It was truly a 21st century coup.
Live television and social media afforded millions of transfixed observers around the world the opportunity to witness the sordid night of the 15th and 16th July unfold in real time from the sanguine pavements of Istanbul and Ankara. Developments in information and communication technology have provided a uniquely comprehensive image of the crisis for the global commentariat and armchair political enthusiasts such as myself to dissect.
Unfortunately for the optimists, the vast body of information that has emerged from the coup exposes a harsh reality: the increasingly authoritarian President Erdogan will only draw strength from this abortive challenge to his rule. Freshly imbued with a triumphalist sense of vindication, Erdogan now possesses a pretext to assert his authority in a vengeful wave of oppression that has already begun to take form.
Turkey has had a long and tumultuous history of military intervention in civilian politics. From the seventeenth century, Ottoman Sultans were effectively subjects to the demands and diktats of the elite Janissary infantry. These guards were replaced in the early nineteenth century by a secular, westernised military outfit which was able to seize power in the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This hero is still lionised by nationalists in the country today.
No less than four coups erupted in Turkey between 1960 and 1997, the military striving to manage the direction of government policy. However, the influence of the armed forces has been largely subdued since Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2002. Notwithstanding the ongoing Ergenekon trials (which have seen the arrest of 275 suspected secularist plotters from within the military and beyond), Turkish politics has been marked by a generally cordial relationship between the government and the armed force in recent years – a relationship that has now been left battered and defiled upon Turkey’s bloodstained streets.
This is a crisis of Erdogan’s own making. He commands fierce support from around half the electorate, but has left the other half feeling disaffected and marginalised by his meteoric ambitions and authoritarian tendencies. Under Erdogan’s tenure, judicial prosecutions have become increasingly arbitrary with the arrest of journalists, academics and other public figures. In one instance, a 16-year-old boy was even taken into custody for insulting the President.
Erdogan was denied an executive presidency when his party failed to gain a parliamentary majority in the 2015 general election but this coup could provide him with another opportunity to centralise authority. Over 6,000 arrests have been made at the time of writing, including over 2,700 judges.
Erdogan has even seemed to celebrate the coup as a ‘gift from God,’ giving him ‘a reason to cleanse our army.’ Tellingly, the Gulen Movement – a liberal, transnational Islamist movement led by Erdogan’s political ally-turned-mortal enemy Fethullah Gulen – has been accused as the unlikely perpetrators. Across social media under the hashtag #TheatrenotCoup, there have been claims Erdogan’s government may have fabricated or permitted the attempted coup, at the least showing a wide perception of its potential benefits.
Whatever the truth may be – although the evidence for a Turkish government orchestrated conspiracy is lacking – the military plotters have only succeeded in reinforcing Erdogan’s strength. No doubt the President will choose to interpret the spontaneous protests against the would-be-junta as an expression of personal support for his leadership.
It does not not matter that many of those who challenged the prospect of military rule were avowed critics of the AKP administration. Erdogan has now been gifted with the responsibility of being the symbolic defender of Turkish democracy.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the undermining of his presidency has left him in a more secure position than ever from which to arrogate to himself more and more far reaching powers. As the Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran wrote in the Guardian, ‘yet again Turkey’s children have awoken to darkness at dawn’. Such is the unassailable reality of this coup. As always, it will be the ordinary people who will suffer.
