One has to hand it to Tayyip. It has been a difficult year for Turkey’s President. The recent Istanbul airport attacks, following a raft of terrorist bomb blasts, brought painful blowback from Erdoğan’s interventionist policy in Syria, while killing off what remained of the summer tourist season: Russians were already staying home owing to Erdoğan’s row with Putin over the downing of a Russian warplane. After an initial rush of populism which helped Erdoğan’s party regain firm control of parliament last November, his renewal of Turkey’s endless war with the Kurds has bogged down into the usual slog of attrition. Even Erdoğan’s promising new relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel, who agreed to pay Turkey to keep more Syrian refugees from coming to Germany and hinted Turks might be granted visa-free travel to Europe, turned sour after the Bundestag passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide. With declining popularity at home and worsening press coverage abroad, the Turkish strongman was losing his mojo.
Now, in a flash, Erdoğan is again the man of the hour, the toast of CNN. Although the body count (and the beheading of soldiers by the pro-government mob) is shocking, in every other sense the drama followed a script familiar from crises in 2007 and 2013. After an initial burst of euphoria among secularist Turks aghast at the creeping Islamism of AK party rule since 2002, the muezzin rang (a sixth or “extra” time) and Erdoğan summoned his followers to the streets to remind everyone who has the majority. Despite the fireworks in Ankara, the crucial chokepoint was, just as in the “Gezi park” demonstrations of May-June 2013, Istanbul’s Atatürk airport, where the AK voting masses were summoned to greet their savior on arrival. The only novelty this time was that the call to arms came via Facetime on Erdoğan’s smart phone, held up by a sympathetic anchor on CNN Türk. (In Ed Luttwak’s next edition of Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook, he may wish to add: make sure to confiscate your enemy’s iPhone.)
President Erdoğan, a former footballer who approaches politics like a street brawl, lives for moments like this. While most Turks and foreigners following these events are genuinely horrified by the bloodshed, according to Reuters, Erdoğan described the military coup, if that is what this was, as a “gift from God,” which will allow him to “cleanse” Turkey’s army of “traitors.” This is not a man anguished by moral doubt.
Erdoğan also seized on the crisis to revive his feud with Fethullah Gülen, the Islamic preacher who runs, from his Pennsylvanian exile, an influential network of religious schools in Turkey (and also, mysteriously, the largest charter school network in the United States.) Gülen, a longtime Erdoğan ally who reputedly helped the AK party infiltrate and emasculate Turkey’s once-secularist police, judiciary, and army before they broke in December 2013, has already been blamed for the coup. If anything remains today of Gülen’s “Hizmet” network in Turkey, it will not remain for much longer (judges are already being purged, along with the army). One hopes only that no “Gülenists” are found in parliament, where a rejuvenated Erdoğan will surely now make another push to amend Turkey’s constitution to grant himself sweeping Presidential powers.
As they navigate the aftermath, Western leaders should observe diplomatic protocol and propriety. President Erdoğan is a lawfully elected President, and his AK party maintains a legitimate majority in the Turkish parliament. Turkey remains a member of NATO., an important U.S. partner (of sorts) in a troubled region, and Erdoğan is entitled to the respect any head of state of a country of like stature may expect.
Let us not be too hearty in our congratulations, however. Whatever or whoever lies behind the attempted coup d’état in Turkey, it is terrible news for this beleaguered country, already reeling from the Syrian refugee crisis (nearly three million refugees are here already), terrorism (both Kurdish PKK- and ISIS-inspired), a tottering economy and plunging tourism income which must now dwindle further still. This is not even to reckon with the political fallout, as Turkish Islamism gets another lease on life, and likely constitutional reforms creating a strong-Presidential system bring Turkey ever closer to dictatorship. President Erdoğan will celebrate his deliverance as a triumph of “democracy,” but we need not join the celebration.