Nobody knows better than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that jail time can aid a political career. He was unjustly imprisoned in 1999 by the country’s old “deep state” prosecutors, for reading out a poem at a political rally. The charge — incitement to violence — was as transparently political as the corruption case his own prosecutors have now brought against his main political rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.
On the day of his incarceration, Erdogan released an album of poetry, This Song Does Not End Here, which sold more than 1 million copies. Supporters inundated him with mail, and within a few short years he was running the country. When he revisited the jail in 2013, he called it a symbol of rebirth, the place in which today’s ruling Justice and Development Party was conceived.
Like Erdogan, Imamoglu was mayor of Istanbul at the moment of his arrest. He is as popular as Erdogan was in the late 1990s, though with a different strata of society, and just as much the focus of frustrations with a “status quo” that has run its course after 22 years. So how likely is it that history regurgitates itself and, at the next scheduled election in 2028, a new president takes charge? Sadly, not very.
Illustration: Tania Chou
At the turn of the millennium, Turkey was not run by an autocrat able to bend the system to the singular goal of maintaining power. Now it is. Erdogan would not repeat the mistake that was made with him by imprisoning Imamoglu for a few token months, ready to emerge a political martyr. Chosen by the main opposition Republican People’s Party to run for president even after his arrest, Imamoglu would likely be locked up until his release poses no further threat. Selahattin Demirtas, the Kurdish political leader who last challenged Erdogan’s grip on power, remains in prison after more than eight years.
This marks the difference between rule by democrats, no matter how flawed, and strongmen (or women), no matter how exhilarating their promise. Having taken control of the institutions created to limit the powers of elected leaders, Erdogan can do whatever he perceives necessary to stay in office, no matter what the cost to his country.
This story is a tragedy for Turkey. In Erdogan’s early years, it was among the most promising economies in the world. Who now remembers the forecasts around 2010 and 2011, when major investment banks and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development foresaw growth rates that would make it one of the world’s biggest economies, overtaking Germany? The Turkish tiger story has been unravelling since 2013, and almost entirely for political reasons.
Even for those who do not care about Turkey’s fate, this should be a teachable moment. A number of national and multi-national polls in recent years have come to the same conclusion when asking people their thoughts on the importance of democracy. All found a rise in the number of people willing to say they prefer to be ruled by someone strong and unelected, with the shift clearest among the young — more than one-fifth of 18-to-44-year-olds in a January UK poll by consultancy FGS Global, for example.
That should not come as a surprise. The limits imposed by fully functioning democracies are most valued by those who recall or have fought against the alternative. Young people growing up in developed economies know only the disappointments of their democratically constrained leaders. Just as telling is that the same polls found that countries in which democracy is most valued tend to be those already run by fully entrenched autocrats — Turkey and Ethiopia came joint first in one of them.
Erdogan did once have an economic dream team, at a time when he saw his future in big-tent politics that captured the center ground. The first years of his rule were objectively good for his country by almost every measure, including civil rights. He went from slipping a bracelet of beads over my wrist and espousing secularism and sound economic policies the first time I met him in 2003, to encouraging hatred of everything construed as Western within a decade.
Erdogan promoted the Islamification of education, the domestication of women, and imposed his religious beliefs about the wickedness of charging interest on the central bank. He polarized Turkish society between the ultra-religious and the less so. One by one, he knocked away the drivers of Turkish growth potential, and nothing was there to stop him. He had changed the constitution to increase his powers and purged the media, courts, police and military of any opposition, a process that went into overdrive after an attempted coup by former religious allies in the military. No one in his shrinking entourage dared to confront him.
The one exception has been global financial and credit markets, which are unforgiving. He’s learned that lesson at least, after coming close to destroying the economy, and is sticking by a talented finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, as he tries to right the ship. That’s been enough to halt the selling of Turkish assets that followed the targeting of Imamoglu and drove the lira to a record low against the dollar.
For most of this ride, Turkey’s leader had a strong support base that believed he could do no wrong. Any suggestion he might be leading Turkey astray was met with accusations of conspiracy or Islamophobia. However, as his policies produced inflation and hardship, Erdogan has had to repeatedly reshape his support base beyond a religious conservative core to keep a plurality of voters on his side, appealing first to liberals and Kurds, then to conservative nationalists and now to Kurds again. This month, however, he was reduced to Putin-level tactics, arresting his main political rival.
Turkey’s story under Erdogan is one that every voter hoping for the magical solutions of populist politicians should absorb. The key takeaway? It is a lot harder to reinstate democratic constraints that prevent a leader from pursuing illegal or destructive policies than it is to remove them.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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