Turkey Is Shifting From Illiberal Democracy to Putin-Style Autocracy. By Soner Cagaptay in Foreign Affairs on May 29, 2023.
On May 28, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish leader “who never loses elections,” won the runoff of Turkey’s presidential poll against his opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan has been at Turkey’s helm since 2003, first as prime minister and then, since 2014, as president. His latest win gives him another five-year presidential term. Together with a sweep in the parliamentary polls on May 14 that yielded pro-Erdogan far-right- and right-wing parties a solid majority in the country’s legislature, his victory all but anoints Erdogan as Turkey’s indisputable sultan.
Defying the assessments of many Western observers who had predicted Erdogan would have trouble holding on, his relatively smooth path to reelection has raised far-reaching questions about the sources of his power. In the face of prolonged economic turmoil, a disastrous response to a devastating earthquake, and a newly unified opposition, Erdogan nevertheless came out comfortably ahead in the preliminary round of voting. Then, having secured a new majority for his ruling coalition in parliament and mercilessly attacking Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan cruised to victory. Moreover, turnout was generally high, and the elections appeared to be free if not fair, given Erdogan’s ability to determine the overall parameters in which the contests took place. After 20 years of increasingly autocratic rule, Erdogan has managed not only to cling to office but also to potentially emerge even stronger.
In recent years, analysts have often compared Erdogan’s approach to power with that of other illiberal leaders in European democracies—including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban—who have used a combination of institutional leverage and populist measures to sustain broad support and rig the system in their favor. Turkey was not a pure autocracy, the theory went, but rather a democracy that had fallen into the hands of an authoritarian leader and was trying to make a comeback. According to this model, as long as Erdogan could deliver prosperity to Turkey’s middle classes—making pious, ordinary Turks feel like they are the country’s center—and as long as he could keep the opposition fragmented and tighten his grip over the judiciary and the other branches of government, his hold on power would be safe. Now, however, Erdogan seems to have arrived at a different inflection point. In the run-up to the May elections, he could count on neither economic successes nor a divided opposition. On paper, Turks had many reasons to be dissatisfied with their leader and to push back against his strong-arm rule. But that is not what happened.
The outcome of the May elections suggests that Turkey has now shifted closer to a Eurasian autocracy than an illiberal European democracy. One reason is that Erdogan’s approach to electoral power has increasingly come to resemble that of a different kind of leader altogether: Russian President Vladimir Putin. Just as Putin has done in Russia, Erdogan was able to set the parameters of the elections long before any votes were cast. During the campaign season, he arrested key opposition leaders and civil society activists; demonized opposition parties as Western sympathizers, coup plotters, and terrorist allies; and played the homophobic card. (“The opposition are all LGBTQ,” Erdogan said at one point, sounding very much like the Russian president.)
And with only slightly less ruthlessness than Putin used to silence the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Erdogan also sidelined the one figure who might have been able to beat him, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, who was charged with “insulting election officials” and faces a court case that threatens to ban him from politics. (As a result, Imamoglu had little choice but to stay out of the race to avoid triggering a blanket ban that would also oust him from the mayor’s office.) Erdogan, meanwhile, labeled the opposition “sluts” and attacked his opponent Kilicdaroglu as “craven, immoral, and worthless, as well as a traitor.”
Just as dramatically, Erdogan wielded his near-total control of the Turkish media to change the focus of the election itself, effectively banning any discussion of critical issues such as the earthquake, the economy, and government corruption. In essence, like Putin, Erdogan was able to use his advantages as the incumbent, his control over information, and his ability to associate himself with national imperial greatness to such an extent that ordinary electoral considerations didn’t matter.
In fact, Erdogan has spent much of the past seven years cultivating closer ties with Russia and emulating Putin’s strategies for maintaining power. Given that Erdogan spent his initial years in office known as a moderate leader who would reign in Turkey’s generals and bring the country into Europe—and given Turkey’s position in NATO—the extent of his recent tilt toward Russia is all the more striking. Of course, Erdogan was an astute political strategist long before the current election, and his approach to power also borrows from other sources. But his reelection, against powerful odds, could mark a crucial watershed: Erdogan could now be in power for many more years to come, and the Russian president’s growing role as supporter and model may hold key insights into what Erdogan’s new mandate will mean for Turkey’s future.
THE PUTIN SOLUTION
Although Erdogan’s turn toward Putin has developed incrementally, its origins can be traced to the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey. This was one of the most critical moments of Erdogan’s time in office, a point of dramatic uncertainty that Putin used to draw Turkey’s leader closer to him. During the night of July 15, 2016, plotters within Turkey’s armed forces tried to overthrow Erdogan and take control of the country. Erdogan, who nearly lost his life, held on to power and regained control but was deeply shaken. Barely two weeks later, Putin invited him to St. Petersburg for a meeting. For both leaders, the encounter was a game-changer.
To many observers, the meeting came as a surprise: going back to the Ottoman era, Russia has been Turkey’s historic nemesis, and at the time, Erdogan and Putin were on opposite sides of a brutal proxy war in Syria, with Erdogan supporting the forces trying to oust the Assad regime and Putin having sent Russian forces to protect it. Moreover, it would take the leaders of Turkey’s NATO allies much longer to extend Erdogan a similar invitation after the coup attempt. But Putin saw a rare opportunity to court the Turkish leader, knowing that Erdogan was vulnerable and needed support. In particular, the meeting offered a chance for Putin to create a wedge between Turkey and the United States, home to two of NATO’s largest militaries. But it also offered advantages to Erdogan, who was anxiously trying to shore up his power after the coup.
In fact, the two leaders had more than a few things in common. Both had first come to power around the start of the new century—Putin in 1999, Erdogan in 2003—and both had initially been seen as moderate figures who might integrate their countries with Europe and the West. But crucial to their later pursuit of unchecked power, both leaders had also entered office after a decade of turmoil in their countries. Putin’s rise followed years of Russian economic collapse and the bloody Chechen war, a time in which Russia descended to the level of a third-rate power. In Turkey, Erdogan ascended to the premiership in the wake of three economic crises, massive corruption among the elites, and fighting between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that had taken thousands of lives.
Both Putin and Erdogan had promised to end the political chaos and deliver prosperity, for which they initially enjoyed huge popularity. After bringing new stability and growth to their countries, however, both had developed a strong taste for power—for their countries and for themselves Thus, for Erdogan, vulnerable after the coup attempt, Putin was a strong leader who could provide not only crucial support at a time of significant uncertainty in Turkey but also personal safety in case of a similar putsch attempt in the future.
Crucially for Putin, the 2016 meeting paved the way for Russia to bring Turkey closer to its own foreign policy. The two countries entered into a series of agreements—first in Syria and subsequently in Libya and the South Caucasus, where Moscow and Ankara had also been engaged in proxy wars. In Syria, for instance, Erdogan agreed to stop intensive military campaigns against the Assad regime, instead turning the Turkish military’s attention to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the United States’ partner in fighting the Islamic State (or ISIS), much to the ire of U.S. policymakers, especially at the Pentagon.
Following the 2016 meeting, Erdogan also committed to purchasing the S-400 missile defense system from Russia, knowing full well that this purchase would result in an additional rupture in Turkish-U.S. ties. (In fact, the congressional sanctions that resulted effectively put a freeze on U.S. military cooperation with Turkey.) Thus Putin was able to create the two core problems in the Washington-Ankara relationship—the YPG and the S-400s—that continue to hamper U.S.-Turkish ties to this day and that many analysts now consider to be irresolvable.
TSAR AND SULTAN
But the growing partnership with Russia also gave Erdogan a new template for organizing his administration at home. Putin would become a new source of financial support for the Erdogan regime—Russia provided Turkey with tens of billions of dollars in cash and payment deferrals during the last year alone. But Erdogan also started to directly copy Putin’s style of rule. For one thing, after the coup attempt, Erdogan was prepared to take newly harsh measures to stamp out any threats to his authority, strategies that Putin had long put in play in Russia. Thus, Erdogan used emergency powers to carry out a broad crackdown on society, targeting not just suspected coup plotters but also centrists, liberals, leftists, socialists, Kurdish nationalists, and even conservatives who opposed him.
Then, in 2017, Erdogan initiated a referendum—the first rigged race of his reign—to change Turkey’s political system from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential system, a move that would give him more sweeping executive powers. Even with the competitive advantages his office gave him; however, he could not win this referendum fair and square. After the polls closed and while the count was underway, the country’s electoral board, taking cues from Erdogan, declared that although only ballots stamped by the board had been counted as valid until that moment in Turkish elections, unstamped ballots, too, could now be counted—and that 2.4 million unstamped ballots that had suddenly surfaced could be added toward the final tally. As a result, Erdogan “won” the referendum by a margin of 1.7 million votes.
The constitutional change took effect in July 2018 and gave Erdogan new powers, making him simultaneously the head of state, the head of government, the head of the ruling party, the head of the police (a national force in Turkey), and the head of the military as commander in chief. Just as Putin had acquired sweeping executive powers in Russia, Erdogan had now become Turkey’s most powerful elected leader since the country’s first free and fair vote in 1950—in effect a new Sultan. More symbolically, like Putin, who has increasingly portrayed himself as successor to Russia’s greatest tsars, Erdogan also began to embrace the trappings of an imperial head of state. Already in 2014, he had abandoned Cankaya, an unassuming villa complex and the traditional office of Turkey’s presidents before him, in favor of Bestepe, a massive 1,200-room palace and office campus in Ankara. And he has continued to repurpose Istanbul’s Ottoman-era palaces as government offices in an effort to cast himself as Turkey’s neo-Ottoman leader.
In addition to strengthening his grip on power, Erdogan’s entente with Putin has already had significant consequences for both Russia and the West. Since 2016, Putin has facilitated four Turkish military operations into Syria to undermine the PKK’s Syrian offshoot, YPG—helping build a view among Turkey’s security elites and the public alike that Russia is a better and more sincere counterpart to Turkey than is the United States. Erdogan’s military success against the YPG in Syria has meanwhile helped his image at home, where many view the PKK as a mortal national security threat.
In return, Erdogan has offered Putin a helping hand in the Ukraine war. Although Ankara has supported Ukraine militarily—Turkish drones helped prevent the fall of Kyiv into Russian hands during the initial blitzkrieg phase of the war—Erdogan has kept ties with Russia open economically. By not joining U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, Erdogan has provided Putin with access to international markets and allowed his oligarchs, now denied vacations on the French Riviera, to take sojourns on the Turkish Riviera.
MOSCOW’S MAN?
Amid this growing partnership with Russia, it is less surprising that Erdogan was able to engineer a successful result in the May elections. The tactics he used—controlling which candidates ran against him and dominating the information space with false news—come right out of Putin’s playbook. Today, nearly as many Turkish citizens believe that Erdogan has made Turkey an industrial-military giant and that, as he puts it, “PKK terrorists support Kilicdaroglu” as Russians who believe that Putin is “de-Nazifying” Ukraine and that he has restored Russia to its lost imperial glory. Like Putin, Erdogan has made the electoral process so slanted in favor of the incumbent that it no longer matters how free the vote is. The predetermined conditions in which the election takes place made it nearly impossible for Turkey’s sultan to be voted out—even in the face of a large opposition and growing economic troubles.
At this stage, Erdogan and Putin have an increasingly insoluble bond. For Putin, Erdogan is a like-minded leader through whom he can indirectly challenge the U.S.-led international order, whether by criticizing the U.S. role in the Ukraine war or by throwing sand in the gears of NATO’s Nordic expansion. For Erdogan, the Russian leader has provided a model for how to eliminate domestic opposition and accrue near-absolute power. Meanwhile, Turkey’s political system has come closer to Russia’s than ever before in its moves toward an ever more centralized executive state. This is despite continued geostrategic disputes between Ankara and Moscow, ranging from the Cyprus conflict, where Russia and Turkey have traditionally been on opposite sides, to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which Turkey sees as unacceptable. But even with these unresolved issues, Putin knows that with Erdogan he has made a safe investment: for the Russian president, the more Erdogan moves in an autocratic direction, the more likely Turkey will be a pliant partner to the Kremlin. Turkey’s autocratic turn and foreign policy pivot towards Russia are the twin pillars of Erdoganism.
Erdogan’s election victory means that he will continue to favor Moscow internationally, keeping strong economic ties with Russia and providing Putin and his oligarchs with vital ways to bypass sanctions. Putin exploited Erdogan’s key insecurity in 2016—Erdogan still feels that his hold on power is tenuous, even if he has become Turkey’s new sultan—and to this day, the Kremlin continues to benefit from it. Erdogan sits anxiously on the throne. Putin knows this, and he is using it to pull Erdogan closer to his orbit and Ankara closer to Moscow’s.