Turkey

Beyond the veil

Jun 12th 2008 | ANKARA
>From The Economist print edition

The secular and the pious march towards a new collision, with
unforeseeable consequences for democracy and Turkey’s chances in
Europe

WHEN Adnan Menderes, a right-wing politician who spoke up for pious
Anatolians, swept to power as prime minister after Turkey’s first free
parliamentary election 58 years ago, a group of officers began
plotting a military coup within weeks. Ten years later, with the
support of the secular intelligentsia and politicians, they overthrew
the government, by then in its third term. A year later, in September
1961, Menderes was hanged. Yildiray Ogur, a young activist, sees
worrying parallels between the 1960 coup and today’s campaign,
spearheaded by Turkey’s generals and judges, to overthrow Recep Tayyip
Erdogan,

the prime minister, and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Turkey has
been in upheaval ever since the constitutional court began considering a
case brought by the chief prosecutor to ban the AKP and to bar 71 named
individuals, including Mr Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from politics,
on thinly documented charges that they are seeking to impose sharia law.

The stakes were raised on June 5th, when the court overturned a law passed
by a big majority in parliament to let young women wear the Islamic-style
headscarf at universities. By voting 9-2 to quash the law the court sent a
clear signal that it would vote to shut down the AKP. A verdict is expected
by the autumn.

To many the case is like a judicial coup: a last-ditch attempt to cling to
power by an elite that refuses to share wealth and social space with a
rising class of pious Turks, symbolised by the AKP. It may also further
discredit the constitutional court. Above all, says Mr Ogur, the case
reveals "an army that believes it should have the final say, not elected
politicians."

A defiant Mr Erdogan vows to fight back. In a fiery speech in parliament
this week, he declared that the court had exceeded its jurisdiction and
would "need to explain itself to the people." There is talk of changing the
rules for appointing judges and limiting their ability to ban political
parties. Some AKP officials dream of unleashing millions of supporters on to
the streets. But they know that doing so would risk provoking a real
military coup. "We are like lambs being taken to slaughter, we are resigned
to our fate," sighs one AKP deputy.

A few hardy souls pin their hopes on Western support. The European Union has
hinted that it would suspend membership talks if the AKP were banned. But
thanks to the growing opposition to Turkish accession in countries such as
France and Austria, few Turks believe they will ever get in anyway. "With no
carrots left to offer, the EU has no stick to wield," opines Cengiz Aktar,
who follows EU affairs.

The biggest deterrent to overthrowing the AKP may be Turkey’s wobbly
economy. After six years of steady growth the economy is slowing down,
inflation has crept back to double digits and this year’s current-account
deficit is expected to rise to 7% of GDP. Faik Oztrak, a former treasury
under-secretary and opposition parliamentarian, reckons that Turkey will
need at least $135 billion in foreign inflows to plug the gap. As he asks
pointedly, "where will it come from?"

Investor confidence has been rattled by the government’s indecision over
extending an IMF deal that expired in May. "With financial markets remaining
jittery, Turkey is walking on a tightrope, making policy errors potentially
costly. In particular, new initiatives that jeopardise the achievement of
the announced fiscal targets, such as the planned reform of municipal
finances, could tilt the balance of policies and should be avoided," Lorenzo
Giorgianni, the IMF’s mission chief for Turkey, says. He is referring to the
government’s plans to boost local spending.

Yet in Istanbul many financiers seem unfazed. They see no reason for alarm,
even if the AKP is banned. A chastened, wiser AKP would simply regroup under
a different name and it will be business as usual, the argument goes.
Certainly, when a party is banned (they tend to be either pro-Kurdish or
pro-Islamic) its members usually come together under a new banner. But
Islamic parties often come back even stronger. The AKP itself is an offshoot
of Virtue, a party that was banned in 2001. It romped to power in 2002 and
won a second term last year with a bigger share of the vote.

Even if it were disbanded, the AKP’s surviving parliamentarians would remain
as independents in sufficient numbers to be able to force another snap
election. Indeed, the million-dollar question, as one European diplomat puts
it, is "whether those who are perpetrating this strategy against the AKP
will let them come back even stronger. They are stuck between a coup and a
hard place."

Not everyone thinks that the AKP will emerge unscathed. Even his allies
agree that Mr Erdogan made a strategic blunder by passing the headscarf law
instead of blending it into a package of broader reforms embodied in a new
constitution. Instead of appeasing secular fears, some AKP members crowed
that the headscarf would soon be allowed in government offices as well. Many
say the void left by Mr Gul, who moved up from foreign minister to become
president last August, is partly to blame for Mr Erdogan’s mistakes. As
number two in the AKP, Mr Gul had often curbed Mr Erdogan’s rasher
instincts.

Meanwhile, support in the Kurdish south-east, where the AKP made big gains
last year, has been waning ever since Mr Erdogan yielded to army pressure
and authorised cross-border attacks on PKK terrorists in northern Iraq. He
also snubbed members of the pro-Kurdish Democratic People’s Party (DTP) in
parliament. Police brutality and mass arrests during a May 1st demonstration
in Istanbul have not helped his image.

Yet, for all his and the party’s failings, recent opinion polls suggest that
the AKP retains a big lead over its rivals. "You may criticise us for going
slow on reforms, but the truth is that we made more changes than Turkey was
able to absorb," says Abdurrahman Kurt, an AKP member from Diyarbakir. By
giving pious Turks a political voice, the AKP has also bolstered their faith
in democracy.

By overturning the headscarf law, says Mazhar Bagli, a sociologist at
Diyarbakir’s Dicle university, the court is running the risk that "radical
groups will now seek their rights through illegal means." In other words,
the threat of radical Islam in Turkey may have increased thanks to the
secularists’ attack on the AKP.