The coup attempt that set Turkey on a path to authoritarianism
It was a spectacular falling out.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had risen to power largely thanks to the support of a preacher and fellow Islamist, Fethullah Gulen, who died this week. Gulen’s millions-strong following of educated and motivated Turks helped fill the ranks of government, as well as the media, the police and law courts, helping Erdogan run the country and cement his power.
In the early years of Erdogan’s leadership as prime minister, Gulen followers were the most prominent spokespeople for the government in Turkey and abroad. But by a decade later, Erdogan had come to resent Gulen’s reach and differences over policy emerged.
The first break came in 2013 when Gulenist prosecutors started corruption proceedings against members of Erdogan’s government and even against members of his family.
Erdogan accused Gulen of directing a “judicial coup” and moved to close down some of Gulen’s holdings in the media, as well as his lucrative education centers that prepared students for university entrance exams.
The rivalry turned deadly when members of a group found to be aligned with Gulen – some visited him in the United States – attempted a military coup in July 2016. Erdogan faced it down, bringing his supporters out on the streets and securing the allegiance of military and intelligence leaders who moved to arrest the coup leaders.
He then cracked down with a vengeance not only against those immediately involved in the coup attempt but also on the wider circles of the movement. Tens of thousands of followers of Gulen were arrested, their businesses and properties were seized, and 150,000 government employees were purged from their jobs.
The Turkish government issued a warrant for Gulen’s arrest and requested his extradition from the United States, where he had lived in self-imposed exile for many years in Pennsylvania.
Erdogan was never successful in bringing Gulen back to Turkey. The United States government cited a lack of evidence for not moving on the extradition. But he did succeed in crushing the Gulenist movement, branding it as a terrorist organization and imprisoning many prominent leaders with draconian sentences of multiple life terms without parole.
By the time of his death, Gulen had lost much of his support among families whose relatives were in prison and thousands who had been forced to flee Turkey and rebuild their lives as refugees.
The attempted coup had a profound effect on Erdogan.
He wept at the funeral of one of his closest political aides, Erol Olcok, and Olcok’s 16-year-old son, who were killed in gunfire on the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul. They were among protesters there who were blocking advancing troops.
Erdogan strengthened ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had warned him of a pending coup and was swift to offer his support afterward. That led Erdogan to make a deal to buy an S400 missile defense system from Russia, despite Turkey’s membership in NATO – a decision that caused broad upset among its partners in the military alliance.
His drift into authoritarianism, which had begun several years earlier after popular protests in 2013, accelerated dramatically and led to a sharp deterioration in relations with the United States and countries in the European Union.
Erdogan frequently railed against Washington for not supporting him at the time of the coup and for failing to extradite Gulen. Many of his supporters went further and accused the United States of hosting Gulen and of being behind the coup attempt.
Whether driven by the threat to his person, or political opportunism, Erdogan used the coup attempt to reshape Turkey and prolong his position at the helm of Turkish politics.
With a referendum in 2017, he changed the constitution to end Turkey’s parliamentary system and give widespread executive powers to the president, once a largely ceremonial position. He has since secured two more terms as president.
He has overseen years of mass trials of Gulen followers, including of young cadets, conscripted soldiers, teachers and others who had little or no part in the coup attempt and who have received lengthy prison sentences.
The evidence presented at the trials of the coup leaders seemed to put to rest any broad doubts that there had been an organized plot to unseat Erdogan, but human rights activists and government critics said the prosecutions were nevertheless deeply flawed. In some cases, several hundred people were tried at the same time.
In addition to supporters of Gulen, hundreds of Kurdish politicians, democracy activists, journalists, and others, among them a prominent philanthropist, have been imprisoned in Turkey in recent years in what is seen as a broad effort to suppress dissent. Hundreds of media outlets have been closed and opponents of the government are rarely allowed access to mainstream media.
As a result, Erdogan has achieved what has long been the aim of Islamists in Turkey, including his own Justice and Development Party: to take power from the country’s secularist parties and expand the role of Islam in Turkish society and its institutions.
Erdogan has even adopted some of the methods of his former ally, Gulen. Members of Erdogan’s party have frequently pointed to Gulen’s old practice of securing power by inserting his own followers into the various branches of government, commerce and the media.
In the crackdown after the coup attempt, Erdogan’s government purged thousands of Gulen followers from government ministries, schools, courts, universities, nongovernmental organizations, police departments, military battalions, hospitals and banks.
Then he replaced them with his own loyalists.
That has left Turkey deeply divided, but with a system that is skewed toward supporting the incumbent president and his party.
Still, Erdogan has retained elections. He is in the second of two presidential terms allowed by the constitution, with a mandate until 2028. His plans are not clear, but weeks before voters went the polls last April to cast ballots in local races, the president suggested that it would be his “last election.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
