Iqbal Abdu opines on the current state of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's presidency.
Two weeks ago, we had an interesting discussion in my friend circle on Erdogan and Hagia Sophia. The discussion had a healthy participation with an array of ideas and discussion points from history to current affairs. Many were blaming Erdogan to be a populist, others a right-winger, and few others a “right-wing populist.” For me, one word stood out distinctly during the whole engagement — “populism.”
Turkey and Erdogan
Turkey was a country born under the craftsmanship of Musthafa Kemal Ataturk. He is often projected as the one who moulded modern Turkey out of Ottoman “backwardness.” However, his vision of a developed Turkey failed miserably due to many of his impractical and anti-liberal ideas. His vision for his country was to produce a Europeanized state out of Turkey. He thought the cultural baggage of Turks would hinder his dream; hence he elevated the power of the military to safeguard his vision of a steel-stubborn “secular” Turkey.
Contrary to his original vision, the post-Ataturk decades for Turkey represented dark ages of misery, invisibility and despair. The country witnessed multiple military coups, stagnated national GDP, peak unemployment and widespread corruption. The dream of her founding father to emulate and join Europe literally lay shattered due to the use of wrong policies.
Then the story takes a U-turn in 2002. A former Istanbul mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in 2001 reads an Islamic poem in a public forum, the “secular” Turkey’s police arrests him. Later, the party he establishes achieves a landslide victory in 2002. Under Erdogan’s leadership, Turkey rose to prosperity. The country marks multifold growth in almost every segment of the economy in just a short 10 years. Turkey gets a rebirth. Erdogan, with his economic success, also brings in social reforms. He redefines and establishes the enlightenment version secularism of inclusiveness in Turkey. He took himself and Turkey to newer heights, towards the original idea of a thriving modern society. Finally, Europe invites Turkey to hold membership talks.
The Hagia Sophia ruling in July 2020 to officially change the status of an ancient heritage building — revered by Muslims and Christians alike — to a mosque has triggered a global discourse. Greece, Russia and Germany have raised concerns about this already. Intellectuals are referring to this as a short-term political tactic by the President to consolidate his losing vote bank. Is Turkey repeating history? Is the saviour of the new Turkey transforming into a populist?
What is populism?
In an ideal liberal democratic structure, a political party presents its electorate with solutions to their problems and a direction for leading the nation towards progress. A detailed analysis of the problems, challenges and priorities of the people are done based on the host ideology (liberal democracy, socialism etc.) and rule of the land (constitution and institutions) to come up with a solution to move forward.
With centuries of living together, we humans have come from being nomads and tribals, to subjects of monarchs, and finally to adherents of democracy. Hence our problems and challenges are not simple and easy; they are complex and have roots in years of accumulated causes. With the passage of time, the problem naturally becomes more cumbersome. A legacy socio-economic problem or a political problem of a society shall obviously not have simple solutions.
A critical element of a political party is its leader, or its “mouthpiece,” that speaks to the people about the solutions. These solutions are prioritized per the political party’s ideology and indulgence. The leader’s role is the aesthetic and the psychological part of the game, that is, how effectively they take the message from the party’s whiteboard to the attention of the common man. Leaders are celebrated mostly for their influencing skills which enhances the party’s reach within the public. In short, the party’s proposals get beatified with an able leader translating it to the language of the masses.
One loophole to the political element of democracy is with this component of a leader. The idea of a leader merely aesthetically attracting the electorates versus seductively mesmerizing the masses to overlook the facts and logic of the whole scenario. The former being a popular leader and the latter, a populist.
When a populist leader boasts simple, but also phony, solutions for complex and convoluted problems of the society, people fall for it. The reason for this is explained by how our mind works. Our brain functions by seeking energy efficiency, i.e. to think less, work less and hence conserve energy. Our tale-telling, story-loving emotional mind adores lore that is quick, easy and simple to understand. On the contrary, the process of thinking about complex problems and analyzing factually for solutions requires burning calories and hence is tiresome to the brain. A populist leader uses his “charisma” to invest in this caveat of the human brain — to exploit and win people by masquerading truth and facts, and by offering fraudulent quick-fixes.
Populism is defined as the decorative part of politics, and not to be confused with any full-blown ideologies like communism, liberal democracy, socialism or fascism. Academically, populism could be neutral, right-leaning or left-leaning in nature. When it takes a political form, it moulds to shape depending on the host ideology it's founded upon.
In summary, populism in broad terms, (left-wing, or right-wing, or neutral) is a measure of how a leader of a party outperforms and nullifies the establishments of democracy. Populism is a disease or a shortcoming of the political side of democracy. Populism being a concentration of power is essentially dangerous to democratic values. However, right-wing populism (RWT) is a grave threat not only to democracy in particular but society at large.
Why worry about populists?
Populist leaders (right-wing populists in particular) are the trend of modern democracies across the globe, and they don’t presume themselves a misfit in an emergent right-leaning world. Nigel Farage of Brexit, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Narendra Modi of India, Marine Le Pen of France, Donald Trump of the US, Geert Wilders of Netherlands, Frauke Petry of Germany, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil are good examples. Populism by nature is pro-democratic for its political component but deeply anti-liberal in nature for anything beyond elections. That is the reason why Ruth Wodak, Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, says it as the “Politics of fear”.
An interesting example I followed was of Donald Trump, on how he successfully led a whole society to believe in the simple story of building a wall to be “great again.” Trump, a conservative populist, but with Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller an RWP, in his election rallies kept on repeating the argument for a physical border wall. With his simple language and limited lexicon, he was very conversational and expressive with animated gestures; people felt him authentic and speaking as one among them. The repeated, monotonous rhetoric made people chose this simple solution for their “immediate” safety from a non-existent threat of Mexican migrants over elaborate and detailed solutions to their existent and real social, civic and economic problems.
Why is RWP a threat today?
Populist leaders' glory dies with time. Max Weber characterizes the key ingredient of a populist leader as “charisma.” “(It is) to be understood as an extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged or presumed,” he says. The Chinese communist leader Mao Tse Tung’s staged swimming in Yangtze River to get back to the limelight of power from his shattered image of leading China to the disastrous famine of the sixties is a good example to recall. Also in India, how a “56-inch chest” of Narendra Modi was the trump card to rise to power to fight the “terrorist” Pakistan.
However, charisma is not immortal, it's a social status the disciples (the term “Bhakts’ in Hindi makes a good fit here) attribute to their leader. With time, charisma vanishes, and the populist virtue disappears from the leader. Max Weber says. “…obedience is forthcoming only so long as people ascribe these (extraordinary) qualities to him, that is, so long as his charisma is the proof of evidence.”
Today RWP centers around the charisma of its leader by heavily “mediatizing” it, through traditional mediums as well as social media. The BJP, the RWP platform in India, allocates a mammoth share of its funds to its propaganda IT cell, to promote and retain the charisma of its leader. A report in The Wire Magazine says, for the 2018 election campaign of Narendra Modi, out of its total expenditure of nearly one billion USD (which equals the previous 10 years' worth of total expenditure of the opposition party on advertisements), half a billion was spent on social media for propaganda. (Source: The Wire, In 2019, Is BJP Riding a Modi Wave or a Money Wave?).
Why are political platforms spending more and more on social media? All these to point out how social media really works. Social media algorithms are a way of sorting posts in a users' feed based on relevancy instead of published data. Social media prioritizes content a user watches by the likelihood that they'll actually want to see more of it. The algorithm intrigues the user by feeding more and more, every time “upping” the previous one by the flavour of the content. This algorithm essentially helps populists live longer, hence the humongous spending on social media by RWPs around the globe.
How do we fight RWP?
RWP in a nutshell is the call to go back to the “good old times” of archaic rule by strong “kings” and his fellow men. When in power, they either buy out the democratic institutions (e.g., India) or bypass the liberal institutions of court, media and administration by referendums (e.g., Hungary). A lot of relevant literature offers tips on how to defend and voice down RWP in a political environment, like:
- Tactical political integration or isolation,
- International liberal platforms to voice against illiberal RWP policies,
- Counter-populist social media campaigns exposing the phony nothingness of RWP with alternative agendas,
- A collaboration of local human rights organizations at a global level to be the guardian for “rights to have rights,” etc.
Beyond these top-down tactics, I believe we also need bottom-up strategies to eradicate this cancer. Ways to socially deconstruct populism should be the way in that front.
- Practice democracy: It is to live and embrace the concept of democracy in its entirety, beyond just the political aspect of it. Assimilating and extending the value of democracy in our daily lives and the platforms we engage — such as our family and friend circle, work, community associations, religious associations, sports associations, and political association etc — is the way for it.
- Promote democracy: The famous Nobel Laureate Amritya Sen says (Democracy as Universal Value, 1999), “… one of the greatest achievement of the 20th century is the gift of democracy to the world”. Though it is accepted as a political norm globally today, the same is practiced and understood at different levels of maturity. The giant shift of understanding that the electorate needs to have is their very participation in the rule itself. The understanding that, unlike kingdoms, it's not a chosen leader who is appointed, but an elected official. An elected official wholly behaves dutiful to his master, the voters. And a populist chosen leader will only be responsible for himself.
Back to Erdogan and Turkey:
Erdogan did not begin as a populist, unlike a populist leader who grabs power by being so. He rose to power legitimately by the nature of his able leadership and tangible outcomes. He became popular with the true sense of democracy by being the central figure of development and prosperity to Turkey.
In July 2016, the military staged a coup and it almost worked. Erdogan effectively rallied people to fight the military and restore parliament. This was another milestone in the history of Erdogan becoming more popular and accepted by all sections of the society, the religious and the non-religious factions alike. With this, he was getting celebrated as the icon who re-instated values and institutions of liberal democracy from the remnants of the populist Ataturk era.
However, then he takes another turn, he veers away from the sphere of democracy and moves into the territory of being a populist. More than 100,000 journalists, academics, politicians and military officers get arrested since the coup attempt, critics say anyone opposing the regime is targeted as supporters of the coup, and many thousands still remain in detention to date. In April 2017, Turkey passed a referendum that gives sweeping powers to the President, from the budget, to appointing judges to dissolving parliament, to extending his own term.
Consequently, Erdogan is losing his ground with rising disapproval rating and dissatisfaction by his base. Hagia Sophia may be an iconic identity for the Turks, but the very idea of the state investing efforts in a non-issue and animating it to be a prime priority is concerning. Though Erdogan is well-known for his strategic and well-thought decisions, Hagia Sophia seems to be a short-term tactic to reconsolidate his vote base. Turkey has so many itching issues on hand, such as GDP’s fall, soaring unemployment, and many more. However, the easy solution for Erdogan was to re-instate Hagia Sophia. I see a typical charismatic leader’s mesmerizing spell here, of blinding the electorate with fake euphoria.
This excitement will be short-lived politically for Turkey. However, there is a longterm global backlash that I am worried about, from all the corners of the world against this move. Greece, Russia, Germany and many EU countries have raised their concern and may be waiting to be taken in with the EU parliament. Contrary to the view of Istanbul being the crosswalk and a live museum of tolerance and accommodation of many cultures and traditions, this decision might now be a triggering point provoking Islamophobia and for more RWP leaders emerging in Greece, Germany and beyond.
However, I would want to make something clear, I also had my friends comparing Erdogan with Narendra Modi of India. The Indian Prime Minister is part of a right-wing organization (the RSS) that has strategic goals of transforming India into an exclusive Hindu state (similar to the idea of Nazi or Zionist states). Mr. Modi is an example of a right-wing populist threat to the world, where the dangerously toxic ideology of right-wing extremism gets normalized, promoted and implemented with his populist appeal. Erdogan on the other hand is not an RWP, but a sprouting populist. He is treading this new land by cutting ties with democratic values and liberal institutions.
Hence, I would say, Hagia Sophia is not a strategy of a visionary, but a tactic of an emergent populist.
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