TURKEY

Intro: Turkey’s failed coup now gives Recep Tayyip Erdogan a chance to seize more power

IN just the space of four decades Turkey has seen four governments ousted by its military, the most recent was in the late 1990s. Until now, another coup had been considered extremely unlikely. Many senior army officers resent Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian and autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his single-handed attempts to reshape society along Islamic lines and to rein in the military. Few would have reason to think that an attempt to depose him would ever have been successful. Mr Erdogan has won every election since 2002, and retains the support of roughly half the electorate. A decade of economic prosperity, Mr Erdogan is considered a lesser evil than army rule even by many of his committed opponents.

The attempted coup on July 15th, was dismantled in just a matter of hours amid a massive show of popular support for continued civilian rule. According to official sources, at least 265 people were killed. Mr Erdogan has emerged from the episode stronger than ever. His ultimate desire of changing the constitution to grant the presidency executive powers may now be within reach. Mr Erdogan wants power around himself and not shared through parliament.

The Turkish president plays a masterful game at being both victor and victim. This is the man who brought Turkey’s secularist old guard to heel and gave a voice to the country’s conservatives, but, at the same time, also claimed to be surrounded by enemies both at home and abroad. For Mr Erdogan, the world is divided into two groups: on the one hand, his voters; on the other, a coalition of foes that includes the political opposition, Western countries ostensibly envious of Turkey’s progress, the global financial elite, and a secretive Islamic movement, the Gulen community. In the eyes of his supporters, the coup attempt has proven Mr Erdogan right. He will now likely claim a mandate for amassing even more power and eliminating the remaining centres of opposition.

To the relief of most Turks, the military is no longer the credible and alternative power base it once was. It will be the first target for any purge under sweeping changes being considered by Mr Erdogan. While the coup had the support of only part of the officer corps, this was not a coup by the military as an institution but more of a mutiny. The plotters did, however, deploy large numbers of troops and heavy armour in both Istanbul and in Ankara, where their aircraft bombed the national parliament. Over 2,800 military personnel, including a number of generals, have been arrested.

Another target on Mr Erdogan’s radar will be the Gulen movement, a Muslim sect headed by a cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who was a close ally of the Turkish president before falling out with him in 2013. The government immediately charged the group with masterminding the violence. The government labelled the Gulenists a terror group this year, and it now has a green light to pursue anyone even remotely suspected of links to them. Some Turkish officials insist that the Gulenists have their finger prints all over this latest coup attempt. On July 16th, Binali Yildirim, Turkey’s prime minister, demanded that America extradite Mr Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania. “The country that stands behind this man is no friend to Turkey,” he warned.

Mr Erdogan has long sought to undermine his parliamentary political opposition. Last year he responded with massive force to a growing insurgency in the southeast by groups aligned to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), fanning the flames of the violence and providing an excuse to link moderate Kurdish MPs to the terrorists. They have since been stripped of parliamentary immunity, and now face terrorism charges. Bomb attacks by the PKK and by Islamic State, which Turkey says it is battling in Syria, have legitimised a government crackdown on independent media and free expression. The main independent newspapers and television broadcasters have been taken over by government organisations aligned to the previously issued instructions of Mr Erdogan. Prosecutors have opened some 2000 cases against people suspected of insulting the president since 2014. Following the coup, such repression will probably intensify.

Perhaps most troubling, the coup will provide an opportunity for Mr Erdogan to eliminate what remains of Turkey’s independent judiciary. On July 16th, the government announced that 2,700 judges had been suspended from duty. Two members of the constitutional court have also been detained.

The irony is that the coup’s failure demonstrated just how weak a threat Mr Erdogan actually faces. Almost all people spoke out against the coup, including the entire political class, as well as the overwhelming majority of Turkey’s citizens. That is the good news. The bad is that today’s sense of unity risks being drowned out tomorrow by calls for vengeance. The day after the coup attempt a group of men clad in Turkish flags marched down Istanbul’s main street shouting “We want executions”. The death penalty was abolished in Turkey in the early 2000s. Media photographs and video footage online from the coup’s aftermath showed protesters on one of Istanbul’s bridges beating soldiers and whipping them with their belts.

The failed coup is a golden opportunity for Mr Erdogan to heal a deeply divided society. Past experience suggests that he will instead respond with a vicious crackdown. During the night of July 15th, Turks of all stripes managed to protect their country from a relapse into military rule. Yet, the fragile democracy that many of them died to defend is now in Mr Erdogan’s increasingly untrustworthy hands.