Turkey

Since its founding as a secular republic in 1923, Turkey has been marked by cleavages between ethnic Turks and Kurds, its urban and rural population, secularism and Islam, and more. The military has frequently interfered in politics – usually, but not universally, framing itself as defending the Turkish republic from an excessively Islamist government – roughly once a decade since the 1950s. Kurds comprise about 20 per cent of the Turkish population, and since 1984 the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has waged an intermittent armed campaign for Kurdish independence that has resulted in 30,000 to 40,000 deaths.

As Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2002, the main political divide has been between mostly rural, conservative and religious Turks and their urban, liberal and secular counterparts. With the President and ruling party identifying explicitly with the former group, this has manifested as increasing restrictions on the operations of political parties that represent the latter groups, barriers to civic activism following the 2013 Gezi park protests, and most recently, more active political interference in academia, higher education and the judiciary. The crackdowns on political opposition, liberal civil society and other groups opposed to Erdoğan's increasingly personalized rule are not ad hoc events, but part of a larger shift to move the country towards an illiberal, authoritarian nationalist mode of governance. The shift to a presidential system approved in the 2018 referendum was read as an attempt to legitimize this political project, and was accompanied by a thorough dismantling of Turkey’s administrative institutions and more frequent refusals to comply with decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.

There are no indications that the current Turkish government will reverse its path of illiberal nationalism. Although Turkey’s political opposition remains strong in major urban centers and is capable of contesting elections, there are significant institutional hurdles to mounting a serious electoral challenge to AKP dominance at the national level. The Erdoğan government will continue to find enemies to justify its strong-handed rule, which can manifest as further deterioration of relations with the United States and Europe or renewed policing of the perceived loyalty of Turkish citizens abroad. The government’s struggle to contain the country’s long-running economic crisis or integrate Syrian refugees suggest that Turkey’s domestic instability will not be resolved in the near term. Key indicators to watch moving forward are Fundamental Rights, Freedom of Expression and Assembly, Clean Elections, Absence of Corruption, and Judicial Independence.