Erdoğan is pushing his luck

By Asli Aydintasbas

His colossal new palace is just the latest misguided effort to maintain his grasp on power.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was in for a shock when he passed through Ankara in January. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, had decided to meet Abbas in his colossal — and controversial — new presidential palace. With its 1,150 rooms and 50 acres of forestland belonging to Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the palace is the ultimate symbol of Erdoğan’s power.
Never mind the zoning issues and the court injunction from the Ankara Chamber of Architects; initially built as a prime ministry, Erdoğan  declared the palace a presidential compound in August 2014, after he was elected president. Its minimalism-meets-Ottoman decorated interior also houses an underground tunnel, a mosque, the latest anti-espionage technology, and a soon-to-be-delivered Chinook helicopter.

Ottoman circus

But the palace itself wouldn’t have been a shock for Abbas. The Palestinian leader had most likely seen more than a few displays of stately largess during his travels in the Middle East. The real shock was Erdoğan, who greeted the Palestinian leader with spear-carrying, helmet-wearing warriors in shiny armor and colorful kaftans, representing, as the official Anatolian News Agency reported, 16 historic “Turkish states” dating back to the Huns, the Mughals and, of course, the Ottomans.
This was Turkey’s moment of comic relief: Erdoğan’s earnest pose in an official photo op with 16 warriors was instantly ridiculed by commentators and on social media. “Ottoman circus in the palace,” wrote Turkish journalist Kadri Gursel. “Fiefdom of shower cabins,” another tweeted, referring to the makeshift costumes.
But in many ways, that particular moment — imperial, silly and lonely — captured Erdoğan’s peculiar trajectory in his 13-year reign, from the world’s most promising Muslim leader to a mediocre regional autocrat.
Once the darling of the West, Erdoğan was dubbed a “Muslim democrat” in his early years as prime minister. He carried out much-needed economic and political reforms from 2002 to 2007, pushing Turkey towards the European Union while helping to scale back the influence of Turkey’s outdated military establishment. During much of that decade, Erdoğan, though a pious Islamist with religious training, seemed pragmatic and inclusive.
But there were telling signs. In 2009, he picked a public fight with Shimon Peres, the president of Israel at the time, on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Though he visibly lost control on stage, the incident bolstered his popularity in the Middle East. Over the next few years, as Erdoğan consolidated power domestically, eliminating the influence of the military with showcase trials and shady investigations, he continued to sound more conservative.
Come the Arab Spring, Ankara preferred to take on a leadership role in the Middle East, rather than secure its place in the West. Visits to Brussels pretty much stopped, and were replaced by an endless back and forth to the Arab Gulf States and around the Middle East.
Always a populist — and popular — Erdoğan won elections for a third term in 2011, pursuing a Putin-style takeover of the media and the business community. He was good at “making trains run on time,” and improved Turkey’s old infrastructure with grandiose projects, boosting the size of its economy. That same year, the Committee to Protect Journalists noted that Turkey had the highest number of journalists in jail. But it wasn’t just journalists. Turkey’s former chief of staff was incarcerated for allegedly planning a coup, on charges that have since been proven false. Thousands of officers were rounded up in simultaneous investigations.
Still, compared to anything in its immediate region, and certainly anything in the Muslim world, Turkey seemed like a bastion of stability. Despite his eccentricities and increasingly authoritarian ways at home, Erdoğan was still an ally to the West. He was featured on the cover of TIME magazine in November 2011, with the caption “Erdoğan’s Way: Turkey’s pro-Islamic leader has built his (secular, democratic, Western-friendly) nation into a regional powerhouse, but can his example save the Arab Spring?” In an interview with TIME’s Fareed Zakaria in 2012, Barack Obama named the Turkish leader one of his top five allies, speaking of “bonds of trust.”

New divisions

It is hard to pinpoint when and where things took a dramatic turn. Some say it was Erdoğan’s colon surgery in late 2011, after which he began to sound more Islamist and combative. A former adviser told me that after his surgery Erdoğan felt “I have done a lot for the country but not enough for Islam.” Soon afterwards, he instructed the Parliament to pass an entire overhaul of Turkey’s education system. It consisted not only of introducing a more religious curriculum, but also of engineering the system in such a way that allowed children to attend special Islamic middle-schools called imam-hatips.
Turkey’s secular educational system surely had its own problems, but with fistfights in the Parliament, Erdoğan seemed to be tilting the balance in the other direction. Himself a graduate of an imam-hatip, under Erdoğan’s watch the number of students in religious schooling soared from 70,000 to almost one million. He likes to say he’s responsible for bringing up a “religious generation.”
Efforts to ban alcohol, discrimination against Turkey’s Alawite minority, and his quarrelsome tone in the face of social discontent are among the things that contributed to Gezi riots in June 2013. Ferociously suppressed, Gezi events further polarized Turkish society, splitting it into two camps: Those who love Erdoğan and those who hate Erdoğan. This still remains the single most important paradigm in Turkish politics.
Erdoğan has subsequently survived a string of corruption investigations in late 2013, naming it an “attempted coup” and detaining the police, judges, and prosecutors that were responsible.
I once asked a friend, a senior bureaucrat from an Islamist background, what it would take for him not to vote for Erdoğan. I named a few possible scenarios – all of which he answered with “Naaah … I think I still would.” My friend represents a subgroup of 18-20 million of Turkey’s 55 million registered voters who are devoted to Erdoğan’s way no matter what.
But in reality, there isn’t much of an enigma to Erdoğan’s continued reign. Most despots are popularly elected, and thus given the tools to reshape their country’s independent institutions, media and political. Erdoğan has a bit of Vladimir Putin, a hint of Iraq’s Nuri el-Maliki, and traces of Central Asian autocrats like Ilham Aliyev or Islam Karimov. Erdoğan used to be a more temperate politician in his early days, but there is little fun and compassion in his disposition nowadays.
But in many ways, Erdoğan is weaker than Putin, Karimov, and other regional autocrats — thanks in large part to Turkey’s longer history of democracy and civil society. Sure, he is still the most powerful man in Turkey, but he is also becoming increasingly isolated in his palace, with his core group of advisers and immediate family. There is a sense of vulnerability — evidenced by pro-Erdoğan media being solely devoted to attacking his critics.

The backlash

The palace is turning out to be a curse — ridiculed every day in media and politics and partly responsible for the 9 percent drop in votes for Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the general elections in June. In order to recover his image, Erdoğan renamed it the “campus” and is inviting hundreds of neighborhood muhtars, the lowest ranking elected officials for administrative tasks in residential districts, for weekly speeches.
Still, the polls are not budging. Erdoğan’s ruling AKP, though still the top vote-getter with 41 percent, lost the majority to form a single party government last June and the president is now taking the country to snap elections in November.
As it is, Erdoğan’s predicament is Turkey’s very own crisis. His popularity is in decline, the lira is fast-falling and the war with Kurdish separatists is taking its toll on the public morale.
Can he — the man the West once hoped would help democratize the Muslim world — ride out forces of gravity at home? Both loved and hated, and under increasing pressure from his opponents, he will lash out at the increasing resistance. The growing coalition of opposing forces, including secularists, Kurds, and intellectuals, will not go away. Things aren’t going to get any better for Erdogan — they’ll only get worse.’