Yesterday brought a burst of good news from Turkey, whose democracy has seemed to be teetering on the edge of a descent into de facto strong man rule for several years. The headline news is that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party lost its majority yesterday in national parliamentary elections. They are still far and away the largest party in the parliament. But without an absolute majority they must form a coalition with other parties. In most multi-party democracies this would be in the normal course of things. But in 2015 Turkey, it is a dramatic result.

Here’s why.

Going back to the founding of the modern Turkish Republic in the aftermath World War I, Turkey had a long period of nominally democratic but effectively one man rule under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and then his successor Ismet Inonu. This was followed by a post-War World II period of true parliamentary democracy with what we might call significant exceptions. They overlapped and they were these. The Turkish military, the sheet anchor of Turkey’s so-called ‘deep state’, reserved the right to intervene when formal democracy threatened to hop off the rails of the state’s founding ideology of ‘Kemalism’. (As the official ideology of the Turkish state, Kemalism is said to have six principles: republicanism, populism, nationalism, secularism, statism and reformism. 3, 4 and 5 could be said to be the most dominant.) This could mean chaos and instability. But the big red line was the preservation of secularism and preventing Islam from taking hold as anything but a purely private faith excluded from the political arena. From the beginnings of this post-war democratic period until 2002, Turkey had long periods of functioning parliamentary democracy punctuated by a series of military coups, often brutal in nature, in which the military overthrew the elected government to defend Kemalist secularism.

Ataturk is a fascinating and hugely consequential historical figure. I strongly recommend Andrew Mango’s 2002 Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey.



Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish Republic

That ended when Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party won its first election in 2002 and Erdogan himself became Prime Minister in 2003 after a ban on his office-holding was overturned. Unlike in the 1990s, when the predecessor party of the AKP was nudged aside in a ‘soft’ coup, this time there was no coup.

The AKP presented itself as a moderate Islamist party that accepted secularism and embraced democracy and economic liberalization. Indeed, it purported to embrace democracy and a form of minority rights in a way that Turkish democracy, with its first leash held by the secularist military, never had. As things have ended up, those pretensions seem somewhat dubious. But while I use the ‘purported’, these were at least for a significant period of time, quite real. Erdogan and the AKP liberalized much of the state structure, brought the military to heal, and made an aggressive though ultimately failed attempt to join the EU. He produced a long period of unprecedented economic growth which helped cement his popularity as the most dominant figure in modern Turkish history since Ataturk.

Unlike other Muslim majority countries in the Middle East which have tiny secular elites, a broad cross section of Turkey is deeply western-oriented and secular in its outlook. Yet the essence of the AKP experiment was that there was simply no way Turkey could be a truly democratic state as long as the culturally conservative Muslim population – most represented outside the big secular-leaning cities – was excluded from full representation in the body politic.

Erdogan offered that chance – Islamist but also accepting and seemingly embracing secularism as the governing ideology of the state and more democratic than the secularist military which was its quizzical would-be protector. Indeed, in the early years of AKP rule, his party gained significant support from secularists who had no truck with Islamism but supported liberalization of Turkey’s in many ways corrupt and certainly authoritarian ‘deep state.’

But over the years, first slowly and then more rapidly, quite a lot changed.

Erdogan has now been in effective power for 13 years – first as effective ruler, then as Prime Minister and finally as President, a once largely ceremonial office he has been transforming into the actual power in the state. I’m ambivalent about whether Erdogan was always really the man his detractors claimed he was or whether this was more a story of power corrupting. I lean toward the latter answer, though this will certainly be a question historians and Turks will be debating for decades.

In practice, over recent years, Erdogan has been leading Turkey in the direction of something like Putinism – nominal or procedural democracy in which a single man holds most or all power and rules with an authoritarian hand, using the media and judicial system increasingly as appendages of his rule. To date there has been little persuasive evidence that this hasn’t been the product of legitimate, free elections. Erdogan hasn’t been overwhelmingly popular. But his electoral support from just over half the population has been extremely durable. For the last half dozen years it has basically authoritarian rule based on 50+%.



Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Beyond the slow and then more rapid erosion of Turkish democracy over these years, there has been what can only be called the emergence of a deeply authoritarian side of Erdogan’s personality, something genuinely bordering on megalomania. All of this has been abetted by that very durable 50+% majority from the country’s culturally conservative once-excluded hinterlands and the fact that the opposition simply could not get its act together in any real way.

Turkey seemed on its way, in many ways had already arrived, at a Putinist future – one party and one man rule that successive elections seemed to ratify if only by small margins.

But yesterday Turks went to the polls and threw a major obstacle in Erdogan’s path. Indeed, many believe they’ve put an end to this path, though it seems unlikely Erdogan won’t be the head of state and effective head of the government for some time to come. Preliminary election results show his party’s vote falling from just under 50% in the last election to 41% in yesterday’s result. These differences are magnified in the actual seat count and the last election gave his party an absolute majority of seats which he has now lost. Erdogan wasn’t on the ballot but it was treated by all sides as a referendum on his rule and his on-going effort to centralize power in the hands of the presidency, which is to say in his hands.

On that question, he clearly lost.

On the other side of the equation, yesterday’s results are a major breakthrough for the country’s large Kurdish minority and to an interwoven extent the country’s secularist population. More broadly though, after years of disorganization and dysfunction, this result shows the majority of the population organizing around and against Erdogan’s authoritarianism. For the opposition, it shows diverse and often disagreeing parties coming together, in spirit if not formally, to blunt Erdogan’s quest for ever greater power.

If you’re a Turkey watcher, this is a very good sign that Turkish democracy is still alive. And stronger than President Erdogan.