Talking Turkey: Coup bid a warning signal to Erdogan

The failed coup attempt in Turkey is not a return to the periodic coups of the past but a warning to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that his overweening ambition to be a modern Ataturk in the 21st century has more critics than he had imagined. In this instance, sections of the security services were unhappy with his rule and tried to change the scenario in the only way they knew. A coup broadcast said the Army had seized power in order to save democracy. The coup was put down rather quickly but only after the reported deaths of nearly 265 people and 1,400 who were left injured in Ankara, the capital, and elsewhere.

Its political consequences will linger to present a major challenge to the President’s ambition of converting his country’s parliamentary system into an executive presidency. Beyond it is the task of meeting the domestic, regional and international challenges. The attempted coup is the last thing Turkey’s friends and allies would have wished because it was one of the few countries in the Middle East considered stable. Turkey has of course been heavily involved in the Syrian civil war and has been the entry point of jihadis going to fight for Islamic State and other groups. Today, Turkey hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees.

Only in recent times has the Turkish leadership exerted itself in policing its borders more rigorously, allowed the United States to use the Incirlik airbase for anti-Islamic State operations and sought to reduce the number of regional antagonists by making peace with Israel and Russia. However, President Erdogan’s problems are mostly at home. He fell out with self-exiled cleric Fetullah Gulen, who was once his close ally, and has had an army of followers in the country’s legal, administrative and media sectors. The President has charged him with instigating the coup — a charge he has denied — and asked the United States for his extradition. Significantly, 2,750 judges were dismissed after the coup.

After falling out with Mr Gulen, Mr Erdogan went to great length to try to clean the administration of Gulenists and took on the added burden of fighting the Kurdish rebels, the PKK, concentrated in the country’s southeast, with whom he had once sought peace. The Turkish establishment’s hopes of joining the European Union have faded although recently it did do a deal with the EU on stemming the flow of Syrian refugees into Europe in exchange for economic assistance.

President Erdogan’s basic problem will not go away even if he is willing to compromise on the fringes. His Ataturk complex, on view in the over 1,000-room Ankara palace he built for himself in Ottoman style, is taxing the nation’s politics and resources. Clearly, he doesn’t brook dissent. The media, particularly the publishing empire of Gulen, have been browbeaten or taken over. And his ruthlessness in dealing with political opponents is a byword. President Erdogan, however, has accomplished one task in his 13 years of rule, mostly as Prime Minister. He did put the military, which had got used to running the country through a succession of coups, in its place.

But the new coup attempt has the potential of setting off discontent. First, there is the overt Islamisation of the country to please Mr Erdogan’s political constituency in Anatolia, much to the dislike of secular Turks. The second is the restriction of democratic freedoms. The coup was attempted while President Erdogan was on holiday. He flew home post-haste. But the plot involved only some sections of the armed forces and the speedy surrender of young soldiers was a sign of fear although some colonels and a few generals were complicit. The Army chief has been replaced. Officially, 265 people died, more than 1,400 were wounded and nearly 3,000 servicemen have been detained.

President Erdogan has undergone many changes in his political career. As mayor of Istanbul, he was a rebel. As Prime Minister, he first presented himself as a democrat and moderniser, seeking to meet EU goals in pushing his country’s membership of the organisation. As the prospects of Turkey’s membership receded, Mr Erdogan swung to greater observance of Islamic custom and precepts, recognising it was the religiously observant, upwardly mobile middle class that had put him in power. A string of electoral victories also gave him the confidence of fancying himself as a latter-day Ataturk, the great moderniser who built the modern state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The irony, of course, is that in trying to seize Ataturk’s mantle, he is taking the country back to the religious baggage his hero had dispensed with.

President Erdogan is well aware that he lives in a dangerous region. Before he decided to cease playing a double game with jihadis to help oust Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey was viewed favourably by Islamic State supporters. His change of stance brought about deadly terrorist strikes that killed hundreds of Turks ascribed to the Islamic State or Kurdish rebels. There are other ironies stemming from the vainglorious role Mr Erdogan sees for himself.

He is seeking to firm up a super majority he needs for a constitutional amendment to change the parliamentary system into a presidential one, though in practice he already enjoys supreme power after dispensing with the services of his more independent-minded Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, in favour of an old supporter, Binali Yildrim. Mr Erdogan rides several horses. His country is an important member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation even while he played footsie with jihadists. It is the nature of Turkey’s balancing acts that some moves go wrong in the changing equations and circumstances. Ankara’s ambition at one point was to have “zero problems” with neighbours. Even after mending relations with Israel and Russia, hostile neighbours remain. Mr Erdogan’s actions in the immediate post-coup phase will be watched with keen interest at home and in the region.