IT IS hardly a fair contest. In the campaign for Turkey’s constitutional referendum, due on April 16th, the Yes side has harnessed the power of the state to crush the Noes. Selahattin Demirtas, co-leader of a pro-Kurdish party, was poised to become one of the main No voices but has ended up behind bars on trumped-up terror charges. He faces 142 years in prison. A Kurdish-language song calling for No has been banned. A study of 168.5 hours of campaign coverage on 17 national television channels at the start of March showed that Yes supporters got 90% of the airtime. The route from Sabiha Gokcen airport, outside Istanbul, has more than a dozen building-sized banners with an image of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or his prime minister extolling a Yes vote. Giant No banners are nowhere to be seen.

Stacked as it is, the ballot could not be more consequential. Voters must decide whether to abandon a parliamentary system in favour of an executive presidency that would give the head of state complete power over the budget and the executive, and huge sway over the judiciary. MPs would have minimal powers of scrutiny.

The result will help determine the fate of Mr Erdogan, who has governed since 2003—first as a reforming prime minister, but lately as a strongman president who has come to treat all opposition as a form of treason. A No would be a grave blow for Mr Erdogan. A Yes would root his power in the very foundations of the state.

The fate of Turkey is at stake, too. Ever since Mr Erdogan took power, the country has been a test of what happens when democracy is put together with political Islam. Turkey was also an example of the benign influence of the European Union, which encouraged open markets and civil rights. Some years ago Mr Erdogan began to reject all that for nationalism and autocracy. Lately he has courted Russia and the Gulf monarchies. He would use a Yes as a popular endorsement of that illiberal path.

Since Mr Erdogan has all the advantages, anything but a resounding victory ought to count as a defeat. At least 40% of the country—religious and conservative—will support him come what may. He chose the timing of the vote in the wake of a failed coup last summer, when most of Turkey had united behind him. He has attacked the EU, Turkey’s biggest market, in an attempt to stir up nationalist support. The authorities have nearly 50,000 people in detention, whom it calls coup-supporters and terrorists; it has sacked 100,000 more. Abetted by a captive, frightened judiciary, the police are rounding up anyone Mr Erdogan designates as an enemy.

He has a healthy lead in the polls (see chart 1). Yet in the privacy of the polling booth, voters might deny Mr Erdogan his victory. Outside the ferry terminal in Uskudar on the Asian shore of the Bosporus, across the water from one of the sultans’ palaces, the AK party, co-founded and led by Mr Erdogan until he became president, has more workers handing out leaflets than there are punters willing to take them. The red and white tent of its nationalist allies blares out the peppery strains of Turkish bagpipes to Instanbulus who turn their shoulders and walk by. The country is uneasy, rocked by the failed coup and murderous bombing campaigns of jihadists and Kurdish separatists. Corruption, state interference and a collapse in tourism are weighing on the economy. Early in Mr Erdogan’s rule, Turkey made great progress towards democracy. But Turks who can remember the detentions and torture after the military coup in 1980 say that today’s are a throwback to those dark times. Workers inform on their colleagues, students on their professors, husbands on their wives. Some within AK—including, it is said, dissident party leaders—think that, this time, Mr Erdogan has gone too far. The district of Basaksehir, about 20km from the heart of Istanbul, helps explain the enduring popularity of Mr Erdogan and his party. A few decades ago such a place would have been a shanty town, put up by peasants who left the Anatolian countryside in their millions in search of work. Mr Erdogan and AK gave a voice to such “black” Turks, who suffered under the arrogant, secular “white” Turkish elite. Today, it is clean and well-appointed. Tidy apartment blocks tower alongside immaculate roads. Shops and cafés testify to a new affluence. To the visitor’s eye Basaksehir lacks character, perhaps, but to devout, working-class Turks it stands for dignity, self-respect and prosperity. It is easy to forget how abysmal the economy was in 2003 when Mr Erdogan came to power. The crisis of 2000-01, the third in a decade, caused collapses in the currency and GDP and led to the intervention of the IMF. Under the stewardship of the fund and with encouragement from the EU, Mr Erdogan’s government brought down inflation, which had briefly exceeded 100% in the early 1990s, and rescued the banks. Foreign investment soared. The country became Europe’s workshop. Thanks to their newfound stability, Turkish entrepreneurs grew rich.

Change the system

Mr Erdogan wants voters to believe that Sunday’s referendum is all about recovering this stability. Sitting in the AK office in Basaksehir, Mustafa Sentop, who helped draft the new constitution, argues that a man of Mr Erdogan’s calibre has accomplished things in power despite the system, not because of it. In its 94 years as a republic, Turkey has had 65 governments. Shadowy oligarchies have infiltrated the army and the bureaucracy in order to usurp elected politicians. There is a history of terrorism, plots and coups. “We will stop that,” Mr Sentop vows.

Formally, the new constitution abolishes the prime minister’s office and divides power between parliament, which legislates, and the president, who acts. In practice, it enthrones the president as a term-limited sultan and parliament as his court.

Mr Sentop points out that France and the United States have powerful presidents, too. But under the new constitution, unlike the Assemblée Nationale and Congress, the Turkish parliament will not control the details of spending or have a say over presidential appointments. Neither will it be able to subject the cabinet to questions, except in writing. Besides, in France and America the independence of the media and the courts is well-established. In Turkey Mr Erdogan has spent recent years turning them into his fiefs.

The chances are that the president will dominate parliament politically, too. Because executive and legislative elections will coincide, unlike those in France and America, where they are not always aligned, the president and the parliamentary majority are likely to come from the same party. Turkey operates a list system, in which party leaders control who gets a seat. The new constitution allows Mr Erdogan to retain control of his party, giving him power to handpick parliamentary candidates. Those who challenge him would pay a high price.

The reform has met strong criticism abroad. The Venice Commission, a panel of constitutional experts who advise the Council of Europe, calls it “a dangerous step backwards”, saying that the new constitution “lacks the necessary checks and balances to safeguard against becoming an authoritarian” regime. Human Rights Watch, an NGO, says that it poses “a huge threat to human rights, the rule of law and the country’s democratic future”.

Within Turkey, however, voters’ perceptions are coloured by the terror attacks and the attempted coup. The outside world has failed to grasp just how besieged Turks feel. And that has strengthened Mr Erdogan.

First came the spiral of terror and retribution. Early on, Mr Erdogan had been ready to make peace with the Kurds. Perhaps because his people had also suffered under Turkey’s secular governments, or because he stood to win votes among conservative Kurds, he offered new rights and a promise to resolve a 30-year war between security forces and the PKK, a Kurdish militia. Later he saw them as potential allies over the constitution. With their support, he would win his executive presidency and they would gain autonomy in the south-east, where they are in the majority.

But peace talks with the PKK fell apart in 2015. Kurdish success fighting with the Americans against Islamic State (IS) in Syria raised their hopes of a homeland in Turkey. After Mr Demirtas told him in early 2015 that he would never get his new constitution, a furious Mr Erdogan disowned the peace process. When the PKK blamed him for a deadly IS bombing against pro-Kurdish activists and killed two Turkish policemen, Mr Erdogan launched an offensive against its bases in northern Iraq, accompanied by mass arrests. A spiral of PKK bombings against Turkish security forces and ruthless army reprisals rocked the south-east. Under pressure in Syria, IS continued unleashing its own suicide-bombers against Turkey.

Guns and steel

After the terrorism came the putsch. Most Turks thought they had consigned military coups to history. But on the night of July 15th last year rebel troops stationed tanks at Istanbul’s main airport, occupied Taksim Square and took up positions on the two bridges crossing the Bosporus. They put their top commanders under arrest. In the capital, Ankara, their jets bombed the parliament building and the grounds of the presidential palace.

But within hours the coup collapsed. A squad attacked the hotel in Marmaris where Mr Erdogan had been on holiday—but he was already gone. In a remarkable display of people power, Turks poured onto the streets to defend civilian rule.

Mr Erdogan has seized on the violence to whip up a frenzy of paranoia and nationalism. He has memorialised the bungled coup, in which almost 250 people died, as Turkey’s second war of independence—setting himself up as the equal of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (see article).

Behind the crude myth-making lies the paranoia—which has at least one foot in reality. The police, judiciary, intelligence services and, it turned out, army had all been penetrated by unknown thousands of the followers of Fetullah Gulen, a cleric living in self-imposed exile in America.

The Gulenist movement is part self-help group, part secret society. Its 75-year-old head preaches a tolerant Sufi Islam. For many, affiliation was the route to a good education and upward mobility. In the old days, when to be devout was dangerous, it offered protection. But Gulenists continued to operate in the shadows through the 2000s, “like a Dan Brown novel”, says a journalist who, like most people in Turkey these days, will speak to the foreign press only on condition of anonymity, even though he is a supporter of AK.

The Gulenists were organised in secret stand-alone cells, as if they were revolutionaries. They helped each other gain influence by rigging state exams and fixing promotions. In the government’s telling, those who infiltrated the army lay low for years, pretending to be secular, by drinking alcohol and letting their wives uncover their hair.

If anyone should have grasped the threat, it was Mr Erdogan. When he first came to power the Gulenists provided the brains, he and his party the votes. Together they took on Turkey’s “deep state”. He used Gulenist prosecutors and judges to purge the army of secular officers—sometimes on thin or forged evidence. He stood by as the Gulenists destroyed their enemies in show trials or through smear campaigns in their newspapers and television stations.

Inevitably Mr Erdogan and Mr Gulen turned on each other, using the methods that the deep state had once used against them. The details are murky, but the first blow may have been a Gulenist attempt to arrest Mr Erdogan’s intelligence chief in 2012. The two men became locked in a fight for survival after someone released taped conversations implicating Mr Erdogan and his family in corruption—which he strenuously denies. Having compiled a roster of suspected Gulenists in the army, Mr Erdogan was about to swoop. The plotters, joined by some secularists, struck first.

Faced with an enemy within and separatists and terrorists without, Mr Erdogan had a duty to strike back, say AK politicians. “Nowhere in the world is supporting terrorism acceptable,” says Ravza Kavacki Kan, an MP for Istanbul.

And so, in the name of democracy and the rule of law, Mr Erdogan unleashed a whirlwind. In the south-east, between July 2015 and the end of last year, several thousand people lost their lives—800 of them government forces. The fighting displaced hundreds of thousands. Entire districts were flattened by artillery and bulldozers because, the government says, they were booby-trapped. Politically, the crackdown paid off. Denied a majority in parliament in an election in June 2015, AK regained it five months later. The government has since expanded the crackdown, jailing thousands of Kurdish activists, including 13 MPs, and kicking out the mayors of over 80 towns, on the ground that they have ties to the PKK.

Since the coup the police have arrested or sacked 168 generals—about half the total, among them many close to NATO—some for being too slow to come out in support of Mr Erdogan. The judiciary has lost 4,000 members. About 6,300 academics are out of a job or in jail, several hundred for signing an open letter objecting to the counter-insurgency campaign in the south-east. Roughly 160 media outlets have closed, many of them backers of Mr Gulen. Within six months of the coup, police had detained some 4,000 social-media users. And so it goes on.

On the wrong side of the state

Many people caught up in the mania did not deserve it. Much of the time, Mr Erdogan has acted under sweeping emergency powers. These are so broadly drafted that almost anyone can be detained. The authorities are quick to see guilt by association. Critics say that gives a foretaste of what a Yes vote would enable Mr Erdogan to do as president.

Emine was a primary-school teacher who had savings with a Gulenist bank and belonged to a trade union with Gulenist connections. She was sacked by decree. Her neighbours are frightened of being seen with her. Her husband has been branded a traitor. Her children are being bullied and in therapy. She is taking anti-depressants. For support she meets other women who found themselves on the wrong side of the line—a statistician who tweeted her doubts about the coup, someone who went to a Gulenist school. Emine believes she has no future. “We have no power or jobs,” she says. “It is civil death.”

AK loyalists talk of “crypto-Gulenists” and PKK terrorists hiding in plain sight. “There is no difference,” Mr Erdogan said last year, “between a terrorist with a gun and a bomb in his hand and those who use their work and pen to support terror.” MP, academic, author, journalist or the director of an NGO, “that person is a terrorist.” It looks as if the state is acting against individuals, rather than their crimes. On March 30th 21 journalists suspected of being Gulenists were acquitted. After an outcry by AK supporters all the journalists were re-arrested before they could leave prison, 13 of them on new charges of “attempting to overthrow” the government. The judges who heard the case were dismissed.

For emergency use

Safak Pavey, an opposition MP, argues that Mr Erdogan has weaponised his emergency powers. “The law is only being used against us,” she says, “not to provide justice for everyone. Foreign policy has been weaponised, too, perhaps because Mr Erdogan thinks the referendum result is in doubt. After Germany and the Netherlands refused to accept government ministers campaigning for a Yes among Turks in their countries, Mr Erdogan accused them of “Nazi practices”. The Dutch, he said, had murdered Muslims in Srebrenica during the Balkan wars. No matter that they were in fact UN peacekeepers who killed nobody. Mr Erdogan is calculating that, when Europeans hit back, patriotic Turks will rally to the flag.

At the same time, Mr Erdogan is signalling that he is prepared to shift towards Russia. This may be a ploy to provoke the EU. But it also reflects how the army and the bureaucracy are increasingly in thrall to a “Eurasian” faction whose leaders spurn NATO and the West and look to a Turkish version of the nationalism that has served Vladimir Putin. Although Turkey shot down a Russian warplane on the Syrian border and Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was assassinated last year, military and intelligence co-operation between the two countries has never been so close.

NATO is worried. So is the EU, which has struck a deal with Turkey over Syrian migrants and is mired in increasingly futile talks over Turkish membership. Under Mr Erdogan, an essential ally in a troubled region is drifting away.

Given Mr Erdogan’s power today, what difference would victory in the referendum make? Optimists outside Turkey hope that it would inspire him to be conciliatory in an attempt to unite the country. But he is by nature a bully in a culture that admires displays of strength. More probably he would use the chance to move against the next lot of enemies. That may include the secular opposition as well as some bigwigs in his own party.

Constitutionally, Mr Erdogan would be almost untouchable. As president, he would have two five-year terms (and, under some circumstances, a third). He and his allies in parliament would be able to appoint loyalists to the most senior judicial panels, immunising him and his family against prosecution should corruption allegations resurface. Some think he is grooming his son-in-law, the energy minister, as his heir.

And yet, Mr Erdogan would face obstacles. The talented administrators of his early years have gone, replaced by yes-men and second-raters. Economic growth was 2.9% last year, half its rate in the early 2000s (see chart 2). GDP per head is stagnant. Without the anchors of the IMF and the EU, Turkey has gradually shifted away from the economic orthodoxy that worked so well in the past. Inflation is over 11%, the highest since 2008.

Rather than returning to economic reform, the government is pinning its hopes for reviving the economy on a sovereign-wealth fund financed by state shareholdings and with up to $200bn to invest. But that is likely only to increase Mr Erdogan’s control over the economy, hardly a promising sign—and not just because of incompetence. In recent years cronyism, always a problem, has become steadily worse.

A rare vote for no If Mr Erdogan is vulnerable anywhere it is here. Unlike Russia, with its oil, Turkey needs foreign exchange and investment. Corruption and political repression will drive them away—even as they eat up resources. Eventually the pain will fall on the merchants and business people who are the backbone of AK support. Already, there are signs that Mr Erdogan’s popularity is waning. “Chief”, a biopic eulogising his career, has proved a failure with critics and audiences. At a recent performance at 11am in the town of Izmit, the box office refused a cinema-goer a ticket: he would have been the only member of the audience. And if Mr Erdogan loses? The consequences of No are harder to predict. A defeat of any kind would be a humiliation. But Turkey would still be under emergency rule, giving the president vast power. A heavy defeat could embolden dissidents and reformists within AK to attempt to restrain Mr Erdogan. It would also encourage his opponents. After the repression, dissidents, the media and ordinary Turks would leap at the chance to speak out. “There is a wall of silence in this country,” says Selma Atabey, a former nurse and trade-union member, sacked after the coup. “A No in the referendum would help break it down.”

Yes and No

A narrow loss, however, might lead Mr Erdogan to take desperate measures. A master at manipulating conflict to his own advantage, he could engineer another clash with the Kurds. He could call an early election in the hope of winning a large majority. Some fear that his government could put forward another new constitution, with a few cosmetic amendments. This time, with a big enough majority, it would not need to go to a referendum.

Whatever the result on April 16th, Turkey has entered a dark period. A vote for Yes would saddle the country with an elected dictator. A No would not save Turkish democracy. But it would let it live to fight another day.