Chicanery in Turkey

The Justice and Development party has been rightly regarded, until very recently, as one of the most successful political movements in Europe. While other Turkish parties neglected the grassroots, the AKP built up a stronger and stronger following among ordinary Turks in the country's rapidly expanding cities. It did so in part because of its emphasis on the Islamic values with which these voters, many of them still influenced by the traditional ways of the countryside from which they, or their parents, had come, were comfortable. Equally important was hard organizational work, and the fact that, long before it achieved national power, the party was providing many poor and disadvantaged people with the welfare services reflected in its current title.

It coped with bans on its activities by reinventing and renaming itself, gaining as it did so a greater degree of loyalty from supporters affronted by the attempt to prevent them making the political choice they desired. The party then diluted its Islamic emphasis and discarded some of its more fantastical policies, like its advocacy of an Islamic Union to parallel the European Union. It emerged instead as the party of Europe, as the party of big business as well as small business, as a center-right party but also as the party of labor and of social reform. It helped that it possessed, in Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one of those astute and charismatic "big barons" around whom Turkish politics has often revolved in the past.

The result was a transformation of the Turkish political landscape. The AKP had comprehensively stolen the clothes of its political opponents, and rearranged them in a uniquely appealing package. Other Turkish parties, including some that had been large and long-established, were damaged to the point where alternation in political power is not, for the moment, a real possibility. The AKP has most of the votes and nearly all of the seats and, in spite of some disillusion among its supporters, that is likely to remain the case. And therein lies the problem.

The party system does not reflect the interests and views of the old Turkish professional and upper middle classes, intent on maintaining the tough Kemalist distinction between politics and religion – in part because they are genuinely secularist, and in part because it provides a means of keeping social and political forces of which they disapprove in check. There are aspects of this divide that seem almost tribal, but the badges are those of religion on the one hand and modernity on the other.

The AKP knew that its relations with these powerful groups were in the nature of a truce, but it unwisely began to push its advantages. From the beginning in government, it had used its power of patronage, and into the ministries and agencies came a growing steam of people with an AKP, and hence a religiously conservative, background. The old elite saw itself as losing ministry after ministry to these invaders. The AKP then put forward for president a less than neutral figure, who had a headscarf-wearing wife. It followed this by further moves on the totemic issue of headgear.

When leaders like Kemal Attaturk in Turkey and Rezza Shah in Iran set out to modernize their countries they went first for the head – targeting traditional headgear and traditional ways of wearing and covering hair. Men and women, stripped of fez, turban, veil, headscarf or beard, were quite literally revealed as individual citizens in a self-consciously secular state, rather than as people whose dress and habits reflected the primary importance of their religious faith. The state seized control of personal appearance. Now, the AKP wanted, in the words of one of its leaders, to heal this "trauma", in which Turks were "overnight … told to change their dress, their language" and "their religious ways were dismantled."

The cumulative affect of the AKP's moves on these various fronts was to trigger a counterattack that has sought to use the constitution's stipulations on religion as a means of bringing down the government. The government has in turn retaliated by pursuing its secular opponents not for the offence of plotting a constitutional coup, but for pursuing an allegedly real military coup, arresting a group of former army officers, businessmen and a journalist on the very day that proceedings began in the constitutional court on the charge that the AKP has been subverting the state's secular foundations.

Those behind the constitutional challenge, in seeking to dislodge a government with a resounding majority, are certainly acting against the spirit of democracy. But the AKP is hardly free of blame. Packing the ministries was not wise, given the suspicions that existed about the AKP's real intent being to take Turkey down a slow road to Islamisation. The presidency decision was not wise, and headscarves, surely, could have been left to a later day.

However the crisis ends, the fundamental problem is that the political system is dangerously lopsided. It needs a strong parliamentary force to balance the AKP and there is, as yet, no sign of one coming into being.