Erdoğan came to power after the turbulent 1980s and 1990s. What was striking was how he led Turkey towards greater democratisation with a firm hand in his early years. Even his biggest critics did not hide this. ‘A strong figure like Erdoğan was needed’, the co-authors of a voluminous and highly documented biography on Erdoğan told MO\* in 2017. ‘He was not only a rhetorical genius. He wanted to move forward, even with Turkish taboos like the Kurdish and Armenian issues’, **Jean-François Pérouse**, one of the two biographers, told MO\*.
Co-author **Nicolas Cheviron** recalled the enthusiasm he had felt in those early years of the new millennium: ‘Erdoğan provided reform after reform. He kept piling up his credits.’ Those reforms continued until 2007. But at an increasingly slow pace, due to disappointment with the European Union for halting accession negotiations.
Without Erdoğan’s political weight, there would have been no AKP, biographers echoed about the religious ruling party. ‘No one but Erdoğan has that gift of appealing to the masses, no one can compete with him.’ And that seems to be the case until today. The secular opposition CHP may have won local elections in all major Turkish cities last year, but it has little in the bag.
Challengers to Erdoğan’s success, such as Ekrem İmamoğlu, face fierce opposition. ‘In Beşiktaş, a key district in Istanbul, the local CHP mayor was just sidelined’, says Burhan Sönmez. ‘Frankly, I doubt the CHP will be able to cash in on that political victory last year.’
Journalist **Sebnem Arsu**, correspondent for Der Spiegel from Istanbul, acknowledges the impotence of local CHP mayors. ‘But the opposition parties’ biggest problem is their inability to unite, which the far-right parties have just been doing.’ If Erdoğan were to suddenly defect tomorrow, the entire Turkish political system would have to reinvent itself, Arsu says. ‘He has left an indelible mark on Turkish politics for so long.’
Gezi as first defeat
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The decline of an independent rule of law in Turkey began back in 2012-2013 with the infamous trials of Ergenekon, the “Deep State”, an alleged plot to overthrow Turkey. Even then, observers say, Erdoğan was seeing ghosts.
But with the Gezi protests in 2013 followed a second ghost that continues to haunt Erdoğan: the masses who said no. After all, Gezi was more than one place. In addition to the peaceful demonstrations in Istanbul's Gezi Park, there were the “Gezis” outside the capital, which were more violent and smelled of rebellion. Millions of Turks demonstrated across Turkey; the civic character took on a more political face.
For Erdoğan, it was all rigged. ‘Gezi was his first and biggest defeat, the breaking point of his overall success. He never recovered from that’, Sönmez says of it. ‘Every so often, the Turkish president cites the Gezi protests in his speeches.’
Even now, after 12 years, trials are ongoing against people who took part in Gezi, says Turkish director for Amnesty International Ruhat Sena Akşener. And that perfectly illustrates the new form of state repression, she explains. ‘The 1980s and 1990s were characterised by the arrest of thousands of political activists, torture, by enforced disappearances too. We have much less of that steely physical violence now. But today we see repression against a very wide range of people. You can be arrested for a trifle. We haven’t figured out which is worst: the 1990s or today.’