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A referendum win for Turkey’s president would dismay his critics but be good for the region
Roger Boyes
The Times
The Middle East needs a stronger Erdogan
Should we worry more about Turkey’s swaggering sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan? If he wins a constitutional referendum on Sunday, his critics say, he will abuse the powers of an executive presidency, further cracking down on the press and subverting institutions. And if he loses, the president will indefinitely extend the state of emergency that was imposed after last summer’s failed putsch. “The military coup was foiled,” says Can Dündar, sacked editor of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, “but a civilian coup suspended freedoms.”
Not a happy choice this weekend, it seems, for the Turks. Yet a stronger Erdogan, acting within constitutional restraints, is what Turkey and the wider Middle East needs at the moment. A Yes vote, one that formalises the authority of a directly elected executive presidency, could give him the psychological reassurance to loosen up at home and become an important stabilising force in Syria.
Erdogan will never be the kind of democrat that the European Union or Turkish metropolitan liberals want him to be. He could, however, turn into a kind of Lee Kuan Yew, the autocrat credited with transforming Singapore from a Third World into a First World country within a generation. He too tried to modernise, create a growth economy while facing off external enemies — communists, Indonesia — in a tricky neighbourhood.
As Putin’s hold on Syria weakens, Turkey’s authority will grow
The Turkish leader certainly started off as a moderniser; a popular mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, he led a young Justice and Development party to a landslide victory in 2002. In short order, he accepted a UN unification plan for Cyprus, endearing him to the EU; brought in minority rights for the Kurds; subordinated the army to civilian control; and gave a voice to Turks who were simultaneously socially conservative Muslims and intrepid entrepreneurs. Inward investment boomed.
That was Erdogan 1.0 and he was still seen to be the initiator of a successful model when the Arab Spring overturned Middle East regimes in 2011. His AKP party seemed briefly at least to offer a possible model for the emerging democracies of the region.
Two problems created Erdogan 2.0, the man that the EU loves to hate. The first was his sense that the much-feared deep state — the web of army officers, intelligence people, clubbable judges — was out to get him. The army had thrown out four governments in four decades, threatened many more and whispered to its friends in Nato governments that Erdogan was a rabid Islamist. If Erdogan fell into fits of paranoia, it was partly down to the sense of enemies within.
That explains the purge after last July’s coup attempt: jails burst at the seams with supporters of the exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen, who was supposedly behind the bungled power grab. Tens of thousands have lost jobs, businessmen suspected of disloyalty have had their assets seized, critical teachers have been forced out of education, newspapers shut.
Second, the Syrian war started to destabilise Turkey. In part it was personal. Erdogan was upset by old email intercepts from Asma Assad to her husband Bashar, moaning about the boorishness of their summer house guest Erdogan and his apparently shopaholic wife. Erdogan also has fierce political arguments against Assad staying in power. His massacres stoked anger across the Sunni world; Gulf states were piling in to pay jihadists to fight the regime and Erdogan was being marginalised. Refugees poured over the border. Islamic State set up cells. And the atomisation of Syria prompted a surge of activity by Syrian Kurd groups, in contact with the banned PKK inside Turkey.
Hence Erdogan 2.0: an autocrat at bay, trusting no one. If he wins the referendum on Sunday, however, we may see an Erdogan 3.0. Turkish friends howl at my apparent naivety when I make the case for a Yes vote. But consider this: a stronger Turkish leader, no longer looking over his shoulder and in place for what could well be the final years of the Assad regime, is exactly what is needed. As Vladimir Putin’s hold on Damascus weakens, Turkey’s regional authority can only grow. And Turkey remains a Nato member, committed to an outcome in Syria that also serves the interests of the alliance.
A more confident Turkish leader should be able to acknowledge that his domestic critics are not terrorists just because they represent alternative opinions. If he does that, if he holds by his promise to act as a holding station for the refugees heading via Turkey towards Europe, then the West can surely stop treating him as a Putin clone.
If the West wants to rehabilitate Erdogan then it has to sort out the problem of the Kurdish militias which are in effect being used as western (and Russian) ground troops in Syria. If they are in the front line of the force that drives Isis out of Raqqa, they may end up occupying the Sunni town or handing it over to Assad (and the Russians). Neither is a good outcome for Turkey.
We have to let the Syrian Kurds down gently: they are not going to be allowed to carve out an independent Kurdistan.
Sooner rather than later we will all —Europeans, Americans, Russians, the Gulf states and especially the Turks — have to rebuild Syria together with the Syrians, reimagine the Middle East and bury a lot of bodies. We can start next week by not treating Erdogan as the devil incarnate. There’s only one of those, we know where he lives — and it’s not in Ankara.
An interesting article. Do the British agree with him? What do you think?
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Originally Posted by Siyendi
We give Hopa to Georgia or to Armenia.
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