Confessions of a recovering AKP fan

The headline above was suggested to me yesterday by a Turkish friend from California. “That’s what some people really expect to hear from you these days,” she said on Skype. “Especially after [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s latest attack on the media.”

Well, my friend has a point. Erdoğan’s recent call for media bosses to fire the columnists whose pieces “increase tension in the country” is really over the top. It is shockingly illiberal and utterly unacceptable. No columnist has to write pieces Erdoğan, or anybody else, will approve. The fact the prime minister dared to say something like that is not just tragic but also worrying.

Remembering Menderes

Yet still, I did not sit down to write this piece in order to give you confessions, for I have never considered myself an “AKP fan.” I rather have supported most of the policies the incumbent party has pursued since 2002, for they fit into the political principles I believe in. I still agree with Erdoğan in that Turkey’s self-styled secularism needs to be democratically defined and that a Kurdish identity should have its legitimate place in society. I do support his government’s longtime goals to integrate with the global economy, to have “zero problems with neighbors” and to be a much more influential actor in world politics.

But the suppression of press freedom and the silencing of opposition are certainly not among my principles. And Erdoğan is wrong, damn wrong, with his growing tendency to take this route.

While this is a nuisance we should oppose, though, I think it is also one we should try to understand.

To begin to understand things, I suggest you look back to the late 1950s. The Turkey of that time was a bit similar to that of today. The incumbent center-right Democrat Party, or DP, had won three elections in a row but was deeply troubled by the fierce opposition from the arch-Kemalist CHP and its allies in the mainstream media. The latter soon started to call the military to “duty” and even started to provoke the emergent junta by false propaganda. One of the notorious libels was that the DP government was killing Kemalist youngsters and “making minced meat” out of their corpses.

Soon, on May 27, 1960, the military launched a coup directed solely against the DP, and, after a show trial, executed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and two of his ministers. Before being sent to the gallows, Menderes was even abused and humiliated in various ways – a job the Turkish security forces have been always good at.

The tragic fate of Menderes is something Erdoğan must be remembering quite often. And if he forgets, there are plenty of people around to update his memory. Deniz Baykal, the current leader of the CHP, and several prominent columnists in the mainstream media, unscrupulously told him at various times in the past few years to “bear the end of Menderes in mind.”

Another thing Erdoğan probably remembers well is the role of the mainstream media in the 1997 “soft coup” against his party. It was yet another time some journalists called the military “to duty” by spreading false propaganda. The average political IQ had risen slightly above what it was in the 1950s, so this time we did not have stories about minced meat made out of Kemalist bodies. But we had fear-mongering headlines written in the military headquarters and published word-for-word in mainstream papers the day after.

What I am trying to say is Erdoğan’s intolerance is partly rooted in his perception of the threat. He knows what every Turk knows: No military coup happens in this country without the media’s support. But then he starts to see almost every criticism as part of such a giant conspiracy, which is of course neither correct nor acceptable.

Perpetual patrimony

The rest of the problem is rooted in Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, itself. Erdoğan, as he proudly noted a few times, is a man with a temper. The fact he is the only authority in his party is also making things worse. In the first term, the presence of Abdullah Gül as a second figure with authority was a good balancing factor. Now Gül is a very good president, but the AKP without Gül is not that good.

The heart of the matter, though, is the patrimonial nature of Turkish politics. Not only the AKP but all notable political parties in this country are fiefdoms ruled by their all-powerful leaders.

While this certainly has something to do with Turkish culture, which is not modern enough to establish individualism and meritocracy, it is also reinforced by the tumultuous political history of the nation. The four military coups and the more than two dozen party closures we had since 1960 have hampered something crucial for democracy: institutionalization. Parties simply do not survive long enough to become real institutions. In fact, leaders live much longer than the parties.

Just look at Erdoğan’s life. His political career includes four consecutive political parties, three of which were closed down in two separate military coups. If the AKP gets closed down, which is not out of the question, he will probably found a fifth one.

Within such a punctuated non-equilibrium, parties inevitably turn into one-man shows. And those single men, who get unlimitedly powerful, do nothing but prove Lord Acton’s dictum: All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.