How Turkey’s new century is being shaped by Erdogan

Victory in the presidential runoff vote would further bury the country’s secular roots and raise questions about its future as a Western ally.

This month I stood on the runway of Istanbul’s old Ataturk airport, watching a largely black-clad crowd troop past as they pumped their fists in the air. Every minute, someone would cry ‘‘Takbir!’’, and the rest would respond ‘‘Allahu Akbar!’’ (God is great). In between, they chanted the name of the man they had come in their hundreds of thousands to see – Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

These Turks are the faithful who have propelled Erdogan to two decades of straight election victories, and look set to do so again today.

Erdogan is almost certain to beat his rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, in the presidential election runoff. His popularity has fallen, and his methods have grown more autocratic. But to his fiercest devotees, Erdogan is not a politician but a prophet – a man who came from the fringes, rising from one of Istanbul’s poorest neighbourhoods to become the country’s all-conquering Islamist.

Turkey’s enthusiasm for an Islamist may seem baffling. It is a secular country by constitution – and from certain angles, that is how it looks.

Erdogan’s heartlands are hidden away behind Turkey’s shop fronts, in Anatolia’s vast conservative interior and in the peripheral suburbs of cities. They are the poorest parts of the country, the places that, ironically, developed least during the past two decades of Erdogan’s rule.

Look at Turkey’s election map and you’ll see that its pattern follows that of the United States – opposition strongholds lining its western coast and the Kurdishmajority eastern fringe, and a swathe in the middle supporting Erdogan.

Istanbul, a microcosm of Turkey, is split. Many of its outer districts are gecekondu, illegally built shanty towns where there is little green space and few amenities apart from the mosque. These are places that run on different rules to their secular neighbours – where politics runs in families, religious sects wield huge social power, and Erdogan’s party targets state welfare to the districts that vote for him.

His methods work. Turkey is gripped by soaring inflation, and earthquakes in February that killed more than 50,000 people revealed gaping holes in the state’s disaster preparations. Yet he remains the most popular politician

in the country, still able to secure the support of half the electorate after 20 years in power.

The other half of the country is increasingly terrified by Erdogan’s Turkey. Secular women look on in horror at their shrouded countrywomen. Femicide is on the rise, and Erdogan pulled Turkey out of the Istanbul convention against gender-based violence last year. He and his clerics denounce LGBT people. Minorities shudder at his hardline rhetoric.

Turkey is a country of fault lines – fractures between Turks and Kurds, Turks and other minorities, nationalists and leftists and others, which cleave its politics into antagonistic factions. Its deepest and most bitter fault has been active since the birth of the Turkish republic – the division between secular Turks and their conservative compatriots. In Erdogan’s era, this has leaked into politics and the streets.

Kemal Ataturk, who founded the republic in 1923, was a heavy drinker and womaniser who banished Islam from public life. His vision for Turkey was a westward-looking nation, where women would throw off the headscarf and enter the workplace.

For eight decades, an Ataturkist cabal in the state and military kept the upper hand in Turkish politics and society. Every time an Islamist politician rose too high, the army and the courts brought them down. Turkey’s conservative masses were kept on the margins – impoverished, disenfranchised, embittered – and waiting on their chance for revenge.

Erdogan first rose to fame as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s. In office, he was imprisoned and banned from politics for reading a religious poem at a rally. Yet this charismatic young Islamist already had a popular movement behind him. He captured the hearts of Turkey’s religious masses with his rousing, defiant speeches, and they turned out in their thousands to greet him when he was released from prison.

Turkey at the turn of the millennium was in the grip of an economic crisis, and had been ruled by ineffective coalitions for a decade. The AKP, the party Erdogan co-founded on his release, promised a new start, and took an outright majority in elections in 2002. Five months later, parliament overturned Erdogan’s ban and he became prime minister.

He brought Islam back into the state bit by bit, expanding religious schools and lifting Turkey’s long ban on the headscarf in universities and public office, the law that politicised a generation of pious women. New mosques appeared everywhere. In 2020 he turned the Hagia Sophia, built as the seat of eastern Christianity, back into a mosque after 86 years as a deconsecrated museum.

He used his popular support to castrate the military and anyone else who might block his mission. Erdogan forced the generals to accept Abdullah Gul, his party cofounder,

as president – the first head of state with a headscarfwearing wife – then used a series of trials to sap their power.

A failed coup in 2016 allowed him to clear out his opponents en masse. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested or dismissed from the public sector.

Having changed the constitution to concentrate power with the president, Erdogan now rules like a Sun King from his 1000-room palace, issuing direct orders to his ministers. He has handed state institutions to the religious sects. All the AKP co-founders have defected.

His staying power is partly down to timing. He rose to power just as the old secular order was collapsing, and benefited from cheap global credit that buoyed his impoverished base into middle-class consumerism. His turn towards overt Islamism a decade into his rule came at the moment Muslim grievance was rising everywhere.

The Arab Spring, then the removal of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first Muslim Brotherhood prime minister; Bashar alAssad’s spiralling slaughter in Syria; Israel’s escalating attacks on the Palestinians – Erdogan used them all to promote himself as the protector of Muslims not just in Turkey, but everywhere.

Journalists and academics were persecuted, imprisoned and driven into exile for criticising the president. TRT World, the English-language version of Turkey’s state broadcaster, sells a narrative of Islamic victimhood to Muslims worldwide.

Tourists from the Muslim world now flock to Turkey. Many of them holiday in new halal resorts sprouting quietly amid the package holiday fleshpots.

A decade ago, Taksim Square in the centre of Istanbul was the scene of mass protests against Erdogan. Now it is dominated by his huge new mosque, and the alcohol-fuelled nightlife that once soaked the winding alleyways around it is slowly dying, replaced by baklava shops and the sweet smell of hookah smoke.

This election year is symbolic. In October, Turkey will celebrate the centenary of the republic – a hundred years bookended by two transformative leaders.

Erdogan has made the year his target: To build new warships and tanks, become one of the world’s 10 biggest economies, and build new schools and universities. He is already the longestserving leader in modern Turkish history, and an entire generation cannot remember any other.

Erdogan has sought to unravel much of what Ataturk set in place, yet in one sense he has not been as successful as he would like.

Mosque attendance has remained constant throughout his rule, and despite his dream to raise a pious generation of young Turks, most kick back against religious dogmatism. Drinking Turks grumble that the punitive taxes they pay on alcohol go straight to the Diyanet, the state religious body. The Ramadan fast is observed by many Turks but rarely enforced in public spaces.

Erdogan has also turned Turkey from a nation that was firmly aligned with the West to one that often looks like an unreliable ally.

He has alienated Israel, and although Turkey is a Nato member, his friendship with Vladimir Putin and purchase of a Russian missile defence system has called the country’s loyalty into question. He boasts of making Turkey a mediator, one of the only powers in the world able to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table, but he is also, for domestic advantage, slowing down Sweden’s accession to Nato.

Turkey is still officially a European Union candidate country, but he uses the millions of refugees it is hosting to threaten the bloc, vowing to open his borders if Brussels does not adhere to his demands.

In recent years, Erdogan the politician has looked more like an old-style Turkish nationalist. He has allied with the far right, and rebooted the war on Kurdish militancy. He is stirring old grievances with Greece and Cyprus. He claims to have made Turkey a great world power, even as its international standing has slipped.

Erdogan the prophet can always rely on his base. His fanatics do not form a majority in Turkey, but nor are they marginal – their numbers are enough to give him a head start of about 30% at every election.

Turkey’s first century was defined by Ataturk’s experiment in secularism. Depending on this election’s outcome, its second may belong to Erdogan.

In October, Turkey will celebrate the centenary of the republic – a hundred years bookended by two transformative leaders.