The Wall Street Journal
Review & Outlook

Updated Aug. 13, 2014 12:18 p.m. ET
Recep Tayyip Erdogan called his triumph in Turkey’s weekend presidential election a “trophy night for democracy.” That’s one way to put it. Another is that Mr. Erdogan is using his success at the polls to move his country toward a politics of illiberalism that will undermine democracy.
Sunday’s vote marked the first time Turks directly elected a president. Mr. Erdogan, who has served 11 years as Prime Minister, garnered 52% of ballots—13 points ahead of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the candidate put forward by the two main opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Selahattin Demirtas of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party placed a distant third with 10%.
As with municipal elections in March that saw Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, retain key mayoralties, some opposition media were quick to allege voter fraud. While fraud can never be ruled out, the resort to the allegation is symptomatic of the state of the opposition, which has failed to advance a serious agenda to compete with the AKP’s record of jobs and growth. Turkish GDP grew fourfold over the last decade—the main source of Mr. Erdogan’s popular appeal.
Yet there is little question that Mr. Erdogan and the AKP are hollowing out the institutions of Turkish democracy. The Turkish government has in recent months attempted to ban YouTube and Twitter ; dealt brutally with peaceful protesters; fired or reassigned thousands of judges, prosecutors and law enforcers deemed insufficiently loyal; and earned the dubious honor of being the world’s top jailor of journalists in 2012 and 2013, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
It may now get worse. Mr. Erdogan has already vowed to transform the presidency into an energetic executive office from the largely ceremonial function it currently plays. Abdullah Gul, the outgoing President who possesses more liberal instincts, will no longer serve as a moderating influence on Mr. Erdogan. And since no figure within the AKP can match his political skill and charisma, Mr. Erdogan is likely to lord over whoever might serve as the country’s next Prime Minister.
One silver lining might be a settlement of Turkey’s long-running tensions with its Kurdish minority. Mr. Erdogan has launched a productive peace process with the Kurds, who in recent years have been permitted to assert their linguistic and cultural identity in ways that were unthinkable a few years ago.
But elsewhere in the region, he is less than constructive. Turkey under Mr. Erdogan has emerged as a chief backer of Hamas, hosting Saleh al-Arouri, the operative suspected to have masterminded the kidnapping of three Israeli teens earlier this summer. Ankara may also seek rapprochement with Tehran, having already helped the Iranian regime evade sanctions by facilitating billions of dollars in gas-for-gold transactions.
Turkey is a NATO member and was long a linchpin of the American order in the Middle East—or at least what remains of it. Neither the Obama Administration nor the European Union can be blamed for Mr. Erdogan’s turn away from Western standards of openness and moderation, but Washington and Brussels should call him out if he continues his habit of abusing individual rights.

The Opinion Pages | Editorial By THE EDITORIAL BOARD AUG. 18, 2014

NEWYORK TIMES

 
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD AUG. 18, 2014
It is no surprise that Recep Tayyip Erdogan won Turkey’s first direct election for president. He has served as prime minister since 2002 and, over the intervening years, has skillfully, and ruthlessly, established control and cowed any serious opposition, which was weak to begin with. The victory was not as big as many predicted. Even so, Mr. Erdogan and his ambitions have created new uncertainties for his country and the United States and other NATO members who depend on Turkey to be the bulwark of the alliance’s eastern front.
For starters, the election means that Mr. Erdogan will be even less encumbered by the institutional checks and balances that are essential elements of any real democracy. The first step in his scheme to create an ever-stronger executive was to change the system so that the people, not Parliament, chose the president in a direct vote. Presidents selected by Parliament were largely ceremonial. After his inauguration on Aug. 28, Mr. Erdogan is expected to make the most of what powers he has as president and extend his influence through a handpicked and malleable prime minister.
Mr. Erdogan’s ambitious dreams are not guaranteed. Constitutional amendments will be necessary to make his changes permanent, and, for that to happen, he and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party will need to strengthen their parliamentary majority in next year’s general elections.
His 52 percent tally in the presidential race seems healthy, but it was lower than polls had predicted. Indeed, some analysts say support for him and his party may have peaked. And while he remains popular among conservatives in Turkey’s Anatolian heartlands, many liberal and secular Turks who once endorsed him are now bitterly disaffected, with good reason.
Mr. Erdogan was once an inspiring figure who advocated reforms that seemed designed to make Turkey a model democracy among Muslim-majority nations, fulfill its commitments as a NATO member and make it eligible for membership in the European Union. Under his governance, economic growth has averaged 5 percent per year, inflation has eased and the army has been brought under civilian control. He has offered Turkey’s Kurds more rights than his predecessors and reached a cease-fire with Kurdish militants that has held since 2013.
But he long ago veered off the democratic course, brutally cracking down on antigovernment protests last summer and severely constraining free speech, the press and the Internet. News outlets have been taken over by his cronies, and independent-minded journalists have been fired. A power struggle with a former ally led to a corruption scandal last year that embroiled Mr. Erdogan’s family and seemed to make him even more determined to crush dissent.
Meanwhile, Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian ways have strained relations with Abdullah Gul, the current president, a co-founder with Mr. Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party and a respected consensus-builder who is said to have grown alarmed at Mr. Erdogan’s antidemocratic excesses. But whether he would challenge Mr. Erdogan directly is unclear, and there are no other credible political rivals in sight.
If Mr. Erdogan succeeds in solidifying power, the future of Turkey’s already shaky democracy is more in doubt than ever, and the political uncertainties are expected to persist at least until the 2015 parliamentary election. That is not reassuring news for the United States or any other government that looks for Turkey to play a stabilizing role in an increasingly out of control Middle East.

Stratfor
Editor’s Note: We originally ran this Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan column on May 1, 2013. We are republishing it in light of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Aug. 10 election as Turkey’s new president.
By Robert D. Kaplan and Reva Bhalla
At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force field around him is Russia’s Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is also supremely uncomfortable.
Erdogan and Putin are ambitious because they are men who unrepentantly grasp geopolitics. Putin knows that any responsible Russian leader ensures that Russia has buffer zones of some sort in places like Eastern Europe and the Caucasus; Erdogan knows that Turkey must become a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in Europe. Erdogan’s problem is that Turkey’s geography between East and West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical logic to his excesses.
The story begins after World War I.
Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs, giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy, Britain and France. Turkey’s reaction to this humiliation was Kemalism, the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the surname “Ataturk” means “Father of the Turks”), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who would lead a military revolt against the new occupying powers and thus create a sovereign Turkish state throughout the Anatolian heartland. Kemalism willingly ceded away the non-Anatolian parts of the Ottoman Empire but compensated by demanding a uniethnic Turkish state within Anatolia itself. Gone were the “Kurds,” for example. They would henceforth be known as “Mountain Turks.” Gone, in fact, was the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.
Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from wearing fezzes. Ataturk further recast Turks as Europeans (without giving much thought to whether the Europeans would accept them as such), all in an attempt to reorient Turkey away from the now defunct Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and toward Europe.
Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin’s neo-czarism was the authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin’s anarchy of 1990s Russia. For decades the reverence for Ataturk in Turkey went beyond a personality cult: He was more like a stern, benevolent and protective demigod, whose portrait looked down upon every public interior.
The problem was that Ataturk’s vision of orienting Turkey so firmly to the West clashed with Turkey’s geographic situation, one that straddled both West and East. An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal, a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister in 1983, provided it.
Ozal’s political skill enabled him to gradually wrest control of domestic policy and — to an impressive degree — foreign policy away from the staunchly Kemalist Turkish military. Whereas Ataturk and the generations of Turkish officers who followed him thought in terms of a Turkey that was an appendage of Europe, Ozal spoke of a Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall of China. In Ozal’s mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus politically embody both worlds. Ozal made Islam publicly respected again in Turkey, even as he enthusiastically supported U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the last phase of the Cold War. By being so pro-American and so adroit in managing the Kemalist establishment, in the West at least Ozal — more than his predecessors — was able to get away with being so Islamic.
Ozal used the cultural language of Islam to open the door to an acceptance of the Kurds. Turkey’s alienation from Europe following the 1980 military coup d’etat enabled Ozal to develop economic linkages to Turkey’s east. He also gradually empowered the devout Muslims of inner Anatolia. Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying Ataturk’s warning that such a Pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey’s strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers. The term neo-Ottomanism was, in fact, first used in Ozal’s last years in power.
Ozal died suddenly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the part of Turkey’s sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan’s Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002. Whereas Ozal came from the center-right Motherland Party, Erdogan came from the more openly Islamist-trending Justice and Development Party, though Erdogan himself and some of his advisers had moderated their views over the years. Of course, there were many permutations in Islamic political thought and politics in Turkey between Ozal and Erdogan, but one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like two bookends of the period. In any case, unlike any leader today in Europe or the United States, Erdogan actually had a vision similar to Ozal’s, a vision that constituted a further distancing from Kemalism.
Rather than Ataturk’s emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal, has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia. Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West’s greatest scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G.S. Hodgson of the University of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants’ religion, which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical dealing. In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could — and did — lead to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.
Erdogan now realizes that projecting Turkey’s moderate Muslim power throughout the Middle East is fraught with frustrating complexities. Indeed, it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military capacity to actualize such a vision. To wit, Turkey may be trying its best to increase trade with its eastern neighbors, but it still does not come close to Turkey’s large trade volumes with Europe, now mired in recession. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkey demands influence based on geographic and linguistic affinity. Yet Putin’s Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position. In Mesopotamia, Turkey’s influence is simply unequal to that of far more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, thought — incorrectly, it turns out — that they could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace President Bashar al Assad’s Alawite regime. And while Erdogan has gained points throughout the Islamic world for his rousing opposition to Israel, he has learned that this comes at a price: the warming of relations between Israel and both Greece and the Greek part of Cyprus, which now permits Turkey’s adversaries in the Eastern Mediterranean to cooperate in the hydrocarbon field.
The root of the problem is partly geographic. Turkey constitutes a bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage in neighboring Middle Eastern states.
Turkey’s southeast is demographically dominated by ethnic Kurds, who adjoin vast Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The ongoing breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey. The de facto breakup of Iraq has forced Turkey to follow a policy of constructive containment with Iraq’s Kurdish north, but that has undermined Turkey’s leverage in the rest of Iraq — thus, in turn, undermining Turkey’s attempts to influence Iran. Turkey wants to influence the Middle East, but the problem is that it remains too much a part of the Middle East to extricate itself from the region’s complexities.
Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home in order to gain further leverage in the region. He has even mentioned aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire. This word denotes a semi-autonomous province — a concept that might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey. Thus, his is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the very foundation of Kemalism (with its emphasis on a solidly Turkic Anatolia). But given how he has already emasculated the Turkish military — something few thought possible a decade ago — one should be careful about underestimating Erdogan. His sheer ambition is something to behold. While Western elites ineffectually sneer at Putin, Erdogan enthusiastically takes notes when the two of them meet.
Editor’s Note: Writing in George Friedman’s stead this week are Stratfor’s Chief Geopolitical Analyst Robert D. Kaplan and Vice President of Global Analysis Reva Bhalla.

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