An authoritarian who champions a reactionary social agenda rejected by a majority of the country, a leader whose policies triggered a staggering economic downturn and whose response to the most deadly public emergency in the country’s history resulted in thousands dying unnecessarily and revealed him as inept, out of touch, and arguably corrupt: Can such a figure nevertheless still manage to win re-election as president?
For the answer, Americans might do well to look halfway across the world, to Turkey, where exactly that happened earlier this year.
I was recently invited to speak at a conference in Turkey on the upcoming US election and what others abroad might learn from it about the decline and potential demise of democracy. But I was more interested in what I and other Americans might learn from the continuing decline of democracy in Turkey.
Between East and West
Many countries around the world—from Hungary and Poland to France and Brazil, Israel and the Philippines, and now Argentina and the Netherlands—are facing antidemocratic challenges driven, despite differences in culture, by many of the same forces. Conservatives in the United States particularly fawn over Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Conservative Political Action Committee and Tucker Carlson having both undertaken political pilgrimages to Budapest to bask in the reflected wisdom of a leader who has steadily dismantled democratic institutions, including a free press and an independent judiciary. Donald Trump’s recent reference to Orban as president of Turkey unwittingly attests to the striking similarities among these rising autocracies.
Like most countries facing these challenges, Turkey is deeply and almost evenly divided between a globalized, technology-focused, urban, liberal population and a nationalistic, agrarian or postindustrial, rural-based traditional culture. Sometimes described as “a man running west on a train heading east,” Turkey has for nearly three thousand years faced the push-and-pull of the conflicts between urban and rural, past and future.
Settled by Ionians Greeks around 700 B.C., coastal Turkey became in many ways the brightest light in the Hellenistic cultural firmament: Homer himself, the font of Greek and Western literature, is said to have come from Smyrna—modern Izmir—and the Trojan War he chronicled occurred on the Turkish coast. Troy controlled the choke point connecting the Mediterranean world with the Black Sea civilizations of Russia and Persia, making the Trojan War, to the extent that it is historical, more about global trade than gods, goddesses, and a beautiful woman. Istanbul, the former Constantinople and modern Turkey’s cosmopolitan cultural and economic capital, has been a major center of “globalization” for roughly 2,500 years, a city literally straddling the European and Asian continents and serving as the seat of, successively, the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires. The Ottoman Turks were one of a number of Turkic peoples who moved westward from Central Asia into Anatolia during the Middle Ages, bringing Islam with them. While today Turkey is 99 percent Islamic, it lies historically at the heart of European and Western culture as much as that of Islam and the East.
Its modern political history, after feints in the direction of westernization in the nineteenth century under faltering Ottoman rule, began with the sultanate’s defeat as part of the losing Central Powers in World War I, the resulting dismemberment of the empire, and the emergence of an independent Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal. (Kemal, similar to independence leaders in other emerging twentieth-century states, then took the name “Atatürk,” meaning “Father of the Turks.”) Atatürk followed in a tradition of younger generations of Turks who saw the overthrow of imperial ways and radical modernization, not unlike developments in Meiji Japan, as the country’s path forward. He accordingly frog-marched the country into an austere westernization that banned wearing of the traditional Turkish fez, jettisoned the traditional Turkish script for a Latinate alphabet, and imposed a strictly secular democratic government that makes American church-state separation look almost theocratic by comparison.
Atatürk was a product of the nation’s military, and the Turkish armed forces for the last century have been staunchly committed to his modern secular, western, liberal vision of the country, to the point of not-infrequent interventions in politics to “save” democracy from conservative, traditionalist governments. This has set up a uniquely Turkish dynamic in the ongoing worldwide struggle between “modernism” and “traditionalism,” liberalism and conservatism, and democracy and authoritarianism. In most other ways, the challenges facing Turkey and Turkish politics are similar to ones driving upheaval the world over. Onto this seismically unstable stage, at the beginning of this century, stepped Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Erdoğan Emerges
Erdoğan was born into a conservative religious family in a small rural village. When his parents eventually moved to Istanbul, he enrolled in a leading Islamic academy for high school. He went on to study political science at Marmara University, outside Istanbul, and almost immediately entered politics as an organizer for a hard-core religious party.
Erdoğan became a protégé of Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of a series of Islamicist political parties that were serially banned by the military, who nonetheless rose to the premiership of Turkey in 1996. Erbakan spent much of his time in office promoting religious education domestically and forging deeper alliances throughout the Islamic world, particularly with more radical figures such as Libya’s Muhammar Khadafi. In a preview of emerging global fault lines, Erbakan developed a close friendship with fellow right-wing nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen of France, in large part because of their shared belief in the incompatibility of Christian and Islamic civilization. The Erbakan government’s Islamicist policies, especially its distancing from the West in foreign affairs, so alarmed the Turkish military, however, that it forced Erbakan from office in 1997 and subsequently had his Welfare Party banned and Erbakan imprisoned.
Erdoğan himself was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994 and, focusing his energies on the city’s millennia-long concerns with economic growth and infrastructure, emerged as something of a technocratic beau ideal. He remained, however, a religious fundamentalist at heart: In 1998, he took to the airwaves to read a poem declaring that “the mosques are our barracks” and “the minarets are our bayonets.” That didn’t go over well with the secular establishment; like Erbakan, Erdoğan was forced from office and sent to prison, in his case for four months.
When Erdoğan was released, the successor to the banned Welfare Party, which in turn was also banned, split into two parts: the die-hards under Erbakan, and a pragmatic wing under Erdoğan and the new Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, AKP). AKP leaders recognized that an Islamist party could never capture a parliamentary majority on its own. Nor would it ever be accepted as the governing authority by what was commonly called Turkey’s secularist “deep state” (a term now being misapplied to America’s apolitical civil service). Erdoğan’s tactical innovation was to attain power by wrapping religious values within a more broadly conservative agenda.
This new, more pragmatic approach worked. The AKP captured 34 percent of the vote in the 2002 general elections, allowing it to form a majority coalition in parliament and enabling Erdoğan to become the new prime minister. The question was the extent to which Erdoğan’s moderate pragmatism was a substantive rethinking of his political vision or simply a detour on the way to the same end.
Some believe that Erdoğan’s ultimate interest is simply power, and so, if faced with setbacks or significant opposition, he will moderate his positions as needed. Even his bitterest opponents took that view in conversations with me. In practice, however, Erdoğan has relentlessly, if gradually, imposed his vision on his country: a traditionalist, devout society that aims to make a fallen empire great again through the efforts of its messianic strongman leader.
Erdoğan has devoted significant public funds to building massive mosques around the country. An old friend of mine, Neçati Özcan, the chief strategist of Istanbul’s current mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu, who is Erdoğan’s likely challenger in five years, pointed down from his office tower at one of these massive new mosques and noted that the number of minarets surrounding each denotes the status of its original patron: Most have somewhere between one and four. Erdoğan’s had six. “He’s declaring that he’s the new Sultan,” Özcan said to me.
The grandiose building program includes not only mosques but a new, $1.2 billion presidential palace complex (also including a mosque) overlooking Ankara, the political capital. All of it reflects the three pillars of Erdoğan’s strategy: Erect a state-backed religious edifice that will loom over the society; elevate himself to the level of solo despot; and do so one brick at a time rather than in a sudden putsch. Like other democratically elected authoritarians, Erdoğan, piece by piece, has peeled away civil liberties and undermined the independence of the judiciary, exiled or imprisoned opponents, and concentrated power in his own hands.
In 2016, a misbegotten “coup” attempt was launched one evening while Erdoğan was vacationing on the Aegean coast. (For my skeptical take on the event, see here.) The alleged plotters seized one of the bridges across the Bosporus, though not any significant military targets or major broadcast outlets, allowing Erdoğan to swifty quash the uprising and return triumphantly to Istanbul. In the ensuing days and weeks, Erdoğan purged the military and the few remaining holdouts in the judiciary, fired hundreds of liberal academics at universities across the country, and rounded up and imprisoned thousands of pro-democracy activists.
Erdoğan then unveiled a constitutional amendment that would turn Turkey’s parliamentary system into a presidential one. By obviating the need for Erdoğan to forge a majority coalition in parliament, the proposed change would concentrate even greater executive power in the new presidency, but it would require approval in a national referendum. In closely divided votes in 2017 and 2018, over both of which lingered the strong odor of electoral fraud, Erdoğan’s constitutional amendment was adopted and he himself then narrowly won the presidency.
By 2023, however, there were signs that creeping authoritarianism might be losing its appeal to the Turkish electorate. Most concerning to Turkish citizens was the continuing collapse of the economy. Erdoğan has assiduously pursued an aggressively loose-money policy, driving interest rates down to near-zero, cratering the value of the lira and fanning rampant inflation. To implement his monetary policies, Erdoğan undermined the independence of the central bank, in part by placing his son-in-law in charge of it. Not a single Turk I spoke with failed to mention the spiraling cost of living. Going into the election year, annual overall inflation stood at 79.6 percent, with food inflation surging over 90 percent; the value of the lira had fallen by 80 percent since the previous election.
Erdoğan’s opposition had only narrowly lost the previous election and was now united in its desire to topple him in the May 2023 presidential election. It looked to be a sure thing. A year out from that election, Erdoğan’s AKP and its parliamentary partner couldn’t attract over 40 percent in the polling; the National Alliance of opposition parties was the choice of a whopping 60 percent of the electorate.
And then, in February 2023, a pair of devastating earthquakes struck Turkey’s heavily populated Antakya region. Entire towns were wiped off the map, and 1.5 million people were left homeless. More than 50,000 Turks were killed, making it the deadliest earthquake in Turkey since the year 526. Of course, an earthquake cannot be blamed on the government. But the response to it can. The government reaction was slow and ineffectual, in part because the capabilities of first responders, primarily the military, had been gutted by Erdoğan in the wake of the “coup” and centralized under his personal control. The extent of the quake’s devastation was compounded by corruption, specifically the fact that building standards had been routinely ignored by developers who paid bribes to Erdoğan’s government for the privilege. “The government,” my friend Neçati observed, “totally failed.”
A leader facing such obvious negatives—an unpopular right-wing agenda, a failed record of leadership, charges of outright corruption, and a united opposition—could not possibly be re-elected. Or so many believed.
Why He Won
Unhappy political systems, as Tolstoy observed of unhappy families, may be unhappy each in their own way. But the victories by the “soft authoritarians” sweeping politics worldwide tend to build off similar elements everywhere, many of which may sound familiar even in the United States. These begin with a solid base of support.
Another old friend, Gulfem Saydan Sanver, the organizer of the conference I attended in Izmir, shepherded me around Istanbul to meet a variety of Erdoğan opponents in order better to understand how the election had played out. Gulfem earned her doctorate in political communication from the Sorbonne, having done her undergraduate work at Marmara University, Erdoğan’s alma mater. Now she advises opposition politicians in most major Turkish cities and appears frequently as a commentator on many Turkish television stations. She laughs easily, but has an intense, staccato delivery in both Turkish and English.
Sitting in the studios of Sözcü TV, the electronic arm of one of the most-read journals in Turkey, Gulfem observed that the president possessed an odd sort of charisma for his base voters: “When you go to rural areas, they say, ‘He’s so handsome,’ ‘He’s so dynamic.’” When I commented that he didn’t seem that way to me, Alpaslan Akkuş, Sözcü’s broadcast coordinator, replied, “They see themselves in Erdoğan. But he’s not the man they see.”
The man they see, of course, is a projection of their own religious ideals, which makes it impossible for them to acknowledge the human flaws behind the messianic figure. When I asked Akkuş how they might get Erdoğan’s followers to see his faults, both he and his assistant responded in unison, “You can’t.” They should know: Sözcü is virtually the only remaining news organization that opposes Erdoğan; the others have all either been threatened into submission by the government, bought out by wealthy Erdoğan allies, or lost revenues from large advertisers who themselves depend upon government largesse. “The media are tied to him financially,” Akkuş said. “Any country governed by one man for a long time will get the same result.”
With a solid base he has built over years, Erdoğan then proceeded to splinter the opposition through a variety of tactical steps that may sound eerily familiar. He worked to get two candidates with smaller followings to enter the presidential race, siphoning off crucial support from his major opponent. Then, drawing on a technique becoming ever more common, his campaign circulated a “deep fake” video purporting to show his main opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, being cheered by armed terrorists.
Not incidentally, Erdoğan also received crucial help from fellow autocrat Vladimir Putin, who, by postponing Turkey’s repayment of its massive natural gas bill, prevented the economy from plummeting even further before the election.
Most importantly, however, in a tactic known to right-wing populists worldwide, Erdoğan, as Özcan put it, “took steps to increase domestic tension.” He did so both by accusing the opposition of corruption and by running a “campaign of national pride and national security,” tying his opponents to violence and terrorists. “Uncertainty,” Özcan observed, “helps the authoritarian.”
Of course, it didn’t hurt that the opposition campaign was, in Özcan’s words, “awful.” Kılıçdaroğlu is a bland septuagenarian. Polling at the time of Kılıçdaroğlu’s unilateral decision (as party leader) to name himself as the nominee of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) showed him running the least well among Erdoğan’s four leading contenders.
The lack of a galvanizing opposition leader was accompanied by the lack of a galvanizing opposition message. The campaign, Özcan complained, aimed at retaining opposition voters already on board, not converting anyone from the other side. Worse, the opposition offered only an “abstract campaign” built around such slogans as “Promise!”
As Seren Selvin Korkmaz, a political scientist at the Turkish think tank Istanpol, explained, “We had a campaign without politics,” one full of “promises so vague people couldn’t get a sense of what the opposition was promising to do for them. If you don’t tell anything, I don’t know what you think you’re doing.”
This failure extended, my friend Gulfem interjected, to an ineffective response to Erdoğan’s accusations that the opposition was aligned with Kurdish terrorists. The effect posed a double-edged sword for the opposition parties—alienating middle-class swing voters, on one side, and, by frightening opposition politicians into distancing themselves, disenchanting minority voters on the other.
This was only part of a more general political fecklessness that characterized the opposition. Erdoğan won the first round but narrowly missed an outright majority. In the second round, “the opposition swung ultra-right,” in Neçati’s words, to try to court the middle and overcome the gap. Instead, it simply split those voters who were up for grabs and lost the final vote.
As in the United States, the vote in metropolitan areas swamps that of the rural parts of the country, but Erdoğan’s margin among the latter is substantial enough to secure victory. Leading Turkish pollster and economic research firm founder Can Selçuki says, “The opposition lost, but metropolitan opposition [to Erdoğan] grew—the continuation of a trend we’ve seen since 2015.” Nevertheless, Selçuki adds, “Participation rates were higher among Erdoğan voters” and the opposition “can’t reach out to the rural areas. They just can’t.” This “requires a structural change—not just tactical, or [things like] increasing digital spending.” The opposition simply “cannot fuse itself with the grassroots of the country.”
I met with then-Istanbul CHP chief, Canan Kaftancıoğlu, at the party’s modernistic steel-and-glass headquarters in a built-up, buzzing neighborhood. Kaftancıoğlu, forceful and smartly dressed, was tried for insulting Erdoğan and (like most who oppose the president) having associations with terrorists. She was banned from politics and sentenced to prison time totaling just ten days less than the five-year minimum triggering mandatory incarceration. That leaves the remaining charges against her dangling like a Sword of Damocles, clearly intended to dampen any further political activity.
Despite her left-wing politics and cosmopolitan mien—Erdoğan has described her as “Atatürk’s model woman,” which he did not mean as a compliment—Kaftancıoğlu as an undergraduate led the movement to allow religiously observant female students from mostly rural areas to wear headscarves, a traditional religious display banned under the aggressively secular former Turkish regime. (“The headscarf had become an instrument for those who wanted to polarize,” she told me. “To overcome that, you had to take that away as a symbol of polarization.… If we had won that battle, we wouldn’t be in this polarized situation in society today. It’s the authoritarians who benefit the most from polarization.”)
I asked her about the contention that the CHP is increasingly viewed as a party of the upscale and well-educated, unable to reach the majority of working-class voters. (At one point, I suggested to Gulfem that she run for office herself, to which she replied , “Too wealthy. Too well-educated. Too happy a childhood.”) Like our own Democratic Party, the CHP is derided as the party of “elitists,” a characterization that Kaftancıoğlu did not completely deny. “But we have to remind ourselves that CHP was founded as a social democratic party concerned about the daily-life problems of average people,” she continued, even insisting that, more recently, the party had “turned back to its roots. We need to do this to relate to working people better.”
“To beat populists around the world,” Korkmaz of Istanpol concluded, “there are two lessons.” The first is that “to beat an autocrat is difficult.” The second is that you need a united opposition. The CHP mayor of Kadıköy, a municipality in greater Istanbul, Şerdil Dara Odabaşı, said to me, “Turkey is like a building where everything around it is on fire. There are two [options]: One man is ready to pour the water to stop it—on the other side there are six men arguing over how best to do it…. So, it looks to voters like, it may be an authoritarian voice, but at least there’s someone in charge, with one voice, who knows what he’s doing.”
Deploying a similar metaphor, Korkmaz concluded, “You can’t beat a [dumpster] fire with another fire.”
Cradle of Democracy
My last night in Turkey, I ate with my Turkish friends at a restaurant housed in the sultans’ former summer palace looking out onto the Bosporus. I perused the wine list for the names of wines I knew in order to gauge the prices and found that most bottles seemed to cost two to three times what one would pay for them in the States (despite the notable weakness of the Turkish lira). My guide in Izmir had told me that his college-age daughter liked to go out drinking with her friends but complained about the rising cost of alcohol in Erdoğan’s Turkey. My friends in Istanbul confirmed that the tax on alcohol keeps rising, slowly but steadily. It is the frog-in-boiling-water approach to making the religious fundamentalists’ opposition to alcoholic beverages a nationwide fait accompli.
The rising price of alcohol is emblematic of the slow-but-steady advance of illiberal impositions in country after country today. But Turkey presents an inversion of the usual presumptions about the current global struggle between liberalism and conservatism. Because of the militant anti-secularism and anti-traditionalism of Atatürk and his modernist revolution a century ago, the forces of liberalism, secularism, modernism, globalism, and democracy feel they are defending the Republic’s “traditional values” and want to keep the country the way it is. Erdoğan and his followers want to tear all that down and create a conservative, religious revolution. This is setting up a social clash that cannot be resolved by compromise. As the pollster Selçuki concluded, “The agenda of this administration is not the agenda of the public. This cannot last.”
But that is essentially the situation we now have in our own country. I’ve been struck by how, in recent months, many conservative magazines and media outlets have become much more vocal about fighting to roll back the clock not just four years but rather a full century. The conservative religious society they wish to revive is not, like the Confederacy, a Lost Cause long banished to the dustheap of history. It is, rather, they believe, the country’s continuing, and genuine, cultural foundation, one forcefully pushed aside, as in Turkey, by an elitist, godless, deep state.
The question this raises, of course, is when do values become “traditional,” and who gets to define them? The values that the far right in both Turkey and the United States rail against as non-traditional and ahistorical have now been the governing values for the better part of a century or so: In both countries, polling clearly shows that majorities now embrace those very values and reject the agenda of the “traditionalists.”
Far-right opinion leaders console themselves with the claim that the only reason a majority of Americans hold such heretical beliefs is because an alien, cosmopolitan, urban elite out of touch with the nation’s true grass-roots values—the values of “real,” Americans—have spent the better part of a century imposing these alien values on the country. In fact, reactionaries have made pretty much that same argument in all democracies dating back to those of ancient Greece.
My first day in Turkey, arriving late on a long overnight flight, I caught up with the international consultants group at the conference’s welcome dinner, held at a winery several miles outside Selçuk, a small city an hour or so south of Izmir. John the Apostle settled here after Jesus’s death and was buried here; the Emperor Justinian built a massive basilica over his grave in the sixth century. Nearby stood the Temple of Artemis, probably the largest temple in the Hellenic world and one of the Seven Wonders (and, according to the man who compiled the original list and had seen them all, the most impressive).
The winery Yedi Bilgeler, or “Seven Sages,” is named for the seven leading thinkers of the western canon who lived in the immediate area, including Thales (the philosopher credited with the phrase “Know thyself”), Anaxagoras (who became the first of the Presocratic philosophers to live in Athens and got modern cosmology more or less right 2,500 years ago), Pythagoras (of the eponymous theorem), and Solon (whose name is practically synonymous today with wisdom). Its wines take their various names from these assorted sages.
There on the Aegean coast, one could feel safely nestled in the cradle of both western civilization and global democratic culture. The Mediterranean climate, the muscular green hills, the faux-Tuscan architecture—all looked straight out of the California wine country. It all seemed so familiar.
“Turkey was moving toward economic progress, a global role, social openness, democracy,” Neçati told me later, looking down from his Istanbul office upon the welter of striking modern towers and minarets spread beneath us. “We used to say that Turkey wanted to be a ‘Little US’” When Trump won the presidency, Neçati was in Washington, speaking at a conference on the 2016 US election, on a panel of international observers that I happened to moderate. “I did an interview broadcast live to Turkey,” he continued, “and I said, ‘The US is now a ‘Little Turkey.’”
After a convivial dinner and tour of the winery, the group boarded the large tourist bus back to Izmir. It was night and we rolled down an unpaved country road shrouded with thick trees, through an almost total blackness, the bus lurching sharply from side to side. The conversation among these political professionals from around the world turned into a vigorous debate about the future of democracy. Describing Erdoğan, Gulfem bleakly observed, “He’s simply using the Orban playbook—cut back on freedoms and establish one-man rule one small step at a time.”
“They’re all using ‘the Orban playbook,’” I rejoined, “all over the world.”
The boisterous conversation seemed suddenly to die. The bus grew silent.
We hurtled forward, into the darkness.