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.

It took less than 24 hours for the Nice attack – which killed 84 innocents including ten children – to fall from the front pages. In that time the world’s gaze had shifted from the French Riviera to Turkey. Whilst this reflected the magnitude of the attempted coup, it also demonstrated how we are growing accustomed to such deadly terror in France. It is as though some are beginning to see these events as normal, something to be expected.

This becomes most apparent in the worrying predictability of people’s reactions to an attack: Statements of sympathy and solidarity will be made by leaders around the world, Francois Hollande will announce a continuation of the state of emergency and even the same hashtags (#JeSuisNice) will be used on social media. Our familiarity with how to react, more than anything else, shows how terror is becoming an evermore common part of life in France.

But how is it that such a state of affairs has been reached? Two years ago it would have been ludicrous to suggest that France would have suffered so many atrocities to such a degree. Many of its European neighbours and allies have managed to prevent any major attacks over the past decade so why can’t France? This isn’t because things have changed but because they haven’t.

This contrasts with the view of Marine Le Pen and the National Front that France’s newfound suffering comes from a reticence to change policy in failing to take firmer military action and curtail excessive levels of tolerance toward other cultures. Yet of all European countries, France is by far the most involved in the fight against Daesh in Iraq and Syria and the State of Emergency has permitted its security services far greater powers than ever before. Clearly then, the French don’t lack the conviction required to act through force. It is merely that this type of response is ineffective. The answer is not to be found by fighting fire with fire. As any American would testify after Iraq and Afghanistan, The War on Terror is not won on the basis of military might. Chest-beating will serve only to ferment, not prevent terror.

Regardless of the military dimension, the National Front may still point to France’s perceived over-tolerance of Islam as being the ultimate cause of the spike in attacks. Yet, given its controversial law on banning the Burqa in public spaces and the French state’s rigorous enforcement of laïcité, like prohibiting the wear of religious symbols in schools, it is difficult to say France is any more tolerant than other Western countries. Moreover, this imagined tolerance would surely make young French Muslims less, not more likely to attack their own country. Thus, it is the intolerance of France towards many of its immigrants and their cultures which has served to create a climate in which young men from Muslim countries can be easily radicalised.

Over nine per cent of the population in France are immigrants, with over 25 per cent coming from North Africa and former French colonies, known as les Maghrebins. In France, unlike Britain where there has been a policy of multiculturalism, there is an expectation that new arrivals will assimilate and adopt French culture. This serves only to raise tensions between les Francais de souche, a controversial expression which refers to people not only born in France but with several generations of native French ancestry, and les Maghrebins. Neither is this helped by the somewhat acrimonious process of French decolonisation in North Africa. All of these factors create a climate in which immigrants are treated as outsiders.

A fact seen physically in the poor, dilapidated housing estates found on the edge of French cities in which many immigrants are placed. Somewhere from which Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhel, the Nice attacker, came after he moved from Tunisia in 2005. Ghettoised in a city where 25 per cent of the population vote for the National Front, it is not difficult imagine the ease with which he became radicalised. The conditions were perfect.