liberalism as a significant trend, but it’s far too early to assume that this means a liberal future for Turkey. New parties have enormous barriers to entry (not to mention the 10% vote threshold in the Turkish parliament), and the CHP is so feckless that despite being Turkey’s founding party, it has not been the leading vote getter in a parliamentary election since 1977. Many in the party believe that Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s attempt to infuse liberalism into the CHP has been an electoral disaster, and the electoral results do not contradict this view. How a vehicle for the significant subset of liberal Turks functionally emerges I’m not sure, but Cagaptay is a bit too sanguine about its inevitability. He is right that the mood is there, but unfortunately when it comes to politics, the right mood is never enough.

Guest Post: Turkish Kurds and Presidential Politics

July 1, 2014 § 4 Comments

Guest poster extraordinaire Dov Friedman, who is spending the summer doing research in Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey, weighs in today on why the Turkish government’s resumption of the peace process with the PKK is motivated by factors other than improving relations with the KRG in Iraq.

Late last week, the Turkish government submitted a bill to the Grand National Assembly advancing the stalled-but-ongoing process toward resolution of the country’s longstanding Kurdish Issue. The bill arrived after a long period of dormancy in the process. Since the negotiations with jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan began, Prime Minister Erdoğan has faced mass social protests, corruption allegations, and contentious local elections.

The government recommences the process at a time when Iraq is melting down and the Turkey-KRG relationship looks stronger—and more elemental—than ever. This fact has not escaped commentators on the bill. The Wall Street Journal reported on the new bill and implicitly connected it to Turkey’s relationship with increasingly important relationship with the Iraqi Kurds.

That explanation is a bit too neat, and elides some of the complexities—both in the bill and in the Turkey-KRG relationship.

Hurriyet Daily News published a nice summary of the bill’s contents. The bill is mostly procedural. It sets out government control of the process and its reporting mechanisms. Only two articles appear ripe for analysis.

First, the bill explicitly grants targeted legal immunity to any government appointees tasked with negotiations on behalf of the Turkish state. If Erdoğan’s purges in the judiciary and police force were not enough, this article represents another swipe at the Gülen Movement—which has generally opposed negotiations with PKK insurgents as part of a solution to the Kurdish Issue.

In 2012, Gülenist prosecutors sought to bring criminal charges against intelligence chief and top Erdoğan adviser Hakan Fidan. Erdoğan countered by ramming through immunity from prosecution for Fidan. The immunity article formally extends protection to anyone involved in the negotiations, and is nothing more than a preemptive step to discourage Gülenist machinations.

Second, the government—in a very preliminary fashion—has launched the process of bringing PKK fighters down from the mountain and reintegrating them into society. This is a commendable—if long-overdue—step from Erdoğan, and any optimism about the process is pinned to this article. Some analysts may see this genuine step forward as motivated by the crumbling of Iraq.

We should avoid the temptation to connect this step to the ongoing Iraq crisis. As a factual matter, the AKP government advances this bill at the same time as its relationship with the KRG evolves precipitously. But the two are not necessarily related. Turgut Özal famously viewed relations with the KRG as a powerful antidote to Turkey’s Kurdish Issue. In response to Kurds in Turkey clamoring for a state, Özal believed Turkey could strengthen its position if it could point to a self-governing Kurdish region in Iraq. Relations with the KRG would not facilitate a solution, they would obviate the need for one.

Moreover, the KRG’s relationship with the PKK—as with so many intra-Kurdish group relations—is complex. The KRG has not worked especially hard to oust PKK fighters from the Qandil mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan. At the same time, Barzani cultivated the Turkish relationship well before the Kurdish Issue solution process began. Since the Syrian civil war loosed the Syrian Kurds from centralized control, Barzani has worked to expand KDP influence—opening low-intensity conflict with Salih Muslim, leader of the PKK-aligned Syrian Kurdish PYD.

Finally, in a mildly surprising departure from the AKP’s usual lockstep messaging, debate has burbled up from the circle around the Prime Minister. Hüseyin Çelik, former Education Minister and Erdoğan’s close ally, said recently that if the crisis in Iraq leads to the state’s failure, the Kurds have a right to self-determination. Days later, Ibrahim Kalın—adviser to Erdoğan and frequent designee to explain government positions in English—wrote an impassioned defense of a unified Iraq. It would be strange if the government initiated domestic legislative action in response to the Iraq crisis without first sorting out what exactly its unified position on the crisis was.

More likely, the bill on the Kurdish Issue solution is tied directly to the worst-kept secret in Turkey: Erdoğan’s upcoming presidential bid. During his tenure, Erdoğan has often made small but flashy gestures toward solving the Kurdish Issue during election season. The Prime Minister still commands a tricky coalition of forces. It includes urban Kurds, who want to see progress on a solution, and religious nationalists, who will bristle at concessions too swift or numerous.

Erdoğan plainly wants to win the presidency on a single ballot, and he needs both of these voter groups in support to do so. Hence, this bill. It signals to Kurdish supporters that he is serious, if deliberate, in his efforts to solve the long-running conflict. To conservative nationalists, it indicates that the Prime Minister will make no immediate sweeping changes and will pair attention to security with any conflict de-escalation.

As much as Erdoğan benefits from cracking down on free media, weakening Turkey’s institutions, and concentrating power in his person, bills like this one are the primary reason Erdoğan continues to rule Turkey. No other Turkish politician has deciphered how to command such an effective—and impressively stable—coalition. The joint opposition’s management of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu’s presidential campaign inspires precisely zero confidence that it is any closer than it has been over the last decade to offering a viable political alternative. Thus, we can expect more artful baby steps toward a solution to the Kurdish Issue in the coming years under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The Problem With The Turkish Government In A Nutshell

May 14, 2014 § 10 Comments

Turkey is reeling over a tragic loss of human life following an explosion and fire at a coal mine in Soma, with the death toll up to 238 as of this writing and at least 120 miners still trapped. The government has declared three days of public mourning, and Turks are wearing coal mining outfits and spelunking helmets in the streets in solidarity with the families of those who perished. So what does the government have to do with any of this? As has so often been the case under the AKP and Prime Minister Erdoğan, the damage comes in the government’s response to events outside of its control and makes a bad situation that much worse.

Workplace disasters happen all the time, and this is particularly so when it comes to mining, which is an extremely dangerous profession that takes places under volatile conditions. This past Monday, two coal miners died in a mine in West Virginia, and 29 died at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia in 2010. As Erdoğan said in opening his press conference today, accidents happen. In this case, however, there is the extremely inconvenient fact that only two weeks ago, the AKP rejected a motion in the Grand National Assembly brought by the opposition CHP – and supported by the MHP and BDP – calling for an investigation into the legion of mine accidents in Soma. In 2013, for instance, 4500 workplace accidents were reported in Soma mines alone. There is also this picture making the rounds of two AKP ministers chatting away two weeks ago during an opposition parliamentary speech about safety concerns in Soma coal mines. In other words, serious concerns were raised within the last month about this particular mine, the government chose to ignore them, and now has a terrible public relations disaster on its hands on top of the fact that 238 Turkish citizens are dead after an accident that might have been avoided had the government taken the warnings about Soma more seriously.

A serious and responsible government would only have one logical response under these circumstances. It would acknowledge a terrible mistake, apologize, vow to get to the bottom of what went wrong, and generally act in a contrite fashion. But as we all know by now, the AKP under Erdoğan neither acknowledges mistakes nor apologizes, and is never contrite about anything. A preview of things to come began last night, when one of the pro-government TV channels started running a graphic putting things into “perspective” with death tolls from other mining disasters around the world, such as 1549 deaths in China in 1942, 1100 deaths in France in 1906, 687 deaths in Japan in 1914, 682 deaths in China in 1960…you can see where this is going. The messaging is that since there have been mining disasters throughout history – and really, throughout history is the operative term here given the dates used – the Turkish government should be absolved of all blame for anything related to Soma.

Then came Erdoğan’s press conference today, which began in typical fashion with Erdoğan berating a reporter for asking a question that he didn’t like, continued with Erdoğan pulling out the talking points that had clearly already been distributed to the pro-government press and citing mining accidents from around the world, including England in 1862 and the U.S. in 1907 and nothing later than 1970, and moved on to Erdoğan dismissing the motion brought by the CHP and subsequently rejected by the AKP as nothing more than a grandstanding effort to shut down the Assembly with procedural gridlock. In other words, what takes place in Turkey in 2014 should be judged by the standards of Victorian England, and the opposition’s oft-stated concerns about mine safety aren’t genuine but just a plot to bring down the government. In the meantime, police and water cannons are already confronting protesters in the streets who are upset about the government’s response, and no doubt we will soon hear from Erdoğan or one of his lackeys about foreign plots, terrorists, the insidious workplace safety lobby, and how elections confer upon him and the government the right to do anything they please.

This all emanates from the same place as Erdoğan’s response just yesterday to Freedom House ranking Turkey as not free in the realm of press freedom, during which he rolled out the tired argument that because some Turkish newspapers write bad things about the government, Turkey must by definition have perfect press freedom, and then went after Freedom House’s credibility for ranking Israel as the freest country in the Middle East, as if that fact isn’t glaringly obvious. He also brought up what he called Helen Thomas’s firing – but was in fact mass ostracization – following her comments that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back home to Germany and Poland as evidence that the U.S. does not have a free press, so therefore nobody should criticize Turkey. The playbook is always the same – deny that the facts are the facts, blame someone else, and cite incorrect information or things that are laughably out of context in order to defend grossly objectionable behavior.

It’s one thing to resort to these tactics with something like the Gezi protests or a corruption scandal, when a substantial percentage of Turks doesn’t sympathize with those protesting, or thinks that corruption doesn’t matter as long as the government is delivering economic improvements and that the inquiry is being driven by Gülenists. It’s quite another to do it with a mining disaster in which hundreds of people die, since this time there is no other side. The miners were not perceived enemies of the government, and no shadowy groups are driving any investigations. Concurrent with announcing three days of official mourning, Erdoğan essentially told the country to get over it and stop whining because lots of miners died at the dawn of the Industrial Age in countries halfway around the world. I don’t think the tried and true AKP playbook is going to be quite as effective this time around.

The Turkish Debate Over Separation Of Powers

December 21, 2012 § 1 Comment

As has been happening with increasing frequency, President Gül and Prime Minister Erdoğan are having a passive aggressive public disagreement, this time over whether separation of powers is a necessary element for democracy or a hindrance to democratic development. It began with Erdoğan’s comments on Monday fingering separation of powers as the biggest obstacle facing Turkey’s government. According to the PM, there is a bureaucratic oligarchy that hinders efficient provision of services, and projects are unnecessarily stalled due to judicial objections. Erdoğan’s preference would be for the executive, legislature, and judiciary to all work together in order to eliminate “errors within the system” that he feels slow things down. In response today, Gül said that separation of powers is absolutely fundamental to the success of Turkish democracy and said that Erdoğan must have misspoken. This is of course a proxy fight for the larger argument that is taking place over whether the AKP is going to revise the constitution in a way that creates a powerful presidency in a presidential system, and whether Erdoğan is then going to become Turkey’s first directly elected and newly empowered president or whether Gül is going to remain in his post and finish out his term.

The debate over separation of powers is an interesting one historically. Most people – including the folks at Wikipedia – ascribe the principle to Baron de Montesquieu, but this is actually incorrect. As my former professor Jack Rakove lays out in his excellent book Original Meanings, the idea behind separation of powers arose during the 17th century in Britain out of the upheaval caused by the English Civil War and the battle between the monarchy and the parliament. Parliamentary supporters in the 1640s came up with the principle of separation of powers as a way of distinguishing it from the concept of mixed government, which advocated for having representatives of the monarchy, aristocracy, and the people in the legislature as a way of avoiding tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy. Separation of powers was an effort to draw lines between the different functions of government so that one particular branch of government would not overwhelm the others, as opposed to being concerned with one branch of society becoming dominant. Supporters of the monarchy under Charles I advocated mixed government since it allowed the king to dominate the parliament, and thus his opponents began to emphasize separation of powers as a way of leveling the playing field and eliminating the king’s power to govern without Parliament and abrogate legislation. Once Charles was beheaded and the monarchy was suspended, the separation of powers crowd turned on Parliament, as it was now Parliament under Oliver Cromwell that had enormous and unchecked powers.

This debate was picked up in the American colonies not as a response to the government in Britain but because of the constant feuding between colonial legislatures and colonial governors, who were battling over parliamentary rights and executive power and what the proper balance would be between the two. Colonial governors were actually viewed as a bigger problem than the British Parliament, and that led to the Congress eventually being granted something of a privileged position, as seen by the fact that Article I is about Congress rather than the president or the courts. As Gordon Wood has written, the reason separation of powers was given such a prominent place in the Constitution was not because the framers wanted to check Congress, but because they wanted to protect Congress and the judiciary from the president.

I bring this up because the Turkish debate over separation of powers is playing out in reverse, demonstrating just how extreme Erdoğan’s complaints are. Whereas the British and American concept of separation of powers arose out of a desire to check and limit a powerful executive and give the legislature more of a free reign,  Erdoğan is bringing up separation of powers because he believes that the executive does not currently have enough power and that it is the judiciary that is hindering the proper functioning of government. The English-speaking men of the 17th and 18th centuries immersed in the philosophy of government would have found this situation absurd, since nobody really contemplated that separation of powers would create a situation of judicial or bureaucratic tyranny, as Erdoğan is alleging, or buy into the idea that separation of powers should be eliminated in order to empower an executive even further. Despite controlling a near super majority in the Grand National Assembly and operating under a system in which real power is vested in the prime minister rather than the president, Erdoğan is still claiming that it is not enough and that separation of powers has to go, when in fact he is vested with a huge degree of autonomy despite separation of powers. This is precisely why separation of powers is so important, and Gül is correct to point out that it is the foundation of Turkish democracy. Eliminating it in the name of efficiency will lead very quickly to a complete erosion of Turkish democracy, since democracy is not about efficiency but about the ability for a diverse set of parties and interests to contest power while allowing the people to participate in civic life. As I’ve said before and will keep on saying, if you are focused on Erdoğan’s Islamist background rather than on his familiar Turkish authoritarian tendencies, you are missing what is actually going on in Turkey right now.

Kemalism Is Alive And Well

December 11, 2012 § 3 Comments

Since the AKP came to power in 2002, it has been increasingly fashionable to declare that Kemalism – Turkey’s dominant political ideology since the founding of the republic in 1923 – is on life support. Successive governments have paid lip service to Kemalism, particularly since the military has always viewed itself as the ultimate guardian of Kemalist principles and crossing Kemalist red lines has been the best way to precipitate a military coup, but the AKP is viewed as hollowing out Kemalism through its electoral dominance. Most people immediately associate Kemalism with secularism and Westernization, and whether it be the AKP’s battle to make wearing a headscarf acceptable in universities or the controversial decision to allow middle schoolers to attend imam hatip religious schools, the government certainly does not appear to feel that Kemalism should constrain its policies.

It is not just the AKP, however, that has embraced this trend. The opposition CHP, which was essentially created to translate the precepts of Kemalism into tangible policies, has also seemed to go through a post-Kemalist phase. In July, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu defended charges that his party has moved away from Kemalism by declaring that Kemalism is a dynamic ideology and that he rejects a “traditional” interpretation of Kemalism. Kılıçdaroğlu’s elevation to CHP leader was widely viewed as heralding a new direction for the party, which has been out of power for decades, and part of this new direction was a greater focus on social liberalism and less of a focus on traditional Kemalist principles.

Kemalism, however, was always about much more than secularism, and the CHP’s current line of attack against the government demonstrates that Kemalist principles still carry some weight. Kemalism has six arrows, and the two that bear on recent events are republicanism and populism. Republicanism meant popular sovereignty, freedom, and legal equality, and stood in stark opposition to the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate. While Atatürk’s idea of republicanism was based on the French model, the pre-democratic reality of Turkish republicanism was a paternalistic dictatorship containing aspects of liberal rule. Republicanism in the Kemalist sense meant sovereignty of the people as the basis of the state rather than sovereignty of the sultan, and the idea that the state existed to further the advancement of its citizens rather than the glory of a royal dynasty. Connected to this was the idea of populism, which was the notion that the Turkish people should be mobilized in the name of social progress and modernity, but also encapsulated a sense of solidarity among disparate societal or professional groups. Unity was essential in Atatürk’s mind to building a modern state, and he believed that only through popular unity and solidarity had Turkey achieved its independence.  Populism was operationalized in a way that would ensure unity among different groups and eliminate class conflict by enacting socioeconomic and educational reforms meant to achieve equality and social mobility. This tied into republicanism, since equality and unity required the rejection of the Ottoman sultanate as it privileged a ruling class above the people. It was also a response to Marxism and the concept of revolutionary class struggle, and was meant to forestall any such possibility in Turkey.  Throughout the 1930s, populism was used to push off dealing with potentially disruptive social issues by repeating that there were no class or social fissures in Turkey, and among the six principles of Kemalism this was the one that gained the most widespread acceptance prior to WWII.

During the parliamentary debate yesterday over the next budget, the Kılıçdaroğlu accused Prime Minister Erdoğan of running roughshod over republican principles by trying to circumvent the Grand National Assembly’s role in budget planning. Kılıçdaroğlu claimed that Erdoğan and the AKP are trying to elevate themselves above the republic, which Erdoğan vehemently denied and said that making comparisons between Turkey’s economic performance under the AKP and Turkey’s economic performance in decades prior is intended only to demonstrate how the AKP has improved Turkey. This seems like a strange argument to be having, as there shouldn’t be a question as to whether the current government is part and parcel of the republic or not, yet it can be understood in the context of Kemalism and whether or not the AKP is adhering to its tenets. Republicanism was meant to forestall exactly the charge that Kılıçdaroğlu is hurling at the government, of placing its own glory above the good of the people and the state, and the fact that it appears to have hit a nerve with Erdoğan demonstrates just how ingrained Kemalism really is. The CHP is attempting to tar the AKP with only looking out for its own interests, and Erdoğan’s response has been that the AKP’s success is actually Turkey’s success and the republic’s success, which feeds directly into the Kemalist republican ideal. Similarly, the debate involves populism as well, since the idea of popular solidarity and unity is violated by the AKP’s claiming economic success as uniquely its own.

In a world in which Kemalism was defunct, none of this would really matter; in fact, it would be perfectly natural for a party to crow about its economic success and use it as a tool with which to hammer its opponents. The fact that Erdoğan felt the need yesterday to reiterate his commitment to the republic and that Kılıçdaroğlu was nakedly appealing to two of the six tenets of Kemalism in order to score political points demonstrates that for all of the talk about post-Kemalist Turkey, shaking off decades of Kemalist ideological hegemony is easier said than done. As much as the AKP may want to water down the secularist component of Kemalism, the rest of it is still very much intact.

Some Political Spats That Bear Watching

November 2, 2012 § Leave a comment

Today’s post is not a straight Friday gallimaufry, but does deal with disparate topics that all have a connecting theme. There are a couple of political relationships under serious stress that were in the news this week, and you should be keeping an eye on them in the months ahead because how the tensions are resolved will majorly impact politics in both Turkey and Israel.

The first pair is Prime Minister Erdoğan and President Gül. I’ve been predicting a clash between these two for awhile, and this week brought new tensions over their conflicting approaches to the Kemalist Republic Day rallies. After the governor of Ankara, presumably on Erdoğan’s orders, had banned a separate CHP-led rally outside the old Grand National Assembly building that was to coincide with the official government military parade, Gül told the governor to ignore the ban and remove police barriers from the site. This information prompted Erdoğan to strongly criticize Gül indirectly by denouncing “double-headed rule” and saying that if people want a strong presidential system, he is happy to oblige. Gül then fired back, stating that the president should make sure that government officials and police are allowing people to celebrate Republic Day in whatever manner they see fit and that there is no double-headed rule in Turkey. This fight is about more than just who ordered what with regard to Republic Day, and rather is the latest proxy battle over who is going to be Turkey’s next president. Once the new constitution creating an empowered president is in place, Erdoğan fully intends to be the first directly elected president in a presidential system and wants to push Gül out early. Naturally, Gül has no intention of leaving without a fight, and so this is the latest salvo in the fight that will determine both men’s political futures. As I’ve written before, expect to see lots more of this type of stuff going forward, and should the skirmishes get nastier, this has the potential to grind Turkey’s politics to a halt and rip the AKP apart.

The second pair in the news this week is Likud minister Moshe Kahlon and his long-time political home. Kahlon, who is Minister of Communications and Minister of Social Welfare and the most prominent Sephardi member of Likud, announced a few weeks that he would be stepping down from his post and not running in the Knesset elections in January. Kahlon is wildly popular for  reducing fees on all sorts of things from cell phones to bank transactions to electricity bills, not to mention he is the face of Likud’s Sephardi base, and so his announcement was bad news for Likud. Now it turns out that Kahlon might not be leaving politics after all, but is flirting with the idea of creating a new party, which is even worse news for the new Likud Beiteinu list. In many ways this makes sense, since Kahlon’s socioeconomic views clash with much of the official Likud party line, and his views on security issues and the Palestinians don’t exactly make him a Laborite. Bibi Netanyahu, realizing the threat that Kahlon poses, is now racing to keep him in Likud while a poll commissioned by Labor that shows it winning the most Knesset seats should Kahlon join the party means that Shelley Yachimovich is after him too. I don’t see Kahlon going to Labor, and my hunch is that he is not going to form his own party but is rather using the polls showing him damaging Likud Beiteinu should he run alone as leverage to return to Likud in a more powerful position. In any event, the Kahlon-Likud dance also has the possibility to alter the trajectory of Israeli politics depending on the outcome, so keep a close eye on how it is resolved.

Finally, there is the domestic dispute between San Francisco Chronicle columnist Bruce Jenkins and his brain, which apparently decided to leave Jenkins’ body and take with it any cognitive capacity for logic and reasoning that Jenkins had. That is the obvious conclusion to be drawn after reading this brilliant paean to ignorance in which Jenkins claims that the world champion San Francisco Giants won the World Series because the members of the Giants front office “look at the face, the demeanor, the background, the ability to play one’s best under suffocating pressure” rather than even take a glance at players’ statistics – otherwise known as the way one actually measures whether a player is good or not – and that “if you throw a binder full of numbers on their desk, they don’t quite get the point.” I know I have made this plea before, but Michael Schur (aka Ken Tremendous) and crew really need to come out of retirement and start up Fire Joe Morgan again. Where does one even begin with this mind-blowing example of  imbecilic dreck that would have been more believable had it appeared in the Onion? Yes Bruce Jenkins, I am sure that the team that drafted and developed such classic physical specimens as Buster Posey and Tim Lincecum relies only on scouting reports and never looks at stats. The way to win two World Series in three seasons is to completely ignore a huge resource of evidence and to just rely on your gut. Yup, that must be how it was done, since there is no way that Brian Sabean even knows how to do long division, let alone figure out what VORP stands for. There are two possibilities here. The first is that Jenkins is seriously delusional to the point that he is becoming a danger to the people around him. The second is that he is perpetrating an elaborate Joaquin Phoenix piece of performance art. Irrespective of which of these two options is the correct answer, Bruce Jenkins’ family might want to get him to a mental health professional as soon as possible.

 

Republic Day Highs and Lows

October 29, 2012 § 5 Comments

Today is Republic Day (Cumhuriyet Bayramı) in Turkey, which marks the anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. While most Americans would probably assume that Republic Day is like July 4 here and that it is a controversy-free public holiday where people gather with friends and family to celebrate, Republic Day is not quite that simple. Because Turkey’s institutions were created concurrently with Kemalism, a set of challenges arose that continue to this day, and the various controversies playing out on this year’s Republic Day illustrate how unsettled Turkey still is when it comes to the basic issue of what the purpose of the state should be and what role ideology should play.

When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded Turkey out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, he did so with clearly thought out ideas about how his new state should be organized and what goals it should seek to attain.  Furthermore, unlike in other states where an ideology may be adopted after the institutions of the state are already in place, Atatürk built Turkey’s political and social institutions at the same time that he was installing Kemalism as the state’s official ideology.  This enabled him to create structures and rules that were explicitly designed to strengthen and enable Kemalism, meaning that any challenge to the state would unmistakably be a challenge to Kemalism as well.  Kemalism was so entrenched and well articulated that its tenets were explicitly written out and incorporated into the ruling CHP’s flag during Atatürk’s tenure so that there was no ambiguity about which theories and actions comported with Kemalism and which did not.

Since ideology was so wrapped up and intertwined with the state itself, it meant that Turkey was unable to convert first order battles over ideology into a lower grade conflict even after the initial transition to democracy after WWII.  Any ideological wobble away from Kemalism precipitated a crisis, particularly given the fact that the most important and powerful state institution, the military, saw itself as the ultimate guardian of Kemalism irrespective of which party was in power.  Thus, ideological conflict ensured that once ideological fights erupted into the open post-transition, the system was unable to successfully manage them.  Lingering ideological issues hampered Turkey’s political development for decades, leading to a cycle of military interventions and shaky returns to civilian government.

Turkey today under Erdoğan and the AKP seems to have broken the pattern of military coups, which is certainly something to be celebrated during this year’s Republic Day. The fights over Kemalism, however, and whether the state should still be pushing a specific ideology that is linked to both secularism and statism (among other things) are very much ongoing. On a positive note, this is the first Republic Day during Abdullah Gül’s time as president that the leaders of the Turkish military are attending the official reception at the presidential palace. The reason that they had not attended in the past was because Gül’s wife Hayrünissa – along with the wives of other top government officials – wears a head scarf, and Kemalism frowned upon head scarves to the point of banning them from government buildings and universities. That top officers are going to the presidential reception this year might partially be a function of the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer investigations intimidating the military into changing their behavior out of fear, which is not a good development, but I think that the stronger impulse at work here is an emerging realization that ideological battles need to be put aside and deemphasized in order to make Turkey the strongest and most successful state that it can be.

On the other side of the ledger on this Republic Day is the unfortunate tendency of the AKP government to view ideological challenges as existential threats that require clamping down on freedom of expression. The government banned any Republic Day gatherings at the old Grand National Assembly building, which is closely associated with Kemalism and the founders of the Republic, under the theory that they would devolve into anti-government rallies. As a result, politicians and journalists, including CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, have been sprayed with water hoses and pepper spray today while hundreds, if not thousands, of Turks have been prevented from entering Ankara. This too is a result of the lingering legacy of Kemalism, but unlike the standoff in previous years between Gül and the military, this episode is not being resolved peacefully or amicably, and instead is a reminder of the AKP’s darkening record on freedom of speech. While Republic Day rallies may very well be aimed at criticizing the current government, true democracies are able not only to absorb such criticism but to enable it. As Turks celebrate this Republic Day, they should at the same time hope that future Republic Days remind everyone what an amazing country Turkey is rather than get hung up on still-unresolved issues surrounding Turkey’s ideological legacy.

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