Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Turkey’s Putin can’t halt the coming economic meltdown
You have to hand it to him. Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is turning into quite the Putin mini-me, both in terms of his ruthlessness and his complete political mastery of his country.
Stung by his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) shocking failure (after over a decade of utter dominance) to win June’s parliamentary elections outright, Erdogan responded by wandering even further off the reservation. Rather than meekly accepting the Turkish voters’ verdict and curtailing his dreams of creating a strong Turkish executive presidency (with himself at the helm) in place of the current parliamentary system, Erdogan doubled down, embarking on a series of highly risky domestic and foreign policy moves designed to reestablish his absolute dominance of Turkish politics. How, western experts wailed, could he be so reckless?
The simple answer, which any realist understands, is that everything Erdogan has done since the June elections has been an effort to alter those newly-imposed domestic constraints on his power. As ever, this real world imperative conditions everything else, including foreign policy. The western punditocracy may bewail his lack of statesmanship, but it is unlikely that the Turkish President cares very much. From the perspective of the Turkish Sultan, doubling down on his domestic political agenda makes eminent sense.
Erdogan knew that if he quietly accepted the result in June, his dream of changing the very nature of Turkish politics itself would be definitively over. Worse still, the surprising June election could well have marked the high-water mark of AKP power as a whole.
The end game of such a prospect was obvious to Erdogan; either he risked it all, trying with all his might to overturn the result, or his days in power (and even his days of freedom given the corruption allegations lodged against his family) would be numbered. Instead of going gently into that good night, the Turkish President hatched an audacious scheme designed to nullify a parliamentary result he simply could not live with.
First, he saw to it that no government was formed that reflected the disastrous June result, an inconclusive outcome necessitating another parliamentary election, held earlier this month. Second, he aroused nationalists in the country, by playing up external Kurdish threats, particularly in Syria. Third, Erdogan whipped up anti-Kurdish feeling in Turkey itself by restarting the war with the Kurdish separatist group, the PKK.
Specifically, Erdogan wanted to smear the increasingly popular pro Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) as traitors to the Turkish state, while reminding his voters that only one-party government headed by the AKP (and not the coalition outcome they had just voted for) could manage the many dangers – both within and without – that buffet Turkey. In addition, due to his newfound bellicose stand against the Kurds, Erdogan was hankering to poach some of the far right’s voters. One must accept that, though cynical and destructive, the Turkish Sultan devised a brilliant political plan.
And it all worked to perfection. In the parliamentary election held on 1 November, the AKP won 49 per cent of the vote, up from its meagre 41 per cent total in the last electoral contest on 7 June. Instead of that inconclusive result, the AKP found itself with its more customary absolute majority, winning 316 of the 550 overall seats, coming just short of the 330 it needs to amend the constitution unilaterally, establishing the strong Putin-style presidency Erdogan yearns for. Curiously, while the HDP sustained only relatively minor losses, Erdogan poached far more votes from the far right Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which saw its support in parliament halved. Erdogan’s unscrupulous scare tactics worked to perfection. Once again, he bestrides the Bosporus like a colossus.
However, there is an almighty caveat to this cynical, brilliant, bit of political derring-do. Of all the emerging market economies teetering on the edge of the current abyss, Turkey’s is the most likely to fall headlong into the chasm. It is little wonder the Turkish lira has been one of the world’s weakest currencies this year relative to the dollar. The country’s GDP is expected to grow by under 3 per cent in 2015, after increasing by only 2.4 per cent in 2014.
Worst of all, after the first halcyon years of AKP dominance, when then Prime Minister Abdullah Gul led the charge for economic liberalisation and structural reform, Erdogan has seemed to have little interest in sustaining such a policy. With the US Federal Reserve sure to raise interest rates, and with Turkey already nearing meltdown, Erdogan’s unambiguous victory will likely mean that he – and he alone – will be left holding the bag when Turkey falls off the economic cliff.