Reviews of Gönül Tol, Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria (London: Hurst and Co., 2022) and Dimitar Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022).
Augsburg, Germany (Feature: Special to Informed Comment) – At the beginning of 2023, it was already clear that the new year would be a decisive one in the future of Türkiye. The country was expected to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic and conduct parliamentary and presidential elections. At the polls, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faced a real risk of defeat after two decades in power, fueled by a severe economic crisis and growing resentment against Syrian refugees. And then came the devastating earthquakes of February 6, which led to more than 45,000 people losing their lives in Türkiye. The earthquakes, which affected south-eastern Türkiye and the north of Syria, have left around 1.5 million homeless people in Türkiye alone.
Erdoğan announced that the earthquakes would not delay the elections, scheduled for May 14. The most recent polling data suggests the level of support for Erdoğan has remained unchanged despite accusations that governmental oversight of construction standards resulted in a higher death toll when the earthquakes shook southeastern Türkiye. 2023 will now forever be remembered in Türkiye as the year in which the Republic celebrated its centenary, key national elections were held, and the country experienced its deadliest earthquake in modern history.
Two books published in 2022 help us understand Erdoğan’s two decades in power. They also provide some clues on Türkiye’s future course. In Turkey Under Erdoğan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West, Dimitar Bechev, a Lecturer at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, captures the spirit of Erdoğan’s rule when he writes that “the longer the AKP [Justice and Development Party] stayed in office and the more power Erdoğan had in his hands, the stronger the majoritarian rhetoric became.”[1] In her book Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria, Gönül Tol, the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program, offers another study of Erdoğan’s period in power. She pays particular attention to how Turkish politics has shaped and been shaped by the civil war that started in Syria in 2011.
Both books touch upon the key issues that are expected to decide the next elections. One of these is Türkiye’s economic situation. Erdoğan, having come to power in the wake of a severe economic crisis, has always prided himself on the almost continuous economic growth – only interrupted by the global financial crisis in 2009 – that Türkiye has experienced during AKP’s rule. This economic growth continues until the present day but has become spurious in the face of high inflation and currency depreciation.
In contrast to what happened in his early years in power, when economic decisions were the realm of technocrats, Erdoğan is now “surrounded by sycophants”, writes Tol.[2] Ali Babacan, whom Bechev describes as “one of the architects of Turkish economic policy in the boom years in the 2000s,”[3] abandoned the government in 2015. His story is representative of what happened to some of Erdoğan’s former fellow travelers. In 2020, Babacan founded the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), which teamed up with five other opposition parties in the so-called “Table of Six” framework that seeks to unseat Erdoğan.
Economic troubles were already a major factor in the opposition’s capture of Istanbul and Ankara in the 2019 local elections, and since then the economic situation has clearly taken a turn for the worse, exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis. Another topic that already marked the local elections in 2019 but will be even more relevant this time is the increasingly hostile attitude of major sectors of Turkish society towards Syrian refugees. Although Erdoğan and his AKP initially welcomed Syrian refugees, this position was never really popular.
According to a poll from 2012, 52% of respondents were already against settling Syrians inside the country back then. Still, the situation has significantly changed during the last decade, with a recent poll finding that 85% of the respondents want the refugees to be sent back or confined to camps. Moreover, deadly assaults on refugees and gang attacks on immigrant neighborhoods have sadly become common. Not that anti-refugee sentiments are anything particularly Turkish, though. The country hosts 3.6 million Syrian refugees, almost four times as many as the whole European Union. As Bechev rightly notes, “European decision makers have been all too happy to pass on the burden of looking after Syrian refugees.”[4]
Syria and Türkiye have been more intertwined than ever during the last decade. Tol argues that Erdoğan used the Syrian conflict “to consolidate power” at home.[5] The Turkish president’s initial strong support for the opposition to Bashar Al-Assad appealed to his conservative Turkish and Kurdish base. At home, he initiated a rapprochement with Turkey’s Kurdish population. But his failure to secure a parliamentary majority in the July 2015 elections, together with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) rejection of Erdoğan’s plans for an executive presidency, led to a U-turn in Erdoğan’s strategy. He fomented the collapse of peace negotiations with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting the central Turkish state since 1978 and allied himself with the ultra-nationalist Devlet Bahçeli and his Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). In the November 2015 elections, the AKP recovered its electoral majority.
Tol describes the Turkish president’s decision as a “genius political move that would allow Erdogan to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”[6] The Turkish government progressively acknowledged that Al-Assad was unlikely to fall and focused on rolling back the self-autonomy achievements of Syria’s Kurds, a move applauded by the strongly anti-Kurdish MHP. Operation Euphrates Shield was launched in 2016 and established a Turkish-occupied area in Northern Syria. Operation Olive Branch would follow in 2018, widening the territory under Turkey’s control. The military incursions aimed at creating “safe zones where Turkey’s Syrian refugees can be relocated.”[7]
Nevertheless, only a small fraction of the refugees have returned to Syria, as most of them would like to become Turkish citizens and the situation in northern Syria remains unstable. The opposition has exploited the anti-refugee sentiments in Turkey. A good example of this tendency can be observed in Meral Akşener’s IYI Parti, which emerged as a split of MHP in 2017 and diverted a significant number of nationalist votes from the AKP-MHP block – the so-called “People’s Alliance” – in the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections. The Syrian war, which was once “full of opportunities” for Erdoğan, has become “his Achilles heel.”[8] This explains why Erdoğan appears increasingly ready to reconcile with Al-Assad, seeing in this possible rapprochement a way to force the return of Syrian refugees.
Bechev and Tol present somewhat divergent assessments of what the future holds for Türkiye. Bechev writes that “Erdoğan won’t surrender power”, arguing that “what matters is who counts the votes as much as how many ballots each candidate gets.”[9] Meanwhile, Tol believes that Erdoğan has damaged Türkiye’s institutions, but change is possible “if Erdogan is out of the picture and a popularly backed process of reforms is launched.”[10] One wonders, however, if an opposition victory in the elections would not bring new challenges of its own.
This will certainly be the case if the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition party, has not learnt from its past mistakes. As Bechev reminds us, the rise of Erdoğan and his AKP was importantly driven by an “illiberal opposition which rooted for the outright suppression of the AKP.”[11] The CHP, established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, has traditionally had an elitist understanding of politics.[12] The CHP understands “Turkishness” in a way that often excludes conservative Muslims and the Kurds.
In 2008, the CHP, together with army generals, judges, and university rectors, opposed Erdoğan’s government decision to lift the ban on female students wearing the headscarf at university. One of the most vocal opponents of Erdoğan’s decision was Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the current leader of CHP, who after long and complicated negotiations – which at one point risked fracturing the “Table of Six” – has finally been nominated as the opposition’s candidate to replace Erdoğan as president of Türkiye.
Although the CHP has changed its official position on the headscarf debate, many in Türkiye still fear CHP’s secularism. Meanwhile, the IYI Parti currently represents “the most stridently anti-refugee party”[13] – with the exception of the recently founded Victory Party, which denounces the presence of foreigners in Türkiye as an “invasion” and polls around 2% of the total vote. The anti-refugee wave might bring electoral success to the opposition, but it comes at a high cost for Syrian refugees and overall societal cohesion.
It is also unclear what an opposition victory would represent for the pro-Kurdish HDP. On the one hand, the Turkish opposition is reluctant to approach the HDP because it fears losing support among nationalist voters. On the other hand, the opposition clearly needs a majority of HDP supporters to vote for Kılıçdaroğlu in order to unseat Erdoğan. The votes of Kurds and pro-HDP Turks were already essential in securing the Istanbul mayorship for the CHP candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu in 2019. The opposition needs them once again. Now, the HDP faces the threat of closure at the hands of a deeply politicized Constitutional Court over alleged ties with outlawed Kurdish military groups.
The party’s bank accounts were frozen in January 2023. The freeze on the party’s bank accounts was lifted last week, when it was also known that the HDP will present its case to the court on April 11. The HDP will support the opposition not out of conviction but because it sees Kılıçdaroğlu as the lesser of two evils.
Both Bechev and Tol’s books provide a concise and clever portrait of Türkiye in the last two decades. Although their works discuss varied aspects of Turkish political and social life, they put the spotlight on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as he has decisively shaped Türkiye’s history in the 21st century. The coming months are meant to decide whether his figure recedes to the background or looms larger than ever.
n ever.
[1] Bechev, Dimitar. Turkey Under Erdoğan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), p. 54.
[2] Tol, Gönül. Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria (London: Hurst and Co., 2022), p. 244.
[3] Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, p. 140.
[4] Ibid., p. 196.
[5] Tol, Erdoğan’s War, p. 295.
[6] Ibid., p. 189.
[7] Ibid., p. 261.
[8] Ibid., p. 295.
[9] Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, p. 215.
[10] Tol, Erdoğan’s War, p. 285.
[11] Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, p. 163.
[12] Sofos, Spyros A., Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), p. 127.
[13] Tol, Erdoğan’s War, p. 246.
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