|
Erdogan Is Toast
Last week a small environmental protest against the demolishing of a park in Istanbul went nearly unnoticed. But when police rather brutally intervened to let workers cut some of the trees the situation exploded. Within a few days over 100,000 were out on the streets and clashing with police forces.
Most of those people did not come out to save the Gezi park but to demonstrate against the kind of politics that it symbolizes. Most of the locals want to keep the park and are against the larger related project to "renovate" the central Taksim square. Taksim stands for May 1 demonstrations, the Ataturk cultural center and common urban space.
But the AKP wishes to revive the Ottoman era and to insert more religion into public live. Its leading clique has many business interests. The AKP therefor decided to raze the park to build a replica of the Ottoman Artillery Barracks and to fill its with a shopping mall and a mosque. A government commission advised against the project but was overruled. Protesters were moved away through rather brutal police engagements. This authoritarian way of pushing party interests against the common one is what brought the people into the streets.
On Friday a court handed the government a perfect chance to calm the protests down. It ruled that the project would be stopped until some further issues could be heard in court. Erdogan could have pointed to the ruling and could have promised to follow it. Instead he repeated that the government will to continue to “realize their dream” and to build the barracks and to transform the whole Taksim square.
The AKP under Erdogan disregards the societies opinion on single political issues and only cares about its followers' interests and winning the totals in the next election. The political alternatives to the AKP are not strong enough or too dogmatic on single issues to be serious challengers. Turkey has thereby become a hollow democracy and a one party state. The Turkish media are suppressed. Journalists who dared to criticize the government lost their jobs or even went to jail. Media companies were threatened over dubious allegations of tax evasion. Many TV stations did not dare to report the protests and only now start to follow them.
The AKP pursues neo-liberal policies, privatizes state companies wherever it can and hates labor unions. For some years it was very effective in growing the economy though most of the growth was bought with foreign capital, mostly from the Gulf. Turkey's current-account deficit is some 10% of GDP per year. That is unsustainable. Much of this money is "hot" and only interested in short term return. It will flee as soon as the recent Turkish growth story seems to falter. The Turkish stock market already started to fall before the demonstrations started. Today it plunged another 10%. Interest rates jumped.
Erdogan has called the protesters alcoholics, bums, extremists and looters. This video shows "looters" trying to rob an ATM. They clearly wear riot police outfits. Erdogan blamed twitter and other social media for the protests and alleged that opposition politicians were inciting the protesters and suggested that they were under foreign intelligence control.
There are of course protesters who belong to political opposition parties and the soccer fans of Istanbul's three big clubs, who banded together to clash with the police, are not harmless pussies. But the way these protests exploded and spread within two days into nearly 50 other cities does not point to pure political or foreign control. It rather looks like a collective outbreak of long simmering frustrations with Erdogan's authoritarian rule.
Today Erdogan went off to a week of state visits in north Africa. Before he left he claimed that he could "barely hold back" the 50% that voted for his party in the last election. It is dubious that all of those would now come out for him. In several of his policies, like the assault on Syria, a large majority of Turks is against him. But it still is a threat to launch counter demonstration that would inevitably end in more clashes. Last night one demonstrator was killed when a car ran over him. Some claim the driver was incited by Erdogan's aggressive talk. While Istanbul was rather quiet throughout the day today clashes with the police continued in Ankara and for the first time Erdogan's shabiha went into action:
Solidarity protests against the demolition of Taksim Gezi Park continued in Ankara today while clashes erupted between demonstrators and a group 30 people chanting slogans on behalf of the police. The unknown group, which attacked while shouting “May the hands of those who attack the police be broken,” ran away after attacking demonstrators.
Unless Erdogan starts to compromise on the Gezi park and other issues or steps down demonstrations and clashes are likely to continue. There will be counter demonstrations and clashes with groups supporting Erdogan. While the police is on the side of the government the military is not. Many generals are in jail for alleged coup plotting and the officer corps will not support the man and party who put them there.
The economy, already effected by the war on Syria and much too high current account deficits, will go down as the hot money flees from the Turkish markets. The big tourism industry will see further losses. One of the four big labor unions with 240,000 members announced that it will now go on strike. The peace process with the Kurds is still vague and attacks by the Kurdish PKK guerrilla can easily reoccur.
Erdogan is not without competition within his own party. If he can not keep the economy going and the streets peaceful the knifes will come out against him. President Gul, one of Erdogan's top frienemies, is already positioning himself. Today he came out against Erdogan's absolutists claims by explaining that democracy is not just about elections.
There are now four possible ways out of these troubles:
- The protests run out of steam and peter out. Unlikely in my view, especially as the labor unions are now joining.
- Erdogan becomes a humble man, stops the Taksim square project and apologizes. This would be counter to everything that is know about Erdogan's personality and seems unlikely.
-
The military launches a coup. It is dubious that a majority of Turks would support another coup and the military might not be willing to take on the burden. Why not just sit back, simply watch the show and smile?
-
Some faction in Erodgan's AKP launches a party coup against him and put him out of office.
For now my bet is on the third alternative. But it will take a while. More clashes – maybe even outright shootings, more economic damage, more political strife will happen before someone dares to take the sultan down. The process could take weeks or months. But however it ends Erdogan will, in the end, lose out. There is no going back. He is toast.
From Naked Capitalism 0603 links a comment:
Working Class Nero says:
June 3, 2013 at 8:20 am
There is no Turkish Spring occurring in Anatolia. It’s more like the wispy last gasp of breath from the old guard. Although many of the protesters may be relatively young age-wise; in political and ideological terms they are indeed the ancien régime, the Old Turks.
The Arab Spring was and is about undemocratic secular dictators being replaced by popular Islamist tyrants. These regime changes have the full backing of the US and her allies. They help resolve a long-standing contradiction in the Western approach to Muslim countries. While the West preaches democracy, generally it was thought to be a bad idea to let underling nations have it since they might elect governments hostile to US interests. In 1992 elections in Algeria were halted with the backing of the French and ultimately the US, in order to avoid an Islamist party coming to power. The obvious truth is that in most Muslim countries there exists a solid majority (mostly rural peasants) who would support a Sharia-imposing Islamist government if they were allowed to vote for one. But from an imperial point of view, a universalist ideology such as Islam fits in much better than particularist blood and soil nationalism that Muslim elites used to espoused after pan-Arabism collapsed.
So the key, with the help of Saudi Arabia, was to confection pro-American Islamist parties, or to simply make it a condition of power for existing, America-phobic Islamist parties to adjust their attitude towards Uncle Sam..
Since 1992, Western elites have slowly changed their minds and learned to love the Sharia. After all an ideology based on submission cannot be all bad from a ruling class point of view since the goal of any group of leaders is to cultivate obedience from their subjects. Islam turns the trick very well. Even in Europe the ruling class is learning this lesson. As they flood their countries with the “wrong kind of Muslims” (the rural peasant type instead of the liberal urban elite), their welfare states are imploding and their jails are bursting at the seams. In France around 70% of all jail inmates are Muslim. These former rural peasants are now crowded into urban ghettoes which fairly quickly become something close to autonomous regions. This is all fine long-term since one of the international elite’s goals with mass third world immigration is to destroy the societal cohesion that makes a welfare state possible. But in the short term the police or other emergency services are not welcome in these no-go zones. So in a modern day version of feudalism, effective control over these zones is quietly handed over to Imams who are then often able to impose discipline and order on their new subjects but at the cost of creeping Islamization in the urban centers of Europe. Muslim patrols replace state police patrols. So while gay marriage may now be legal in France as a nation, as Muslims reach majority status in neighbourhoods and cities, two men walking hand in hand will not be tolerated by your local Muslim patrol. And all this is not just accepted, but is actually celebrated by the urban elite, both left and right. Meanwhile it is the more conservative rural–types in Europe who are alarmed for now. Who knows, one day they may jettison their lefty urban brethren and realize they have quite a bit in common with the Islamists. But for the time being, the young European Islamists don’t don hippy clothing and go play Occupy for a while at a park. They occupy their neighbourhoods for keeps, just as their brethren back home are starting to occupy their nations.
So the Arab Spring has consisted of placing some Islamist parties in power backed by a majority of the peasant vote. Where elections are not possible, insurgencies, back by Saudi Arabia and the US, are the preferred method of regime change, as in Syria and Libya.
But Turkey has already gone through this transformation over the past decade – in fact they were one of the prototypes of a new pro-Aemerican Islamist regime. Before the secular military ensured that the Islamist-leaning majority were not really seen or heard. But in reaction, it was the Islamist political parties who became a politically “fashion-forward” movement, the “Young Turks”, anticipating the future, the progenitors of a long running Turkish Spring which has placed Islamists in power and may one day soon succeed in building a mall in Taksim Gezi Park. The US may put a little pressure on to calm things down, but Erdoğan is the leader the US wants in place there.
In Turkey, the urban bourgeoisie are ideologically committed to democracy but unfortunately cannot gather anything near a majority. Even the military, which the urban elite hated due to their instinctual animus towards all things martial and nationalistic, used to have enough power to keep the nation safe from the Islamist hordes. But after years of purges of secular-leaning officers, it is an open question whether the Army has the wherewithal to halt the implacably slow but relentless Islamic creep in Turkey. Because while the Islamists may disdain democracy, after all the word of God is never to be compromised by a majority vote; it is a very useful tool for them, since there is no denying that they do have the rural masses on their side which gives them a majority in any election.
The Turkish bourgeoisie have finally awakened but now it is way too late for them. They are attempting a counterrevolution, a Turkish Fall, an attempt to go back to a cosmopolitan secular society. I have several close friends there so I am rooting for them but the realist inside me says they are doomed because in the end they stand for nothing much more than an enlightened Western lifestyle but that’s not something they will get many peasants majority to vote for. And that’s conditioned on the rather naive assumption that the Army has enough secular officers to force the Islamists to relinquish power the day they do lose a vote. As things stand, why would military risk everything to save a few ungrateful Turkish Bourgeoisie? They might be better off just hunkering down and getting with the Islamist program.
For several years I’ve worked alongside Turkish construction companies. In the early ‘00s Turkish companies were enthusiastically looking to break into the first world markets; often in association with German companies. In recent years, especially after their EU dreams were dashed, attention returned to more realistic second world goals, especially Russia, where they are very competitive. And in turn, politically they are dropping the liberal facade and are turning back to Putin-inspired second world authoritarianism as well.
The only leverage the revolting urban bourgeoisie have in Turkey is their value to the economy. But in a second world society, obedience to ruling elites counts more than being able to create an internet start-up or writing an essay on feminist legal theory. So in the coming months many of the demonstrators will start to emigrate, especially as the internal security forces start examining Facebook and Twitter accounts. And as these left-leaning liberal Turkish professionals resettle in Europe’s glamorous cities, perhaps they will be able to warn their European co-Bourgeoisie about what is coming down the road in a decade or two in the old continent’s cities as well.
Posted by: jan | Jun 3 2013 18:40 utc | 11
|
