Erdogan needs to go

—Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was once reported as saying that democracy for him was like a bus ride: when he reached his stop, he would get off. In recent years, he has often seemed to be edging closer and closer towards that stop.

And, once a country starts along the road of tinkering with the constitution to consolidate power, there is usually only one direction of travel: down. Earlier this year the BBC’s Selin Girit argued convincingly that last month’s general election could be ‘Turkey’s last democratic election’. This was no exaggeration: Erdogan’s creeping power-grabs over the last 13 years have made many worry that he could prove impossible to dislodge. For example, the latest proposed constitutional change attempts to turn a ceremonial presidency into an executive one – with himself, naturally, at the helm.

And that is not all. Turkey has always been a Muslim-majority nation. But whereas modern Turkey’s founding father, Ataturk, took pains to build a constitution which kept religion out of politics, Erdogan has spent much of the last 13 years trying to put it back in.

Human rights have – sadly – seldom been a strong point for Turkey, but civil liberties are clearly under threat. 2013’s Gezi Park protests were met with a violent crackdown; there are periodic bans on social media. Indeed, recent years have seen Erdogan sliding towards fully autocratic rule with a distinctly Islamist flavour. While plainly not Islamism in the style of the murderous Islamic State or al-Qaida, it is certainly dedicated to the gradual rollback of women’s emancipation.

Sometimes it is the little things. You could tell something was wrong when the state airline, no doubt to please its masters in the AKP (Erdogan’s party), decreed that its air hostesses were no longer allowed to wear red lipstick or nail varnish. A small point, you might think: but what modern state would intervene in the dress-code (of women only) in a company, essentially for reasons of Islamist prudery?

Finally, there is the traditional resort of the despot: the curtailing of a free press. In the most recent Freedom House index, Turkey’s media slipped down a further notch to ‘not free’.

Such things are a great tragedy for a country whose capital much resembles any other European city and which should be a beacon of liberalism and democracy to the Muslim world. But, despite all this, there is now a little hope.

Last month the Kurdish HDP, surpassing the 10 per cent of the vote required for parliamentary representation, unexpectedly broke the AKP’s grip. While still the largest party, it no longer has a majority, much less the higher level of support required to cement the further constitutional changes Erdogan wanted.

If the electoral process was tampered with, as some suspect, it was clearly not done effectively enough. That has left Turkey with an opportunity, and two things now need to happen.

First, its people need to follow through and remove Erdogan altogether, if Turkey is to stand a chance of taking its place at the table of developed nations. The current course, seemingly set for a weak minority government by his opponents, might yet play into his hands by allowing him to re-emerge later as a strongman saviour.

Second, Erdogan needs to accept the writing on the wall. As an autocratic president, and given Turkey’s history, it would certainly not be unexpected for him to try and hang on to power using less democratic means. And that could certainly signal fiddling with the ballot boxes. It could yet come to mean guns.

Britain should be doing everything it can to ensure free and fair elections, and remove obstacles to its long-awaited entry into the European Union. But it will be a tricky game: neither can anyone afford for an undemocratic Turkey to fall, from being a Nato ally, into the arms of Russia. The stakes are high.

———————————-

Rob Marchant writes on foreign affairs and Labour party matters for Labour Uncut

———————————-

Photo: Michał