The collapse of Erdoğan's way
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has won elections for four major reasons. First, he and his friends proved themselves to be effective and hardworking politicians at the municipal level.
Second, compared to the previous governments, they gave the image of being a devout Muslim government that would never become corrupt. Third, he promised to stick to the EU process, democratization and reforms which immensely helped the Turkish economy to grow. Fourth, he benefited from victimhood and polarization since the people of this country always empathized with the weak and the wronged. At the moment, Erdoğan has been receiving fatal blows on all these four fronts.
His party, ministers and mayors no longer give the impression that they are hardworking and effective politicians. Rumors about how Justice and Development Party (AKP) politicians have become corrupt were always in the public sphere but the fact that Erdoğan had to sacrifice four of his ministers after trying to stop the corruption investigation and interfering with the judiciary for 10 days is telling enough that the evidence of corruption is very strong. Since 2010, he has stopped democratizing the country and, believing that he has captured the state and can fully control it, he has tried to change the Constitution to create a presidential system with a melding of powers so that he and his party can appoint most of the judges in the supreme courts and can enact laws when Parliament is not in session. Yet, this is proof enough of his intentions about Turkey's democratic standards. He kept talking about joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as opposed to the EU process. One of his senior men, Professor Burhan Kuzu, threw the annual EU progress report into the trashcan during a live TV interview.
As far as the fourth blow is concerned, let me be more specific. Whenever he was pressured by the Kemalist oligarchy about his religiosity, his Islamic attitude and his worldview, he was justifiably perceived as a victim by the public. When military generals tried to stage coups against him, when Ergenekon tried to assassinate him, when millions of Kemalo-nationalists (ulusalcılar) spilled out into the streets against his party in 2007 and when the chief of General Staff interfered with the election of Abdullah Gül as president, he increased the percentage of votes from 34 percent to 47 percent in the 2007 elections. Being a very skillful politician, he is well aware that polarization will always help him be perceived as a victim.
The first serious blow to this strategy came during the Gezi Park incidents. He initially reacted very harshly to the protesters. Instead of speaking about governance and listening to demands, he deliberately increased the tension. While he was in North Africa, President Gül, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç and some other ministers tried to appease the masses by declaring that they have received the protesters' message. Erdoğan was not happy with this. Columnist Nagehan Alçı, who is close to the prime minister and had accompanied him on that trip, wrote that polarization was increasing the AKP's votes. She said the AKP's votes had increased to 60 percent.
On his return, Erdoğan inflamed the waning tension by saying he would not only build the shopping center in Gezi Park but would also demolish and rebuild the Atatürk Cultural Center (a Kemalist taboo) and build a mosque next to it (another Kemalist taboo). He also kept repeating that the Gezi protesters had drunk alcohol and engaged in immoral acts in a mosque in an attempt to polarize society once more along the religious and secularist divide. However, six people died and many more were injured. Some senior AKP politicians stated fearing that the military could act. Thus, Erdoğan gave up and blamed the media for fabricating news that he wanted to build a shopping center in Gezi. His polarization strategy did not work.
Now he is trying this strategy again by trying to convince the masses that there is an international dark plot against his government. He claims that the Hizmet movement and the judiciary are helping these dark forces. Yet, the US dollar is soaring and the lira is at a record and historic low. The central bank sold $2.5 billion to help the lira but the rate has not moved.
To cut the long story short, Erdoğan's polarization and victimhood tactics are not working and, what is worse, are terribly harming the economy.
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