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Whatsapp Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech during an election rally in Istanbul on March 23, 2014.

'The Turkish model' has long been a template for democratic reform across the Arab and Muslim world. Now the system is under pressure from civil disturbances and high level corruption. As local elections loom, Andrew West asks whether democracy can survive in Turkey.

Back in 2011, when the impulse for reform and democracy looked like it was sweeping through the Middle East, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan won rock star treatment throughout the Muslim world. The New York Times reported on his ‘Arab Spring tour’, which touched down in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.

The leader of Tunisia’s an-Nahda party, Rashid al-Gannouchi, was just one among many putative Arab democrats who cited the Erdogan led Justice and Development Party (AKP), as a template for the Muslim world. In Turkey, Erdogan had nurtured a deep and observant Islamic culture alongside democracy.

What has happened in Turkey is that an enormously popular and powerful prime minister has let power go to his head.

Erdogan’s party has been in power since 2002—and Erdogan himself since early 2003—and he wants to contest the first directly elected poll for the presidency in August. The consensus among the foreign affairs commentariat is that Erdogan’s support remains broad but is increasingly shallow. And that will be tested this weekend in local elections across Turkey.

In Istanbul, for example, where Erdogan was once a popular mayor, the AKP’s man is in a neck and neck contest with the candidate of the Republican People’s Party, according to polls reported by the Deutsche Welle. The Republicans represent the secular, socialist-leaning ancien regime of Kemal Ataturk, so a comeback in Turkey’s major city would be telling.

Perhaps more interesting is what’s happening to the ‘Turkish model’. British writer Christopher de Bellaigue knows the region intimately, having lived several years in Istanbul and has been writing widely on Turkey for The New York Review of Books. He's also the author of Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup, about the 1953 coup by the British and US governments against Iran's democratically elected leader.

Reflecting on the riots that erupted across Istanbul in mid 2013—and the civil disturbances that have continued sporadically since—and the Erdogan government’s reaction, de Bellaigue believes there is now a real prospect that Turkey could drift towards ‘Islamic authoritarianism’.

‘What has happened in Turkey is that an enormously popular and powerful prime minister has let power go to his head,’ he told The Religion & Ethics Report. ‘And we’ve seen recently indications of corruption on a scale that you inevitably find after 10 years of power increasingly untrammelled.’

‘What makes [Islamic authoritarianism] plausible is that you have a majority of the population that’s pious and that, as far as we know, still supports the prime minister. And at the same time you have a very strong centralised bureaucracy state that’s enormously powerful.’

Is the Turkish model of Islamic democracy crumbling? The Religion and Ethics Report looks at this weekend elections in Turkey that will test the much vaunted Turkish model of Islamic democracy.

One restraint on Erdogan’s power could the movement known as Hizmet, or ‘Service’, founded by the Muslim cleric preacher Fethullah Gülen. Gülen is now based in the United States—indeed, in the woody groves of Pennsylvania—but his teachings are said to have a following of around five million people.

His international network is also vast—about 1000 schools in 120 countries, de Bellaigue estimates.

And perhaps most telling, the Hizmet movement—to the extent that it is a movement—is worth untold billions. Gülen’s message of piety, educational attainment and business success has resounded with Turkey’s corporate elite. The Gülenists and Erdogan may not have enjoyed a formal alliance but they certainly share a similar objective: the creation of a democratic Turkey restrained by a strong Muslim culture. It’s important to note, however, that the Gülenists, while socially conservative, are not Salafist or Wahhabist, and certainly not anti-modernity.

Now the ‘partners’ in this project have fallen out in a spectacular way. As part of the Gülenist mission, followers have risen not only to the top of business but also the bureaucracy, the police, the judiciary and the legal profession. And in recent months they have been targeting corruption that is said to reach into the country’s leading banks and Erdogan’s government.

Erdogan has responded to their efforts by purging Gülenists from positions of influence, even describing them as a ‘parallel state’.

Find out more at The Religion and Ethics Report.



