It looks as if Turkey’s government will survive a coup attempt. You can follow live coverage at the link provided. The airport is reopening, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has returned to Istanbul, and issuing draconian orders against perceived political foes. But the fallout has just begun.
Mr. Erdogan was quick to blame the Gulenists, a rival political group with which he had an acrimonious falling out with.
The accusations by Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen is behind last night’s attempted coup is part of a familiar rhetoric and a long-running rivalry. So Is there any truth in it?
The traditional rivalry in Turkish society has been between secularists who look to the modern state’s founder Kemal Ataturk – notably the army and other state institutions – and Islamists.
So who are the Gülenists? Gülen, a cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania, leads a popular movement – Hizmet or “the service” – ostensibly campaigning for democratic accountability.
But if he is wrong, then it is only a matter of time before the plotters strike again. In the meantime, markets will destabilize, freedoms will be curtailed, and Erdogan will grab even more power. Upon his return to Istanbul from vacation, where he says he narrowly escaped being bombed, he said that the failed attempt was a perfect chance for him to purge the military of elements that he deems disloyal.
The problem for Mr. Erdogan is that the military, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the seizure of power by Ataturk, was installed as the guarantor that Turkey would always remain a secular state. The military has carried out numerous coups over the years against governments that it deemed to be insufficiently committed to the secular state or too Islamist.
Previously, a military could get rid of a government simply by getting control of key government buildings and media outlets. But the rise of social media meant that it was no longer so simple for coup plotters to control the message. Mr. Erdogan, love him or hate him, came to power thanks to substantial grassroots support, and thousands, if not millions of people, put their lives on the line against the tanks that were deployed to seize power. And many others, who are not so enamored of Mr. Erdogan, nonetheless do not see a military coup as the way to solve problems. It is highly ironic that Mr. Erdogan, after waging such a vicious campaign against social media throughout his tenure in office, was saved by the very social media that he had waged war against. Specifically, he used Apple’s Face Time to regain control when the coup plotters had seized control of most of the major media outlets.
The reason that certain elements of the military are so pissed at Mr. Erdogan is that he wants to replace them with the people:
He tells supporters that the government will succeed.
From the highest level of the army to lowest-ranking officers, he says, the armed forces must know they cannot govern the state.
The government is elected and is in control, he says. The people elected a president and that president is here.
He says the coup plotters brought out tanks, but “my people” took them back.
This is the sort of thing that could happen here if Donald Trump wins and the darkest elements of populism take control. Turkey is lurching from a system where the military controlled the government to one in which the mobs and pitchforks control it.