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ISTANBUL — Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, strode onto a …
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Turkish Leader Erdogan Making New Enemies and Frustrating Old Friends
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
strode onto a stage a month ago looking down upon a sea of a million
fans waving red Turkish flags. They were celebrating the 15th-century
conquest of Istanbul by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, the golden moment
of Turkey’s Muslim ancestors triumphing over the Christian West.
“The
conquest means going beyond the walls that the West thought were
impervious,” Mr. Erdogan said as the crowd roared. “The conquest means a
21-year-old sultan bringing Byzantium to heel.”
The
spectacle, complete with a fighter-jet sky show and a re-enactment of
the conquest with fireworks and strobe lights, projected an image of
unity and command, of a nation marching together toward greatness,
drawing on the achievements of a glorious past. But that soaring vision
is being grounded by sobering realities.
Mr.
Erdogan, who long professed a foreign policy of “zero problems with
neighbors,” now seems to be mired in disputes with just about everybody
and just about everywhere. Kurdish and Islamic State militants have
struck Turkey 14 times in the past year, killing 280 people and sowing
new fears. The economy has suffered, too, as the violence frightens away
tourists.
At
the same time, Mr. Erdogan has become increasingly isolated,
frustrating old allies like the United States by refusing for years to
take firm measures against the Islamic State. He has recently gotten
serious about the militant group, but that appears to have brought new
problems: Turkish officials say they believe that the Islamic State was
responsible for the suicide attack that killed 44 people on Tuesday in
Istanbul’s main airport, a major artery of Turkey’s already strained
economy.
He
has helped reignite war with Kurdish separatists in Turkey’s southeast,
leaving hundreds of civilians dead in fighting that began last summer.
He alienated Moscow last fall by shooting down a fighter jet that he said had strayed into Turkish airspace.
He had grown so alone that this past week, he moved to make peace deals with Russia over the jet’s downing and with Israel over its killing of several Turkish activists on a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2010, after railing against both countries to voters.
“I
think this is an indicator of how desperate they are,” said Cengiz
Candar, a visiting scholar at the Stockholm University Institute for
Turkish Studies.
Where
Mr. Erdogan once held up Turkey as a model of Muslim democracy, he now
frequently attacks democratic institutions. The editor in chief of
Turkey’s largest daily has fled the country, and another is on trial on
charges of revealing state secrets. The president has grown intolerant
of criticism, purging his oldest allies from his inner circle and
replacing them with yes men and, in some cases, relatives. (His
son-in-law is the energy minister.)
Mr.
Erdogan hints darkly in near-daily speeches on Turkish television that
foreign powers are plotting to destroy him, and he has moved from a
modest house in central Ankara to a grandiose, Persian Gulf-style palace
on the edge of the city. Brown and pink buildings for his staff dot
meticulously landscaped grounds so enormous that staff members are
driven around in minibuses.
Now
he has set his sights on a new target: transforming Turkey’s
parliamentary system of government into a presidential one, a change his
critics say could soon open the door to his seizing the title of
president for life. On the night of the airport bombing, the Parliament,
which his party controls, worked until 5:45 a.m. to pass sweeping
legislation that will help pave the way by purging hundreds of judges
from Turkey’s top two courts.
“The
ship is going very fast toward the rocks,” said Ergun Ozbudun, a
liberal constitutional expert who once defended Mr. Erdogan. “Pray for
us.”
The
story of how Turkey, a NATO member with the eighth-largest economy in
Europe and a population the size of Germany’s, ended up here is as much
about Mr. Erdogan as it is about the country’s unlucky geography in a
convulsing Middle East. While Mr. Erdogan has seemed to have nine lives,
wriggling out of every crisis, he now finds himself cornered by
conflicts on many fronts, including deep divisions in his own society
that he has helped create.
“Erdogan
is still the most popular political leader, but there is unease in the
population,” said Soli Ozel, a Turkish columnist and professor at Kadir
Has University in Istanbul. “A lot of people are thinking this is an
untenable situation.”
Mr.
Erdogan, 62, is one of the most talented politicians Turkey has ever
known, rising from a poor neighborhood in Istanbul to the heights of
power, where he has won election after election since 2002. He succeeded
where others had failed in tearing down Turkey’s rigid, classist system
of government, sending the meddling military back to its barracks and
opening up the bureaucracy, long deeply suspicious of Turkey’s pious
underclass.
In
his early years as prime minister, the economy soared and, as incomes
rose sharply, so did his popularity. But his critics — and even some of
his admirers — say he became so absorbed in battling his enemies, both
real and perceived, that he lost his way. He became distracted, they
say, by delusions of imperial grandeur and in the process badly damaged
institutions critical for a functioning democracy.
Even
a former friend, who like others feared being identified, said he had
known Mr. Erdogan for 40 years, but no longer recognized him.
Mr.
Erdogan’s advisers point out that institutions like the free press and
judiciary were never all that free to begin with. They say that his
government has genuinely been in danger, a claim Western officials
corroborate, and that changes in the judiciary aim to fix a broken
system.
Ilnur
Cevik, one of Mr. Erdogan’s chief advisers, said the rapprochement with
Russia and Israel was part of a strategy to turn the page, and might
soon be followed by similar measures to quiet some of the storms Mr.
Erdogan has raised, like with Egypt, with which Mr. Erdogan fell out in
2013 over the ouster of that country’s first democratically elected
president.
Continue reading the main story
There
was good news on the media front, too: On Thursday night, a journalist
and a human rights activist were released from jail.
“We
have to kind of change gears regarding foreign policy, regarding the
press, regarding many issues in Turkey, and I think Mr. Erdogan will
start doing that,” Mr. Cevik said, seated in a spacious palace room
recently outfitted, so it smelled like the interior of a new car. “We
have to show our true face to the American public. We are completely
misunderstood at the moment.”
A
political outsider, Mr. Erdogan helped found the Justice and
Development Party, a diverse and inclusive grass-roots political machine
that turned out to be very good at winning elections, not because it
cheated but because its members worked hard.
“He
really listened to his friends,” said Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, another
of the party’s founders. “He was patient. He would consult with a rich
and varied spectrum of people. When he saw violence, he knew how to step
back.”
To
gain control of Turkey’s bureaucracy, Mr. Erdogan struck an alliance
with an opaque religious group led by an Muslim preacher, Fethullah
Gulen, filling the ranks of the police and the judiciary with their
highly educated members.
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“I
told him I didn’t think any part of the state should be left to the
control of people with a certain ideology,” said Mr. Firat, a Kurd who
has since left the party. “His answer was, ‘We will not be harmed by
those who look toward Mecca.’ We were not an Islamist party — we were a
democratic party. But he was already drifting away.”
That was because he could: With the military out of the picture, the major check on his power had been removed.
But
Islam was not his undoing. Absolute power was. As Mr. Erdogan grew more
popular, winning broad pluralities and even majorities in each
successive election, he began to behave with a kind of Bolshevism,
believing that he was the very embodiment of the people, former
officials said.
Others argue that Turkey’s problems are as much about the country as they are about Mr. Erdogan.
“We
treat Erdogan as the cause, but in some sense, he is the consequence of
Turkish society — he is our creation,” said Hakan Altinay, the director
of the European School of Politics at Bogazici University in Istanbul.
“We have learned that even though we have the hardware of democracy —
institutions, elections — our software is not good. We are too attuned
to status, too willing to submit to authority.”
Today,
many say Mr. Erdogan has simply adopted the bad habits of former
Turkish leaders he came to power to defeat. He needs allies, so he has
struck an alliance with the military — the chief of staff was a witness
at his daughter’s wedding — and extreme nationalists are now resurgent.
That is deeply troubling to human rights advocates who have documented
the missing-person case of a Kurdish politician from Sirnak, Hursit
Kulter, the first such disappearance since 2001.
“Erdogan
today has been captured by the patriotic forces of Turkey,” said Dogu
Perincek, the head of a nationalist political party close to the
military, who was jailed for conspiring against the state but recently
released.
Mr.
Erdogan’s Achilles’ heel is the economy. His voters, while loyal, care
about their pocketbooks more. Incomes have stagnated in recent years and
foreign direct investment, a key indicator of economic direction, has
been declining, not counting real estate purchases.
“We
have an ulcer, not cancer,” Atilla Yesilada, a financial consultant in
Istanbul, said of the economy. “But all signs point toward sicker.”
Safak Timur contributed reporting from Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey.
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