Turkey's Erdogan Wins Local Election and Vows to Hunt Down 'Traitors'

You have to give it to the Machiavellian Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan, so far, nothing seems able to shake his position. There has been an extremely damaging corruption scandal involving himself, his son and several prominent cabinet members and their families (inter alia, the scandal involved smuggling gold into Iran to help it circumvent sanctions, and everybody getting a big cut in the process).

This was followed by the recent revelation that the cabinet was pondering a false flag attack on the Tomb of Suleiman in Syria (or alternatively, firing missiles from Syrian territory into Turkey), so as to have a casus belli for military intervention in Syria.

In the course of these scandals, Erdogan brutally suppressed all opposition, banned both Twitter and You-tube in the country and let his police fight it out with protesters in the streets of Istanbul and other big cities. He also purged the judiciary and police, dismissing hundreds of judges and prosecutors in order to stop the investigations into his and his political allies' corrupt dealings. Some of the purges were laughably transparent, such as the detective heading the corruption investigations in Izmir suddenly finding himself 'promoted' to head of Izmir's traffic department, without explanation.

We previously wrote about Erdogan's implementation of authoritarian 'state security' legislation, which inter aliapurported to make “the internet more safe and free”. Safe, that is, from reporting on corruption in the ruling party.

The suppression of political dissent in Turkey hardly rates a peep from the Western political elites of course. Imagine if Russia's president Putin had engaged in only a fraction of Erdogan's antics – we wouldn't stop hearing about it and he'd be buried in threats.

And yet – after all this – Erdogan's party won local elections over the weekend. It is evidently a case of Turkey not necessarily getting the government it needs, but the one it deserves. Although receiving only 45% of the vote, Erdogan's party has has obtained a clear majority (the major opposition party only got 28%). Now Erdogan wants his 'enemies to pay a price':

“Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan declared victory in local polls that had become a referendum on his rule and said he would "enter the lair" of enemies who have accused him of corruption and leaked state secrets. "They will pay for this," he said.

Erdogan spoke from a balcony at his AK Party headquarters to thousands of cheering supporters as early results showed it winning some 44-46 percent of the vote, and the opposition CHP trailing with 23-28 percent.

Erdogan accuses a U.S.-based Islamic cleric, a former ally, of mounting a smear campaign using a network of followers in the police force to concoct a corruption case against him. In response he has purged the police force of thousands of members.

Last week the crisis reached a new level when a secret top-level security meeting about Syria was taped and posted on You-Tube. The cleric, Fethullah Gulen, denies any involvement in the security leak or the corruption investigation.

"This is the wedding day of the new Turkey," Erdogan said. "Today is the victory day of the new Turkey, 77 million united and together as brothers."

It is noteworthy that Reuters merely mentions a 'top level security meeting leak', while not even breathing one word about the content of said leak (a false flag attack). You'd think that would at least rate a one sentence comment, but it evidently doesn't. We only point this out as an example of how our mainstream press always very subtly tailors its news reports, both by commission and omission. One can of course find reports on the contents of the leak, but the way the details are glossed over in this article is still remarkable.

Anyone who missed the news on the leak would think that 'some bad guy is threatening Turkey's national security', which is incidentally precisely Erdogan's line on the whole event. Keep in mind here that he only thought about alleging that the tape was 'faked' as an afterthought. Initially, he merely complained about its release. Of course allthe leaked recordings about corruption and underhanded dealings in high places in Turkey are 'fakes' (but curiously, Erdogan does not want them to be handed to independent investigators that would be able to ascertain if they are).

Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan screeching invective at his enemies at an election rally a few days ago.

The AKP versus the Gülen Movement

Most outsiders know failry little about what is actually happening in Turkey. The to and fro is actually an internal power struggle between two former allies: Erdogan's Islamic party AKP and the Gülen movement.

Although the Gülen movement – founded and led by Fetullah Gülen, an Islamic  preacher who lives in the US in self-imposed exile -   is an Islamic movement, it is staunchly pro-Western and pro-capitalism (at least officially). The AKP is also an ostensibly pro-Western Islamic party, but slightly less so. The Gülen movement (which calls itself “Hizmet” or “the Service” and is colloquially referred to as “Cemaat” – “the Community” – in Turkey) looks like a typical Islamic social movement: it runs schools and universities, charities, health clinics, student associations, and even newspapers and TV stations. It also runs a huge business empire (rumor has it that it controls some $100 bn. in assets) as well as the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists.

In contrast to the Wahhabist Islam propagated by Saudi Arabia, the Gülen movement outwardly supports multi-party democracy, free markets and inter-faith dialogue. Readers may recall an old posting, where we presented Mustafa Akyol's Mises Institute lecture on the commercial heritage of Islam. As we noted in the introduction.

“Most interestingly, in a later instance of cultural cross-pollination, Islamic scholars in the Ottoman empire began to develop a strong interest in the ideas of Western liberalism (in the classical sense) during the 19th century as a result of the evident economic and scientific success it had produced in Europe. This developing Islamic liberal tradition continued to gain in strength until the time the Ottoman empire began to fall apart in the run-up to World War I.”

It is probably not a surprise then to see an organization like the Gülen movement take root in Turkey – it seems that is in fact heir to an Ottoman Islamic tradition that has not been entirely snuffed out by the Wahhabist counter-reformation that Saudi petro-dollars have helped to spread all over the world.

The Gülen movement has become politically extremely powerful, with its members entering the civil service and rising to high posts, especially in the police, the judiciary, and reportedly also in the national security bureaucracy and the army. Initially, Gülen cooperated with Erdogan and the AKP, whom he saw as allies sharing his convictions and most importantly, as allies against a common enemy: Turkey's armed forces and other Kemalists.

Turkey's army always saw itself as the guardian of Kemal Atatürk's legacy, as the one institution that stood between a modern, secular Turkey and the forces of Islam and retrogression. Atatürk dissolved the Sultanate in 1922 and the Caliphate in 1924, and subsequently ordered the separation of secular and Islamic law – in an attempt to forever ban clerical rule in Turkey. Ever since, the army regarded the preservation of secularism in Turkey as its main role.

As a result, the army frequently intervened in politics, executing three coups d'etat in the post WW2 era (1960, 1971 and 1980) and annulling election results it didn't like. It did so e.g. in 1997, when it deposed the first elected leader of an Islamic party, Necmettin Erbakan of the Welfare Party. Erdogan's 'Virtue Party' was the successor organization to the Welfare Party, followed by the AKP – the “Justice and Development Party” after the 'Virtue Party' was banned by the constitutional court in 2001.

One of things the Gülen movement did while it was still allied with the AKP, was to use its influence in the judiciary to help purge the army. In 2010, some 300 military officers were sentenced to prison terms after the 'discovery' of the so-called 'Operation Sledgehammer', a coup plot allegedly designed to depose the AKP. In 2012, another 30 officers were charged over the 1997 deposing of Erbakan. The entire army leadership resigned in 2010 and was replaced with  Erdogan appointments. The Sledgehammer trial remains quite controversial to this day, but it certainly broke the army's political influence in Turkey.

When the AKP came to power in 2002, the Gülen movement was a natural ally for it. Gülen would get the votes for the AKP, and the AKP in turn would protect the movement and its institutions. The many Gülen followers ensconced in the judiciary and police ultimately helped the AKP to utterly defeat the old Kemalist establishment in Turkey. It was only once this defeat was accomplished that more and more disagreements between Erdogan and Gülen began to become evident. In early 2012, their relationship turned really sour in the course of the 'MIT crisis', when a Gülenist prosecutor forced the chief of Turkey's intelligence agency (an Erdogan appointee) to testify in an investigation of the PKK (the Kurdish Workers Party). Erdogan and his allies began to complain about a 'state within the state' that was turning on them.

After this first round of confrontation between the former allies, the Erdogan government followed up with an announcement in November 2013 that it was  going to close down the 'prep schools' for university exams, a quarter of which are run by the Gülen movement and represent a major source of its financing and recruitment. Thereafter, a prominent Gülen supporter within the AKP, Hakan Sukur (a former football star) unexpectedly resigned from the party in December. The very next morning, the Gülenists really struck back in force:

“Zekeriya Oz, an Istanbul prosecutor who is widely believed to be a member of the Gulen movement, initiated an early morning raid on dozens of individuals, including the sons of three ministers, an AKP mayor, businessmen and bureaucrats. Millions of dollars stacked in shoe boxes were exposed to the press, underlining that this is the greatest corruption scandal  in recent Turkish history. Over eight days, the four ministers who were accused resigned. One of them, Erdogan Bayraktar, shocked the country by saying Erdogan should resign too. ”

We conclude from what we know so far that the corruption investigation is politically motivated, but that what it has uncovered is probably real enough. As long as the AKP and the Gülenists were still allied, no-one wanted to prosecute these offenses. Only after the split between the two manifested itself did the Gülen movement decide to use its influence in the judiciary to blow the corruption case wide open. The leaked recording of the 'false flag' attack discussions is evidently part of the same power struggle.

There has been open war between the AKP and the Gülen movement since late 2013, with Erdogan's purges an attempt to limit the Gülenist influence and stop the corruption investigation. Essentially, two powerful Islamic groups are at each others throats in Turkey.

The conflict has a geopolitical dimension too, considering the Iran sanctions busting activities that are forming the backdrop of the corruption scandal (apparently these activities were instigated by the CEO of Turkey's Halkbank, in whose home the shoe boxes with cash were found). Although both of organizations are officially supporting Western values, one must suspect that this is only a thin veneer that could easily peel away. At their core, they are definitely not secular organizations after all. It is said that Turkish secularists are alternately dismayed and ecstatic watching all of this unfold. Dismayed because the power struggle demonstrates that the influence of secularism has waned in Turkey to the point that its supporters no longer have any input into such struggles, and ecstatic because they hope the two major Islamic forces in the country will tear each other to pieces in the process.

Conclusion:

It is too early to say who will come out on top in Turkey, despite Erdogan's still considerable electoral support. We suspect the string of damaging leaks won't stop, regardless of Erdogan's purges. The Gülen movement is deeply ensconced in the country's bureaucracies, having infiltrated them for many years. It will be difficult for Erdogan to root it out entirely. One of these days, a leak could simply prove too damaging, and sufficiently erode Erdogan's grip on political power. Whether those who come after him will represent an improvement remains to be seen, although at this point it seems hard to do much worse.

Erdogan's former ally, now his biggest enemy, Fetullah Gülen. He lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. Some say he is a 'dangerous cult leader', but at least officially, he supports Western values.

(Image source: Youtube screenshot)

The Istanbul XU 100 Index. The stock market seems to have liked the election outcome, we suspect mainly because it promises continuity in terms of Turkey's economic policies – click to enlarge.

Chart by: BigCharts