‘Erdogan making policy on the hoof’
Protests in Turkey are the result of PM Erdogan abandoning his party’s original program. The gap between election pledges and real action as well as Erdogan’s personality cult has driven the Turks onto the streets, believes an academic interviewed by RT.
The Turkish Prime Minister was pushing for reforms which people
“weren’t led to expect”, according to Mark Almond, a
visiting Professor of International Relations at Turkey's Bilkent
University in Ankara.
RT: We saw on Sunday perhaps tens of thousands of
people cheering Erdogan. It's not all as one-sided as it's being
made out to be, is it?
Mark Almond: It’s not necessarily one-sided, but it’s
highly personalized. In the sense that this is the problem for
Erdogan as well as his hopeful trump card playing on the cult of
personality. Everybody who lives in Turkey, even before these
demonstrations, were seeing how inflight magazines as well as
political programs and posters emphasized Erdogan’s personal
contribution to Turkey’s success that has begun to unfold. But of
course it’s dangerous for him precisely because the opponents all
say he must resign. For a Prime Minister that is the problem. And
of course mainly the people in his party, who are perhaps chafing
under his very heavy handed and dominant personality, may perhaps
now begin to feel like pulling the log from underneath him. He
would fall but the party itself would not.
RT: Erdogan has again warned that his patience
is not limitless. What do you think he means by
that?
MA: I think it certainly meant to suggest to the peaceful
demonstrators, the large number of people who haven’t been taking
part in throwing Molotov cocktails that they could find
themselves in the middle of a pitched battle and do they really
want that. On the other hand I think that the personality trait
of Mr Erdogan is that he is very stubborn. And he perhaps should
take into account that the same could apply to his opponents. Any
attempt to disperse them by force could well spark much bigger
trouble. Because we saw crowds greeting him at his three meetings
on Sunday. They were not huge crowds, they were not the scale of
crowds that perhaps he would have hoped to mobilize just ten days
ago had he needed to. And so there is a problem now for him that
his level of support does not seem to be the overwhelming 50%
that he could have called on before. As for the opposition, we
don’t know exactly how many people support them, because we
haven’t had elections, we don’t have rival opinion polls. But
there are hundreds of thousands people who are taking part in
these anti-Erdogan demonstrations.
RT: These are protests against a legitimate
leader, elected in a free election - and with majority support.
Isn't he within his rights to tackle protests which turn
ugly?
MA: Obviously, the police have a duty to protect people
and property from violence. The problem is that precisely Mr
Erdogan was elected by the large majority. But many of the things
he’s done since he was elected weren’t in his party’s program.
People weren’t led to expect them - were they these big property
development schemes that the government supports, but it does not
really publicize what they involve, or for instance his sudden
turnaround from being a friend of Assad, friend of Gaddafi
receiving presents from Gaddafi, to basically engaging in a very
cold war, now increasingly in a hot war with people he used to be
friends of in 2011, when he was re-elected. So we have to face
the problem that there’s a sense of a gap between what his public
statements used to be and then the rather capricious “I’m now
making policy on the hoof”. And that seems to be the case with
the Gezi Park. He now says it will be something more cultural and
acceptable. Maybe it will be. Why then he couldn’t have said that
in the first place?
RT: Erdogan also had harsh words for the West
saying the crackdown on protesters in Turkey was arguably less
severe than if it would have been in the EU or the US. Why's he
lashing out internationally?
MA: I think it’s very striking, at this meeting with the
EU Commissioner Fule and others he was very harsh and in the way
he is trying to split the nationalist opposition, who don’t like
him, because they say he is selling Turkey’s interests by
negotiating with the Kurds, from what we might call more European
style opposition – sandal-wearing musicians playing at protest
meetings. He’s trying to split those by saying: “You see, I’m
against the European Union, it’s pushing us around.” And the
nationalists are against it. Whether that will work I’m inclined
to doubt. He’s been very careful to avoid saying anything
critical of the United States, though John Kerry did criticize
the original heavy handed police activities a weekend ago. And I
think one of his problems is that his international credibility
depends to a great extent on being seen as the Unites States’ key
ally in the region. But now his Syrian policy has really
backfired. It was supposed to bring about a quick collapse of the
Assad regime and the replacement of Assad with something that
would be pro-NATO, pro-American and comfortable for Turkey. But
now Turkey has a huge problem on its border, huge economic
problems. It’s not by chance that border towns have had big
demonstrations against him too.
RT: Erdogan's subordinates are cooling their
words. The governor of Istanbul even tweeted that he wanted to
JOIN the protesters. Are we witnessing the start of a change of
heart?
MA: I think Mr Erdogan himself has great difficulty in
backing away from taking a rather bullish approach to any
opposition. But inside the AK party, there’s a sign that
President Gul is not happy about that hardline rhetoric. Other
people in the party do not necessarily feel that Erdogan is
carrying out a sensible policy, that he may actually be leading
their party, their candidates in the forthcoming local elections
to a setback, and possibly they themselves could lose power. So
there is a big tension inside the ruling party that this whole
sudden crisis has revealed deep flaws in the Prime Minister’s
management of public opinion, which had seen for the previous ten
years to be masterful but not perhaps any more.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.