How Erdogan Turned Turkey into a Fiefdom | M.R. Narayan Swamy

BOOK REVIEW

From Life Itself
Turkey and Istanbul in the Age of Erdogan

by Suzy Hansen

Profile Books

When you read a political biography of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, you feel you are discovering modern-day dictators around the world. It is not a surprise that he once boasted: “Now there are only two experienced leaders in the world. They are myself and Vladimir Putin.”

American journalist Suzy Hansen also puts Erdogan in the same bracket as Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping – men who insist on putting their personal stamp on governance. Unlike Xi, who doesn’t have to face elections, the Turkish President and the Indian Prime Minister are of a different kind.

Both entered politics after humble beginnings – while young, Erdogan was a vendor in postcards and water bottles while Modi sold tea. Both climbed the political ladder with measured steps but with big dreams. Erdogan became the President and Modi the Prime Minister in 2014. But Erdogan has been the de facto ruler since 2002 (when Modi was Gujarat’s Chief Minister). Under their watch, both countries have seen a backsliding of democracy and suppression of dissent.

Of course, there are dissimilarities between the two men. But the near-similar political trajectories are telling.
Author Hansen, who lived in Istanbul for 16 long years, had a vantage view of Turkish politics and society, the way Erdogan worked his way up after a short prison term to become Istanbul’s Mayor, then the Prime Minister and finally the all-powerful President. The result is a penetrating book, From Life Itself: Turkey and Istanbul in the Age of Erdogan (Profile Books/London/Hachette)

His first mission was to chip away everything associated with the founder of modern Turkey, the secular Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Erdogan had to dismantle the old ideology so as to thrust his own on Turkey, a country home to 80 million people and located in a turbulent part of the world.

To consolidate power, he hammered the opposition, punishing everyone who crossed his path, and plunged into large-scale infrastructure construction. As he tightened the grips over politics, he “haunted every conversation, as if he lived inside all of us”.

To win elections Erdogan initially went from door to door, acting the perfect democrat, courting the lower middle class. As Mayor, he cleaned up Istanbul, restored electricity to seven days a week, and made sure that garbage was picked up. He made governance more efficient. But he was against unionized workers. He loved the private sector. His attention to urban care and people’s needs shored up popular support that would last two decades.

Crucially, Erdogan, after his initial steps in politics, firmly embraced Islam. But he framed religious ambition in terms of personal freedom, the Western liberal way. On top of it, he became pro-European Union, pro-American and pro-business.

Corruption was widespread in Turkey. And Erdogan’s AK party legalized it. “Because AK party leaders controlled the Parliament, they could make up new rules that suited their self-interested aims and call it the law. Over time … everything in Turkey got rewritten.”

Erdogan made the Turks realize that Turkey “was going forward” under his leadership. Over time, pro-government individuals came to control much of the media; free-thinking journalists lost work. Supporters were embedded in every aspect of the state. Turkey slowly turned authoritarian.

He took a very hard line vis-à-vis Kurds and their claim for independence. To him the Kurdish fighters mattered more than the ISIS, so much that there were accusations that he was in league with the Islamists. Turkish journalists and academics went to jail for even talking about the Kurds.

When the Turkish military attempted a coup in 2016, Erdogan ordered his supporters to counter the soldiers on the streets. The uprising failed. Once the coup was linked to US-based friend-turned-foe Fethullah Gulen, thousands of real and perceived Gulen supporters in all walks of life were sacked from work, barred from any employment, their passports seized, and jailed. Thousands fled into exile. The judiciary was bullied into submission.

By the time the dust settled, Erdogan had become a super-president, concentrating all power in the executive’s hands. Parliament passed laws without any questioning. Bureaucrats turned loyalists. But all this could not prevent the cost of living from zooming. Purchasing power dropped. Farm subsidies were cut; agriculture suffered. Pro-government media channels played down the economic hardships; “people trusted the media even less”.

Then came the murderous 2023 earthquake, which felled more than 300,000 building containing a whopping 520,000 homes. Entire neighbourhoods turned to rubble. Some 59,000 people were declared dead but few in Turkey believed only that many had died. This was when Erdogan’s inefficiency came to the fore. Turkey’s rescue set-up failed miserably.

The experts were not surprised by the sheer scale of devastation. They knew who was to blame. To win the 2018 elections, the AK party gave amnesty to all apartment buildings and other structures that didn’t qualify as earthquake compliant. After the disaster, Erdogan screamed that the buildings which crashed were built before he came to power. Fine, retorted critics, why didn’t you set right things when you held power for so long?

Like good dictators, Erdogan survived the deaths and destruction. He went on to grab the role of a key regional player by meddling in armed conflicts in neighbouring countries – Syria, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and beyond. He quarrelled with the US but made up with the mercurial Trump. Erdogan considered a badge of honour to be put on par with Putin.

Author Hansen, who saw much of all this while living and interacting with Turks in a residential neighbourhood, was not happy with the ways of Erdogan. “Authoritarianism, in Turkey, was not simply a strongman taking over a state. It was an act of creation, a process of transformation that begins when few are watching and, once identified, is often too late to stop.”

So, what does the future hold for Turkey? “Someday he (Erdogan) will lose the love he once inspired in people, and he too will go, leaving behind for his people a painful inheritance.”

This book is not just about Erdogan. It is about how authoritarians come to power, how they stick on, how they pulverize the opposition, and they turn a state into a single-person state. This is a great book to read.