Democracy is Sustained in Turkey—Sort Of

Paul R. Pillar

Politics, Turkey

Erdogan is likely to be emboldened.

Before this week it had come to be broadly accepted conventional wisdom that the days of Turkish military coups were over. After a post-World War II history in which the military had taken over the government about once every ten years, in the last couple of decades the return to the barracks appeared to be final. One of the most successful and powerful civilian politicians that modern Turkey has produced, current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seemed to have stared down the generals enough to keep them out of politics.

Last night's coup attempt does not necessarily denote a reversal of this more recent pattern. The short-lived attempt appears to have failed. And unlike past coups, this unsuccessful one evidently was instigated not by the top brass but instead by some other not yet identified elements within the military.

The abortive coup does signal, however, fragility in Turkish democracy, in a couple of respects. One is the fact that any such coup was attempted at all. Another concerns probable reasons the attempt was made. Those reasons most likely are related to the autocratic tendencies that Erdogan has increasingly displayed in recent years. Maybe the plotters thought they were acting patriotically to protect Turkey against those tendencies. Maybe they were thinking in more self-centered fashion about how military officers might increasingly become targets of, and suffer consequences from, Erdogan's drive to concentrate more power in his own hands. Perhaps we will learn something more directly about the plotters' motives in the weeks ahead. But it is a good bet that they included some version of the above considerations, and perhaps also a desire to uphold the secularism of the Ataturk tradition against the Islamist inclinations of Erdogan's AK party.

Bearing in mind Erdogan's increasingly evident authoritarian streak, defeat of the coup is not entirely a victory for liberal democracy. It is likely that this episode will incline Erdogan to make that streak even bolder. That seems more in line with his habits than for him to conclude—which would be a reasonable conclusion—that he had overplayed his political hand and that this overplaying helped to stimulate the coup attempt. The implications for independence of the press and the judiciary in Turkey are not good.