By Dexter Filkins, News Desk, April 17, 2017<\/p>\n
Fifteen years ago, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan was the hope of the Islamic world. He was an Islamist, of course, but that was part of his appeal. As the mayor of Istanbul, one of the world\u2019s great cities, Erdo\u011fan had governed as a charismatic and smart technocrat. He\u2019d served time in prison, in 1999\u2014for reading a poem that seemed to celebrate militant Islam\u2014but his jailers had been the country\u2019s rigid, military-backed secular leaders who, by then, seemed as suited to the present day as dinosaurs. When Erdo\u011fan became Prime Minister, in 2003, every leader in the West wanted him to succeed. In a world still trying to make sense of the 9\/11 attacks, he seemed like a bridge between cultures.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, Erdo\u011fan declared himself the winner of a nationwide referendum that all but brings Turkish democracy to an end. The vast new powers granted to Erdo\u011fan\u2014wide control over the judiciary, broad powers to make law by decree, the abolition of the office of the Prime Minister and of Turkey\u2019s parliamentary system\u2014effectively make him a dictator. Under the new rules, Erdo\u011fan will be able to run for two more five-year terms, giving him potentially another decade in power, at least. With a vote by the now truncated parliament, he would be able to run for yet another term, one that would end in 2034. By then, he\u2019ll be an old man.<\/p>\n
The voting took place in a government-created atmosphere of violence, intimidation, and fear. Turks campaigning against the referendum were attacked and even shot at. For much of the past year, Erdo\u011fan\u2019s government has been working to stamp out what remained of the democratic opposition to his rule. Since July, some forty thousand people have been detained, including a hundred and fifty journalists. A hundred thousand government employees have been fired, and a hundred and seventy-nine television stations, newspapers, and other media outlets have been closed. Many opposition leaders are in jail. That\u2019s not an environment conducive to asking a populace what it wants.<\/p>\n
The vote was close\u2014very close\u2014and there are many accusations of fraud. It did seem hard, in the lead-up to Sunday, to imagine that Erdo\u011fan would allow himself to lose. (He did not even permit international observers to monitor the vote.) In the end, to solidify his position, Erdo\u011fan was compelled to strike an unlikely deal with the M.P.H., an ultra-nationalist party that had previously opposed him. Without the ultra-nationalists, who can\u2019t be expected to be enduring Erdo\u011fan allies, the referendum vote may well have failed. Not that it will matter much now\u2014the margin may have been close, but you can expect Erdo\u011fan to exercise his new prerogatives fully. \u201cIt means the country is totally split,\u2019\u2019 James Jeffrey, a former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, told me. \u201cHalf the country loves him, and half the country loathes him.\u201d<\/p>\n
The secret to Erdo\u011fan, I think, is that his Islamism has always been a diversion; what he cares about is not so much the power of his religion as power for himself. This has been true at least since the beginning of his second term as Prime Minster. It was then, in 2007, that his government opened the first in a series of investigations aimed at rooting out what he described as a vast, secret cabal\u2014dubbed \u201cErgenekon\u201d\u2014composed of the secular \u00e9lite that had historically dominated Turkey. As it turned out, Ergenekon was just another name for the democratic opposition and members of the military who regarded Erdo\u011fan with suspicion. At the time, the Ergenekon prosecutions made a certain sense: in Turkey, the secular \u00e9lite and its allies in the military had such a history of repression that much of the world seemed prepared to believe Erdo\u011fan, or at least to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the trials\u2014which began the dismantling, which continues to this day, of the secular democratic opposition\u2014were a farce.<\/p>\n
Since then, Erdo\u011fan has used one trumped-up enemy after another to justify his drive for absolute power. In 2013 came the Gezi Park protests, where Turkish police cracked down on peaceful demonstrators, killing several people and injuring thousands more. Then, last July, Erdo\u011fan beat back an attempted military coup against him, then exploited the crisis to neutralize any remaining opposition. Erdo\u011fan\u2019s strongman tactics worked in no small part because of the acquiescence of the United States and Europe, whose governments have held off criticizing Erdo\u011fan for fear that he might get worse.<\/p>\n
For years, Erdo\u011fan\u2019s critics attributed to him a damning quotation that, they said, revealed his true intentions. \u201cDemocracy is like a train,\u2019\u2019 Erdo\u011fan was said to have remarked. \u201cYou get off once you\u2019ve reached your destination.\u201d It\u2019s not clear that Erdo\u011fan ever actually said this. But it seems, in 2017, to reflect precisely what he has had in mind all along. After fifteen years of riding the train of democracy, Erdo\u011fan and Turkey are finally stepping off.<\/p>\n