Winning the battle, losing the war

Ömer Taşpınar

After months of polarization and political turmoil, it is finally election time in Turkey.

Once again, a municipal election has become a referendum on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. All signs indicate that Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) will score around 40 percent of the vote across the country. Except in the unlikely scenario of the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality changing hands, Erdoğan will spin his electoral performance as a great victory in the face of multiple challenges and conspiracies.

But make no mistake; although Erdoğan will win this battle, he is losing the war. Erdoğan is losing the war because his third term was supposed to be about his economic and political legacy. But we already know that history will not remember him as the great reformer or great democratizing force that pulled Turkey into the age of democracy. In fact, when historians compare former Prime Minister Turgut Özal and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the former will get much more credit for improving the Turkish economy and democracy. While Özal managed to unite different segments of Turkey, Erdoğan will have the dubious honor of polarizing even like-minded conservatives.

This is highly unfortunate because Erdoğan presented a historic opportunity for Turkey. For average citizens who supported Erdoğan between 2003 and 2010, the AKP was the agent of reconciliation between Muslim and modern, conservatism and democracy, the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, Islam and secularism. Today, Erdoğan, far from being a uniting force, has acquired the image of the great polarizer. He managed to divide the country between his fanatical supporters and his fanatical enemies without offering democratic institutions assuring constitutional liberties, rights and freedoms for all Turkish citizens who want a better future.

Even worse, by first generating hopes and later disappointment, he caused despair among those who now believe that there is something incurably wrong with Turkish political culture. Indeed, in the eyes of the most neutral and objective analysts, the essential problem of Turkish politics is the insurmountable challenge of paternalism. The country is unable to transcend the norms of a strong man who ends up establishing his patriarchal supremacy through networks of patronage and clientalism. In that sense, the Turkish model seems to be an amalgam of authoritarianism and crony capitalism where transparency, good governance and civic citizenship are missing. The old type of military autocracy is now replaced by electoral autocracy.

Perhaps the most important reason Erdoğan is scoring a Pyrrhic victory is because his success is coming at the expense of the single best achievement of the last decade: civilian supremacy over the military. The Gülen-AKP rift has produced tremendous collateral damage. The nature of this conservative alliance was driven by a common threat perception. Both forces were united against the same enemy: military tutelage, which considered Erdoğan and Gülen the dark forces of political Islam. Not surprisingly, the golden age of the Gülen-AKP alliance came in 2007, when the generals managed to fully unite their Islamic foes with their shortsighted electronic coup on April 27.

Turkey's staunchly Kemalist military proved much better at uniting their enemies than dividing them. Between 2007 and 2013, the generals became victims of the formidable AKP-Gülen alliance that produced the Ergenekon investigation. Now that the Gülen-AKP alliance has turned into fratricide, the military will emerge as the most powerful beneficiary of this great divergence. In other words, rumors about the demise of military tutelage are highly exaggerated. Erdoğan may have indeed won the battle, but if he believes that he can crack down and purge Gülenists with the help of the military, he is playing with fire. History is full of leaders who won battles but lost crucial wars. Sadly, Erdoğan is not likely to pay attention to history.

Published on Sunday's Zaman, 30 March 2014, Sunday