Erdoğan: a failure of moderate Islamism

Erdoğan was held up as the example of pragmatic Islamism. That was before he became a corrupt autocrat, Islamic State facilitator and enabler of global disorder.

“2023’s most important election” takes place on May 14 in Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has thrown his initial opponent in jail, changed the constitution in his favour and shut down most of the independent media. But in spite of all these institutional advantages and a willingness to jettison the rule of law, Erdoğan is behind in the polls to his challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a mild-mannered former civil servant. Erdoğan’s unpopularity has many causes, including the devastating earthquakes that hit Turkey in February and the number of collapsed buildings that were put up by cronies of the president. Corruption in this case literally cost thousands of lives.

Nonetheless, it remains difficult to imagine that Turkey’s president will meekly accept the results of a close election which he loses. The shadow of Trump and Bolsonaro makes such a thing easier: it’s no longer the done thing to accept unwelcome results. If Erdoğan does reject the outcome, you pity the US Ambassador being sent in to tell him to stand down. So, for all the polling and other evidence that ordinary Turks would like to see the back of Erdoğan, I am cautious about writing his political obituary.

Erdoğan’s career is one of the most consequential of recent geopolitical history. I vividly remember, when running the Foreign Office’s countering violent extremism (CVE) programme, the debates around whether Erdoğan represented a positive, pragmatic version of Islamist politics, or a dangerous fusion of authoritarianism and religious intolerance. Famously, Erdoğan had served a short prison sentence in the late 1990s as mayor of Istanbul when he publicly quoted an Islamist poem with the lines “The minarets are our spears, the domes are our shields”. The fact that you could be imprisoned for publicly quoting poetry that undermined the secular character of the Turkish state was in itself problematic. At that time, the possibility that Turkey could join the EU was taken seriously. On the one hand, the military-enforced secularist norms were a profoundly undemocratic legacy of Ataturk, forcing millions of Turks to minimise their own cultural inclination to live a Muslim lifestyle. On the other, the realistic prospect of a large Muslim country joining the EU was clearly challenging.

Britain under David Cameron was the most forceful proponent of Turkey’s accession to the EU. Long before Brexit, the prospect that the EU might be rendered ineffective as it attempted to absorb Turkey was too tempting for British Europhobes to ignore. It is a strange irony that the prospect of Turkey joining the EU was used as a major element of the Brexit campaign (including the ludicrous idea that 76 million Turks would emigrate to the UK, as if a vast country might become completely uninhabited as a result of emigration). Whereas, the same Europhobes had enthusiastically sought the accession of Turkey to the EU in previous years as a means of undermining the institution.

The biggest barrier to Turkish EU accession has become Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Since becoming Prime Minister and then President, he has forcefully sought the re-Islamisation of Turkish society. This has been pursued in various ways - partly through the normalisation of the hijab (headscarf) in government offices since 2013 or more recently the campaign to create, in Erdoğan’s own words, a “pious generation”, schooled in madrassas that receive generous public funding, even though their educational output has been far behind that of ordinary secular schools. At the same time, Erdoğan has made Turkey less democratic, particularly by his crackdown on an independent media, judiciary and civil service. All of these things would be prerequisites for EU membership, once a coveted aspiration of Turkish leaders, now a distant and increasingly remote possibility. Indeed, Erdoğan has courted popularity in the Arab world - where his Islamist politics and social conservatism are an immediate hit.

The Hagia Sophia - no longer a museum

Under Erdoğan the idea of moderate Islamist government has taken a possibly fatal hit. He and his party have presided over the dismantling of one of the world’s most successful secular states with a Muslim majority population, whilst also turning Turkey into an elective dictatorship. The multilayered character of Turkey was once eloquently expressed in the form of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. This majestic building was built as a Byzantine cathedral, subsequently became a mosque under the Ottoman Empire and then in secular Turkey was a museum, celebrating Turkey’s complex and fascinating history. In 2020 it was turned back into a mosque and became the centrepiece of a celebration of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.

But it is perhaps in the complexities of Turkey’s relationship with the Islamic State that we see the real risks of an Islamist president. Whilst Turkey has at times pursued Islamic State (IS) targets vigorously (including claiming, with impeccable political timing, to have killed the IS leader on 1 May) there is ample evidence of Turkish collusion with the terror group, something that President Macron raised publicly in 2019. Extensive evidence points to the Turkish state supplying weapons to IS, including trucks carrying weapons stopped at the Turkey-Syria border for inspections then being waved through on the orders of MIT, Turkey’s feared intelligence agency. There is also evidence that Turkey gave training and medical care to IS militants. What is not in any doubt is that Turkey allowed thousands of volunteers to IS to travel into Syria to join up, apparently content to see a surge in manpower for the group.

This support is not necessarily reflective of an instinctive support for Islamist militancy on the part of Erdoğan (although that can’t be ruled out); it points to a far more basic calculation: that IS were more likely to target and kill Kurds which Erdoğan regarded as a threat to his grip on the country. The fact that IS committed a genocide against the Kurdish people was, presumably, rather welcome news to Erdoğan.

In the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Erdoğan’s Turkey has once again shown itself to be an unreliable ally. Whilst the country has supplied the Ukrainians with military drones and played an important role in negotiations around access to the Black Sea for Ukrainian grain, it has also danced to Putin’s tune on many occasions. Turkey made it difficult for Finland to join NATO and continues to block Sweden’s application, on the dubious claim that Kurdish exiles in Sweden are planning terror attacks. More recently, Erdoğan has explicitly linked Islam to NATO membership, saying that Sweden cannot expect to become a member of the alliance if people are allowed to burn Qu’rans (undoubtedly highly offensive, but legal, as is burning other religions’ sacred books in many democracies). Whilst Turkey remains ostensibly a member of the alliance, Erdoğan behaves increasingly as if he has already left. In 2017, Turkey ordered Russian S-400 missiles, a hi-tech air defence system that risks Russian technicians gaining access to sensitive NATO data. He has threatened other NATO members with military action and talks of President Biden as a political foe. On the other hand, Erdoğan has called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, which would hand Putin a victory and is completely at odds with the NATO position.

It’s important to make a distinction between a politician who happens to a person of faith (in this case Muslim) and a politician seeking to advance their faith as a political agenda, to the exclusion of other faiths and to the exclusion of secular values. It is of course perfectly valid to argue that this is an Erdoğan problem rather than any issue with political Islam - but there are very few other examples to draw on. Erdoğan was the case study for moderate Islamism in the political context. But under his rule, he has explicitly portrayed Islam as in opposition to liberal values. At times, this has come with crashing insensitivity: after the terrible Paris attacks of 2015, Erdoğan decided to blame western countries, saying, “The West’s hypocrisy is obvious. As Muslims, we’ve never taken part in terrorist massacres.” After terrorist threats in Turkey in early 2023, Erdoğan then threatened western embassies that issued security warnings with dire consequences, apparently indifferent to the idea that he was effectively allying himself with Islamic State in doing so.

In 2020, he used the Turkish phrase “kılıç artığı”, meaning “leftovers of the sword” to attack his opponents. This slightly obscure-sounding reference is, in the Turkish context, a 300-decibel dog whistle. It is widely known to refer to survivors of the genocide carried out in Turkey against the largely Armenian Christian community in the early twentieth century. It is very clearly violent hate speech. This is not the conduct of a man you would expect to meekly accept the result of an election. We may be heading for a rocky period as the authoritarian strongman completes his transition to full dictatorship.