Erdogan’s WaySeptember/October 2019 33seemed anachronistic a century after
World War I, but as a political strategy, it
worked, allowing Erdogan’s vote to reach
53 percent in the 2018 presidential elec-
tion. Again, however, Erdogan was at the
mercy o another political movement, this
time not the Gulenists but the far-right
Nationalist Movement Party, with which
he formed a coalition government. In
doing so, Erdogan worried fellow Islamists
by handing key positions in the bureauc-
racy to their main right-wing rival.RESENTMENT ON THE RISE
Aki Beki, a tall, sleekly dressed politi-
cal operative with movie-star looks,
was Erdogan’s chie adviser and spokes-
person from 2005 to 2009. Today, he
speaks critically about his former boss
and his team. “The feedback mecha-
nisms o ’s rst years no longer
work,” Beki told me earlier this year.
“The party’s old sensitivities disap-
peared. Instead o conducting dialogue
with voters, the insists on a one-
way propaganda monologue. Instead o
facing problems, it conceals them.”
Disgruntled former allies such as
Beki are pebbles in Erdogan’s shoe.
Erdogan can aord to ignore commu-
nists and environmentalists, who garner
little support at the ballot box, but
disillusioned Islamists, who have talked
about forming a new party, pose a
challenge to the ’s reign. Recently,
two o the three founding members o
the raised their voices against
Erdogan’s strongman politics: Arinc
strongly denounced the polarizing tone
o the party, and Gul came close to
running as the opposition candidate in
the 2018 election. Davutoglu, for his
part, published a manifesto opposing
the presidential system on Facebook.The Gezi protests and Ankara’s
isolation in the Middle East unsettled
the leader who, as the scholar Soner
Cagaptay writes in Erdogan’s Empire,
“had been a master o reading the global
zeitgeist and responding to it with a
public relations executive’s craftiness.”
In 2014, Davutoglu became prime
minister, but soon, his warm relations
with the leaders o other European
states angered Erdogan, who now
considered him a challenger to his
authority. In May 2016, Erdogan forced
him to resign and replaced him with a
low-prole placeholder. Even as the
presidential palace moved to the center
o Turkish politics, however, Erdogan
struggled for control. Less than two
months after Davutoglu’s ouster, dis-
gruntled Gulenist cadres in the military
staged a failed coup, in which 250 people
were killed. As ghter jets bombed the
parliament, Erdogan appeared on ¡¢¢
Turk via FaceTime and asked Turks to
defend democracy by ghting o
soldiers in public squares.
The failed putsch gave Erdogan a
further excuse to centralize power.
Announcing a state o emergency, Erdo-
gan suspended the European Convention
on Human Rights, detained tens o
thousands o civil servants, closed more
than 100 media outlets, and canceled
the passports o 50,000 Turks suspected
o having links to Gulenists to prevent
them from leaving the country. It was
in this atmosphere o chaos and fear that
Turks voted in a 2017 referendum to
adopt a presidential system o govern-
ment. Only Erdogan could will Turkey
back into order during this “new war o
independence,” he argued; some opposi-
tion parties, he claimed, were allied
with the enemy. Such polarizing rhetoric06_Genc_pp_Blues.indd 33 7/22/19 5:48 PM