La Turquie d’Erdoğan
At the end of this year, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will celebrate 20 years at the head of his political party, the AKP, while next year, which marks the centenary of the Turkish Republic, will also be an election year, “unless the vote is brought forward, which would not come as a surprise to anyone”, observes Anne Andlauer, whose work credits for the French-language media include Radio France, RTBF, Le Figaro, Le Temps and Le Soir (our translation throughout). Against this backdrop, the French journalist, who has lived in Turkey since 2010, shares an x-ray of contemporary Turkey which, steering clear of cliches and excesses, offers the floor to many Turkish people from all walks of life, painting a detailed portrait of a “society criss-crossed with fracture lines”.
The essay opens with a series of snapshots of young people, stressing that freedom of expression is the number one priority for those aged between 15 and 25, ahead of being able to earn a good living, which retains its importance in a crisis-stricken Turkey, in spite of everything. “Given the uncertainties, more and more young people are dreaming of leaving. According to a survey carried out (…) in April 2021, 43% of Turkish people aged between 18 and 29 ‘want to settle in another country’, compared to 31% in the same study in 2020 and 25% in 2019”, stresses the author, who adds that “Germany, the United States and France are the main target countries. The main reason given, a long way ahead of all the others, is the hope of finding a better job there, or even just any job”.
If Erdoğan’s dream of a “great Turkey of 100 million inhabitants” may come true one day, its only chance of doing so is no doubt due to the numbers of Syrian refugees, with the fertility rate of Turkish women in freefall (1.76 children per woman in 2020, compared to 2.08 in 2010 and 2.38 in 2001). In 2021, 3.7 million Syrians, including 1.8 million under the age of 18, were living in Turkey, where they enjoy only “temporary protection” and are struggling to integrate, with the authorities continuing to insist that they will return to Syria one day.
Having pointed out that in Turkey in the 2000s and early 2010s, those in government spoke of movement, change and openness, Andlauer points out that society has become progressively closed off by a President whose main objective is to remain in power, largely since the event of Gezi. Since then, “the lexical scope of fear and division has supplanted that of hope and togetherness”, the author points out. “It is the age of looking inward, his identity, his values, his acolytes, those who have not abandoned ship, those who depend on the AKP and those on whom the AKP depends. The words have changed, but the worst has not, and the ‘new Turkey’ now led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sounds strangely like the old one, propped up on a narrow and rigid conception of the Turkish and Sunnite Muslim identity. This tendency to look inwards is also the rejection of the ‘200 years before the AKP’, which have been described as a period of ‘uncontrolled westernisation’ together with an ‘inferiority complex’ in self-comparison with Europe”.
“The great closing-off of Turkey is (…) also where the head of state has closed himself off. He is the sole decision-maker of everything and in all things, but he depends on a partner which ultimately represents just a minority of the electorate”, the author argues, in reference to the coalition in place since 2018 between the AKP and the ultra-nationalist MHP party, generally classified as far-right. Since the purge of Gülenists, following the attempted coup d’etat of 2016, the MHP and the brotherhoods have jostled to impose their agendas and their adherents within the State, ministry by ministry, observes the journalist, who also dwells at length on the media lock-down of a country in which “85% of the national media is now in the hands of leaders with links to the powers that be” and no fewer than 60 journalists have been behind bars since autumn 2021.
On the international level, “diplomacy is unfortunately consistently relegated to second place in Turkey’s foreign policy, which is based more on military force”, remarks former ambassador Ünal Ceviköz, a member of the principal opposition party, the CHP. He goes on to criticise the ultra-centralised and ultra-personalised nature of this external policy since the entry into force of the presidential regime in 2018. “Instrumentalised in internal policy, with abundant references to the Ottoman heritage to flatter the aspirations of certain Turks, the country’s foreign policy has been transformed into a succession of unilateral military interventions (Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh), plus attempts to redefine maritime zones, forays into Cypriot waters, sending military vessels into Greek waters, the acquisition of the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft defence system”. And yet, “if he hopes to rebalance the economy, the Turkish head of state is well aware that he must bring on board foreign investors and therefore avoid – possibly even resolve – crises rather than add to them. Permanent confrontation is not sustainable in the long term”, Andlauer writes, arguing that this “largely explains the olive branches held out to the EU, Greece, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and, more discreetly, Israel in 2021”.
“From the point of view of its citizens, Turkey has (…) always been there, in the antechamber of a Europe that has, over the decades, become the reception lobby of a large hotel which asks its customers to make efforts in their presentation, then in their behaviour, then ends up threatening to chase away those who are not wanted, who weaken their case by no longer listening to the rules, while the problems are piling up in the management of this Hotel Europe in a poor state of repair”, the author writes, adding that although considerably more than 20 years have passed since Turkey was granted accession candidate status, six out of ten people are still in favour of Turkish accession, according to a survey carried out in early 2021. Admittedly, they no longer really believe in it, as “Turkey has taken great steps backwards and the EU no longer wants to move forward”. Out of 35 negotiation chapters, 16 have been opened, the last in 2016, and only the chapter ‘Science and research’ was provisionally closed in 2006. If Erdoğan may have wanted the distance, he also knows that in the current economic climate, he has no option but to remain close to the EU: “capitals of the Gulf states did not the expected results, China is not proposing a balanced relationship, Russia has no money… For purely pragmatic reasons, Turkey needs to continue with the EU and the accession perspective”, writes international relations professor Serhat Guvenc. At the same time, “although half of all Turkish people continue to see accession as the ‘best possible form of relationship’ between their country in the EU (2019 survey), increasing numbers of them are coming round to the idea of the ‘privileged partnership’ that certain countries, such as Germany and France, have been proposing for years without ever putting a definition to it”.
Among other subjects, Andlauer also addresses the informal economy (30% of GDP), the earthquake risk in Istanbul, the increase in the budget of the Diyanet (directorate of religious affairs) which, having risen from 550 million Turkish pounds to 13 billion in 2021 (more than twice the budget of the ministry of foreign affairs), reached 16 billion this year (around 876 million euros) and the reconversion of St Sophie to a mosque on 24 July 2020, to “brick up a Christian memory of which the museum was overly reminiscent”. (Olivier Jehin)
Anne Andlauer. La Turquie d’Erdoğan (available in French only). Éditions du Rocher. ISBN: 978-2-2681-0679-3. 250 pages. €19,90
The Playbook of ‘Erdoganomics’ in 2021
In this article published in the German review on Southeast Europe, the economist Jens Bastian (SWP) analyses the effects of the unorthodox economic and monetary policy practised in Turkey.
While Turkey may be considered an “economic giant” among the countries of south-east Europe, it has seen the constant erosion of its GDP from a peak of 957.78 billion dollars to just 720.1 billion in 2010, falling 24.8% over seven years, as the result of several external factors: the influx of Syrian refugees in 2015, the US decision to double customs duty on Turkish aluminium and steel in 2018 and the pandemic, which severely affected the tourism sector in 2020. On top of these come the volatility of the Turkish pound, the secondary effects of the attempted coup d’etat in 2016 and the impact of climate change, with droughts and fires that have hit agriculture hard. The purchasing power of Turkey’s 85.6 million inhabitants has fallen considerably due to inflation, which stood at 36.08% in December 2021 and even as high as 48.7% in January 2022, Bastian reports, telling of queues outside currency exchange offices and banks to convert assets in pounds into dollars, Euro or gold.
This situation, caused by both internal and external factors, was made considerably worse by the erratic actions of the Turkish authorities, specifically of President Erdoğan, in the view of the researcher, who lists the following examples: - the loss of independence of the central bank (CBRT), with frequent changes in its leadership (three successive governors in the space of two years); -the dismissal or resignation of other senior officials of the central bank and the finance ministry over their objections to the non-conventional measures; - the monetary policy of ‘leaning into the wind’ (increasing rates when the other central banks reduce them and vice versa); - the volatility of the Turkish pound. “Over the last three years, the central bank authorities have spent more than 140 billion US dollars on defending the Turkish pound on the markets (…). Why is President Erdoğan arguing the virtues of a weak currency (for export capacity, for instance) whilst the CBRT is spending billions on propping up a highly volatile national currency? This political contradiction has significant adverse effects, not simply in terms of exhausting the CBRT’s foreign currency reserves. The drop in the value of the Turkish pound in 2021 has also showed that these actions are to no effect, resulting in an enormous waste of financial resources” Bastian observes. (OJ)
Jens Bastian. The Playbook of ‘Erdoganomics’ in 2021. Südosteuropa Mitteilungen 01/2022. ISSN: 0340-174X. 96 pages. €15,00
Les Balkans et l’Europe: convergence et diversité
In this article published in the review Futuribles, political scientist and researcher Max-Valentin Robert (Sciences Po Grenoble) examines the views of the people of Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia of the European Union and the notion of Europeanness, as well as their degree of adherence to democratic values. The author analyses the evolution of these on the basis of information collected in EVS opinion polls in 2008-2010 and 2017-2020.
Although the majority of respondents agree that one has to be of a European culture to be European (76% in the EU-15, 83% in the countries of central and eastern Europe who are members of EU and between 61% (Montenegro) and 89% (Albania) in the Balkans), “being of European descent” is more important to respondents from central and eastern Europe (69%) and the Balkans (from 51% of Macedonians to 76% of Albanians) than in the EU-15 (42%) (our translation throughout). Being Christian is a criterion of Europeanness for just 24% of the EU-15, compared to central and eastern Europe (53%) and Serbia (59%). In North Macedonia, this opinion is held by 48% of respondents. In Montenegro, the figure is 42%.
“Large majorities of local public opinion support enlargement of the European Union. Although opinion is more divided in Serbia (just 50% of them agree with the idea that the process ‘should go further’), this point of view is in a strong majority in other populations interviewed – which suggests support for their country’s accession to the EU”, the author observes.
Highly consistently between the first and second wave of surveys, the populations of the Balkans strongly approve of democracy as a mode of government: in 2017-2020, this was the case of 81% of Serbians, 83% of Montenegrins, 88% of Bosnians, 90% of Macedonians and 97% of Albanians. However, the figures call for caution “as to any assumptions that the general public in the Balkans therefore reject authoritarianism”, the author adds, explaining that “a not insignificant proportion of respondents do not clearly reject an interpretation of democracy that some might class as ‘illiberal’. For instance, 28% of respondents take the view that ‘the people obey their leaders’ is a characteristic of democracy”.
“Furthermore, the positive image enjoyed by the EU seems to have been based on the disaffection inspired by the national political and institutional players. Consequently, if the Balkan leaders are unable to meet the social expectations of their subjects, and if the process of Europeanisation does not keep all its promises, then the absence of outright rejection towards non-democratic alternatives would evolve into an authoritarian aspiration. The mistrust the Balkan citizens have for the political systems of their respective countries is already fertile ground for such an eventuality. This scenario appears even less unlikely given that at international level, certain oppressive states – such as China – are trying to capitalise on their management of the health crisis to legitimise their regimes, presenting them as an alternative model to liberal democracy. Moreover, the influence in the Balkans of countries that have – at different paces – experienced a trajectory of authoritarian tendencies (such as Russia and Turkey) is an additional factor in the weakening of local democracies. Finally, the increasing tendency to resort to authoritarianism, even within certain member states of the EU, could weaken the EU’s credibility as an upholder of democratisation”, Robert argues. He goes on to conclude that “all these elements represent windows of opportunity for local variations on ‘Orbanism’, ‘Erdoganism’ or ‘Putinism’”. (OJ)
Max-Valentin Robert. Les Balkans et l’Europe : convergence et diversité (available in French only. Futuribles, edition 448, May-June 2022. ISBN: 978-2-84387-463-5. 128 pages. €22,00