Though leaders in western capitals have made unexceptionable statements in support of democracy in the shape of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, they should harbour no illusions about Turkey’s stability in the months ahead. The president’s ability to thwart the military coup, though projected as being stopped by “the people”, was principally on account of its ham-fisted execution — curious given the armed forces’ institutional experience in four coups since the 1960s. If the collateral crackdown – arrests of military personnel and judges as a start – is anything to go by, Mr Erdogan, a former two-term prime minister, can be expected to leverage the coup to consolidate executive powers that he has systematically appropriated without a constitutional mandate ever since he won the presidential elections with more than half the popular votes in 2014. The coup has exposed again the old fault lines that divide modern Turkey, between hard-line secularism of founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as represented by the military and conservative Islamism projected by Mr Erdogan and his ruling party, the AKP.
Western powers cannot afford to treat this crisis purely as an internal matter of Turkey because of the strategic role the country plays vis-a-vis the crisis in West Asia. Ever since the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) and its violent inroads into Iraq and Syria, Turkey has played a critical dual role. The first is as a buffer — absorbing some two million refugees from the two beleaguered countries, who would otherwise have added to the immigrant crisis Europe faces. A controversial refugee-exchange deal between the European Union (EU) and Turkey currently hangs in the balance. Second, as the frontline ally, Turkey’s air base in Incirlik has been the centre of US-led operations to bomb IS strongholds and its army has done the heavy lifting in ground operations in the region.
Mr Erdogan’s authoritarianism, squandering a genuine popularity he enjoyed in the early 2000s, when Turkey was among the world’s fastest growing economies, adds a complex twist to this geo-political dynamic as he seeks to recreate the Islamic Caliphate that Ataturk had dissolved in 1924. This has been manifest in the imposition of hard-line Islam that resembles Saudi Arabia’s: publicly funded mosque-building programmes and dress codes. He has accentuated the caricature of an eastern potentate by attacking editors and media organisations even mildly critical of him, and cracking down on judges and military commanders for allegedly plotting against the AKP in 2013. And then there are charges of corruption. His son, Bilal Erdogan, was at the centre of a money-laundering scandal involving Iran when it was under sanctions imposed by the United Nations. Mr Erdogan has built himself a 1,100-room palace in Ankara with state funds and runs the economy through a bunch of business cronies. The attempted coup suggests that he has been unable to stifle all opposition, hence, the laughable reference to the influence of ally-turned-foe, the exiled Fethullah Gulen (a bit like Stalin blaming Trotsky, exiled in Mexico, for all the ills besetting the Soviet Union). As NATO’s second-largest force and the self-appointed keepers of the Kemalist tradition, not to forget the key role against Kurd separatists in the south-east, Turkey’s armed forces are unlikely to remain passive onlookers as Mr Erdogan strengthens his power. In light of events in Egypt after the Arab Spring, this means the world needs to be ready for another major crisis in West Asia.
