By David Gardner

Published: March 11 2010 22:44

Turkey’s ruling party has once again entered into conflict with the Turkish army. This is more than the latest episode in a power struggle commenced as soon as the Justice and Development party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan first came to power in 2002.

It is more, too, than a battle of wills between neo-Islamists and secularists; more even than a new and dangerous chapter in a recurring constitutional crisis. It is, above all, a clash between two rival establishments jostling for supremacy: the traditional metropolitan elites who see themselves as the guardians of the secular, republican heritage of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey; and the new AKP establishment that combines the conservative and religiously observant traditions of Anatolia with a huge constituency in Turkey’s modern but Muslim middle class.

One of the principal reasons for this now chronic crisis is that the first group, the Kemalists, are unelectable: after being trounced in two general elections by the AKP they appear to have no strategy except to return to power by goading the army and the judiciary into seizing back what their howlingly irrelevant parties keep losing at the ballot box.

It is a commonplace, often deployed with self-serving slyness in Europe, that Turkey is engaged in a struggle to determine its real identity. Yet, the real drama of Turkey today is more banal: it lacks an effective opposition to the AKP. It will keep bobbing from crisis to crisis until it has one.

The trigger for the latest phase in this transitional struggle was the Erdogan government’s detection of alleged plots by ultra-nationalists connected to the military and security services to overthrow the AKP.

Turkey’s military has form on this. Before the advent of the AKP, it had ousted four governments, and closed four Islamist parties, in four decades. But it was wrong-footed by the popularity of and momentum behind the new ruling party, under Mr Erdogan, a charismatic former mayor of Istanbul, as prime minister. And there was another, transforming factor: Europe.

After more than four decades in Europe’s ante-room, in December 2004 Turkey finally realised its ambition of becoming a candidate member of the European Union. To meet the criteria of the club, the Erdogan government carried out a constitutional revolution: introducing democratic freedoms of expression and association, minority rights for the Kurds and, above all, starting to subordinate the overmighty generals to civilian authority.

The European project worked as a powerful engine of reform and helped glue together Turkey’s political tribes because the Kemalists and the military saw the EU as a fulfilment of the country’s western destiny foreseen by Ataturk, while the AKP saw the EU’s democratic rules as a shield against the generals. Put another way, Europe managed to hold the rivalries of the two, competing establishments in precarious but real alignment. The EU was working as the load-bearing bridge for Turkey’s transition.

But then EU negotiations stalled – mainly because reluctant partners such as Germany and France think Turkey is not European enough and too big, too poor and too Muslim to absorb. As they raised the bar to entry, Turkish reform ran out of steam. The shield against the generals was removed. The glue of political cohesion dissolved. It became clear that a clash between the army and the AKP had only been postponed.

In 2007, the army tried unsuccessfully to stop Abdullah Gul, then AKP foreign minister, from becoming president, on the grounds that he had once been an Islamist. Mr Erdogan called its bluff with early elections. The AKP hugely increased its share of the vote, from 34 per cent to 47 per cent on an 84 per cent turnout.

The urban secular middle classes had staged vast demonstrations in defence of a liberal lifestyle they felt was under threat. There was, too, an unmistakable class animus, captured in sneers about “black Turks” from the countryside, who talk only about God, family and football, wanting to take over the country. But Turks chose democracy over the generals. That should have been a moment for Turkey akin to Spain’s emergence from Franco’s shadow, completed when Spaniards elected the Socialists in a 1982 landslide after a failed army coup in 1981.

But, the following year, the Kemalists turned to the courts to try to get the AKP banned. The constitutional court split; the ruling party survived. This score-draw, after the AKP’s 2007 electoral landslide, appears to have emboldened Mr Erdogan to start packing and using the judiciary too. Hence the baroque plots (Ergenekon) and fathomless sub-plots – Balyoz (Sledgehammer) and Kafes (Cage) – before the courts now, implicating both retired and serving officers in the alleged planning of coups.

The AKP’s opponents say it is striking against a politically weakened army to impose Islamism by stealth. There are genuine fears, stoked, say, by local mayors who ban alcohol. But there is no evidence that adds up to theocracy by the back door.

The case against the swaggering populism of Mr Erdogan is that he has squandered a golden opportunity to widen and deepen reform. The AKP’s attitude, common to all Turkish parties, is that it has a right to the spoils: “we won, it’s our turn”. But the outlook of some secularists reflects a lazy sense of entitlement to power; unable to win elections any more, they incite the army and the courts. Their parties are not real parties. They are shrinking cults for outsize egos. Ataturk’s Republican People’s party (CHP), under the ageing and illiberal Deniz Baykal, is a rudderless rump, incapable of appealing to a young Turkey.

The AKP, by contrast, is demonstrably the chosen path to modernity of the socially conservative, observant but at the same time dynamic and entrepreneurial middle classes of central Anatolia, who now demand their rightful share in power. The AKP’s appeal, in other words, is both aspirational and reassuring, by holding fast to the moorings of family, religion and the villages from which many Turks are just a generation away. What has liberal Turkey got to put up against it? A few, suggestive stirrings in the undergrowth such as the Turkish Movement for Change (TDH) of former Kemalist and mayor of Istanbul’s Sisli district, Mustafa Sarigul.

What it desperately needs is a regrouping of secular, liberal and social democratic forces into an electable party (something an EU re-engagement with Turkey would help).

Banging on about secularism is therapeutic but ultimately futile. A viable centre-left needs to abandon the fragmented, pre-modern to Jurassic, and episodically putschist secular parties. Instead of worshipping at Ataturk’s shrine they should follow his example. The founder of Turkey built the republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Even Mr Erdogan looked far beyond the wreckage of Turkish Islamism to create the AKP. Turkey’s centre-left should emulate him and start again.