President Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned back the momentum that he lost in the June 7th election and again won a majority of seats in Parliament in the first of November elections in Turkey. This election was very important in that the victory for the AKP and President Erdogan will have profound implications for the future of Turkey. He conducted a silent revolution socially, economically, and politically with the AKP reining in 49.4% of the votes in the election, meaning he won 317 out of 550 seats. For several decades the military class was always present to insure that democracy remained strong. Erdogan has whittled down that balance and has broken down the military class. The military in Turkey is under civilian rule now and no longer is independent. After more than a decade as the Turkish Prime Minister and now as the President of Turkey, Erdogan has challenged the ideological basis of the Turkish Republic. Since its founding in 1923, Kemalism and secularism, two pillars instituted by the first Turkish president, Kemal Ataturk, have undergirded the state. In a reversal, Erdogan has won the approval of millions of conservative and religious voters with subtle and overt appeals to Islamic identity, from increasing restrictions on abortions and on alcohol use to the lifting of restrictions on the Islamic headscarf and suggesting an increase in family size. He has unprecedented levels of electoral support, aided also by perceptions of good economic management.
The AKP is a political party with clear Islamic roots. It pragmatically and gradually moved to the center right over a decade, mainly not to repeat the mistakes its predecessors made. The Party’s success has to do with a combination of ideological factors as well as with bread and butter issues. In November 1, 2015, the electorate once again voted for political stability and rewarded the AKP for the country’s growing prosperity, security, stability, and better social services, particular in health care, housing, stability in light of the chaos in the Middle East, and war with the Kurdish rebels, the PKK. The victory for the AKP was historic. Since the beginning of the Republic of Turkey’s multi-party system, none of the parties had won four consecutive elections. Either the courts or the military had closed down most of the Islamic parties in Turkey. Since many AKP founders and members had been outlawed and ejected from power, a majority of them pretend to be mainstream, to embrace democracy, and to be more moderate, promising that Turkey will be allowed to join the European Union. The revolution of a new Turkey under the AKP government focused on economic and health care. The new Muslims’ entrepreneurship has greater interest in politics, and has become more engaged by making Turkey less dependent on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) finally paying the last installment of Turkey’s 52-year debt to the IMF and reforming the health care system. Therefore, the AKP leaders have begun to view the party as a model for other Muslim countries. When President Erdogan won the election, he made a speech from a balcony telling the thousands who had gathered to celebrate the victory of the AKP party, that Beirut won and Damascus won as much as Ankara; that Sarajevo won as much as Istanbul; Ramallah won, and the West Bank won, a only slightly veiled reference to all Middle Eastern Muslims gaining from his victory.
The AKP made a bottom-up revolution in Turkey, but Kemalists did a top down revolution trying to impose the European civilization, culture, legal code, western dress, history, and education system on the post-Ottoman people, banning the Islamic education, culture, penal code, dress, and history that were important parts of both religion and culture. The newly carved out Turkey was a Muslim country, but Ataturk’s Turkey to a degree did not practice the traditional Islam of the Ottoman era. The Kurdish minority opposed the Kemalist fascist idea to create a westernized, secular and homogeneous Turkish society. In 1946, Turkey entered a multi-party system and joined NATO, but the military subsequently staged four coups in Turkey to protect Kemalist ideas against the Leftist and Islamic movements.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey was polarized between two groups: the Turkish versus the Kurdish on the one hand, and the secular versus the Islamic identity on the other. The result was that Turkey lost economically and socially, becoming an unstable coalition government. In 1994, the Islamic Welfare Party won the local elections especially in large cities like Istanbul and Ankara. The leader of the Welfare Party was Necmettin Erbakan, who was also close friends with the Egyptian Brotherhood. This victory alarmed the military and Kemalists, so that the victory of the Islamic Welfare Party was short-lived because the military was afraid that the new party would replace Kemalism with the fundamentalist Islamic agenda. Consequently, the military stepped in and closed down the Welfare Party.
During that time Recep Tayip Erdogan was a very close associate of the Welfare Party and affiliated with its party leaders. He witnessed the red line of Kemalists, so under his tenure he was very cautious not to provoke the military. In 2001, Erdogan founded the AKP, a pro-Islamic party, from the closed down Welfare Party. Since Erdogan knew the precedence of the military’s red line, he tried to consolidate the AKP power base, and to do that, he focused on political liberalization avoiding the term “Islamic,” preferring “conservative democracy,” a better equivocation to fool the West and America. To this end, Erdogan used the European Union criteria guidelines to earn support from the secular Turks and the EU countries and won the political legitimacy while simultaneously putting pressure on the military not to do anything but follow the EU guidelines. As a result, Turkey passed serious reforms to its judicial system, its civil military relations, and its human rights practices based on EU criteria. The party focused more on the poor populations, made the health care system and housing credits more easily accessible, improved roads and infrastructures of the poorer areas of the country, granted minority rights (even if they were not sufficient for the Kurds) including broadcasting in Kurdish as well as cultural rights to Kurds and non-Muslims, curtailed Turkey’s dependence on the IMF, and put Turkey’s economy back on track. In addition, the AKP lifted the ban on the Islamic dress and the wearing of headscarves in universities as well as eradicated discrimination against graduates of Islamic high schools. The AKP tried to make sure there was an equal ratio of representatives among the military officers and among the National Security Council, that they elected a civilian head of the National Security Council, and that they removed military representatives from the boards of the Council on Higher Education and the Radio and Television Supreme Council, very political roles in Turkey. Indeed, the AKP eventually took on secularism and Kemalism, pressing down on those advocating a non-Islamic state.
After the AKP and Fethullah Gulen’s Muslim missionary movement together got rid of Kemalism, Gulen and the AKP, although both Islamic groups, started to fight each other for power. Gulen planned what turned out to be a failed civilian coup against the elected AKP party, especially attacking President Erdogan. When Gulen’s movement was in power in Turkey and controlled the police, politics, media, businesses, and the judiciary and the educational systems, Gulen’s followers arrested many journalists who revealed his lies, slanders, and agendas. There was an arrest of hundreds of journalists who exposed the Gulen movement. For example, “ Imamin Ordusu,“ (Imam Army) Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener spent one year in jail for exposing the links of the Gulen movement to the death of Turkish Armenian Journalist Hrant Dink. Now these hypocrites are crying “wolf” as they are out of power because the AKP and Erdogan are committed to destroying them and leading them to play victim to the West. The Gulen movement, founded by Fetullah Gulen, who was self-exiled to Pennsylvania, owns hundreds of schools around the world in addition to his media and business organizations. From his US command center he infiltrated key Turkish institution to wage a campaign against anyone he perceives as an opponent. The Turkish government discovered Gulen’s followers seeking to create a parallel power structure within the Turkish state, a parallel state intent on overthrowing the democratically elected AKP party.
Until four years ago Gulen’s movement was one of the most powerful religious movements in Turkey. Now that Erdogan has become President and continues to counter Gulen, the Turkish head of state is trying to change the Turkish Constitution to transform the traditional weak presidency into a position from which to dominate Turkish politics. Critics argue that presidential systems are more vulnerable to authoritarianism than party centric parliamentary systems like Turkey. Turkish presidents have normally taken low profiles due to Turkey’s parliamentary system. In contrast to a presidential system like that of the United States, the Turkish Prime Minister has run the day to day affairs of the country and holds most of the legislative and executive power, while the presidency has recently been more of a ceremonial post.
In the November elections, the AKP consolidated its gains. Despite the political turbulence, Gulen’s cult religion had formed an illegal parallel state within the Turkish state. Consequently, Erdogan is moving to close down the parallel state and to bring its leader Fethullah Gulen to court. Imam Gulen does not exactly live in Turkey now, but his influence, even from his self-imposed exile in the United States, is felt around the world including in the Philippines in Zamboanga City and in Manila. Now, Gulen and his followers are on the run and defensive. He is a threat to free society, and he definitely does not promote interfaith dialogue or peace, but rather does promote lies, deception, bribes, crime and hate in the name of his brand of Islam. Countries should join Turkey’s call to close down their schools and organizations. The economy continues to grow after a brief down turn in exports and still Turkey’s unemployment and budget deficit are low. Since the AKP won its fourth consecutive electoral victory, Erdogan and thus Turkey have moved into an important position because of a war in the Middle East, the ISIS problem, the maneuvering of Russia and Iran, and the EU refugee crisis. The election outcome was a paradigm shift for the country that has experienced four military coups to maintain secularism and to get rid of their Islamic fundamentalism.
Dr. Aland Mizell is President of the MCI and a regular contributor to Mindanao Times. You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com
