Filenews 29 March 2025 - by Marc Champion
No one knows better than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that imprisonment can help a political career. He was unjustly imprisoned in 1999 by the old prosecutors of the country's "deep state" for reciting a poem at a political rally. The charge – incitement to violence – was blatantly political, as was the corruption case that his own prosecutors have now brought against his main political rival, Ekrem Imamoglu.
On the day of his imprisonment, Erdogan released an album of poems, "This song doesn't end here," which sold over 1 million copies. He was "flooded" with messages from his supporters and within a few years he was governing the country. When he revisited the prison in 2013, he called it a symbol of rebirth, the place where the current ruling Justice and Development Party was designed.
Like Erdogan, Imamoglu was mayor of Istanbul at the time of his arrest. He is as popular as Erdogan was in the late 1990s, albeit across different social strata, and at the epicenter of a climate of frustration with a status quo that has come full circle after 22 years. So how likely is it that history will repeat itself and, in the next scheduled elections in 2028, a new president will take over?
At the turn of the millennium, Turkey was not ruled by an authoritarian leader who was able to steer the system with the sole aim of maintaining power. But now, it is. Erdogan will not repeat the mistake made in his own case, imprisoning Imamoglu for a few symbolic months, ready to become a political martyr. Having received the nomination of presidential candidate from the main opposition Republican People's Party even after his arrest, Imamoglu will likely remain in prison until his release is no longer a threat. Selahattin Demirtas, the Kurdish political leader who last challenged Erdogan's rule, has been in prison for more than eight years.
This marks the difference between a government by democrats, however flawed, and that of powerful men (or women), no matter how exciting their promises may sound. Having taken control of the institutions created to limit the powers of elected leaders, Erdogan can do whatever he deems necessary to stay in power, whatever the cost to his country.
This story is a tragedy for Turkey. In the early years of Erdogan's rule, Turkey was one of the promising economies. Who remembers the forecasts around 2010-2011, when major investment banks and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicted growth rates that would make it one of the world's largest economies, surpassing Germany? The story of the "Turkish tiger" has been deconstructed since 2013 and almost exclusively for political reasons.
Even for those who are not interested in Turkey's fate, it should be a instructive moment. A number of national and transnational polls in recent years have come to the same conclusion when asking people about the importance of democracy. They all saw an increase in the number of people willing to say they would prefer to be governed by someone powerful and unelected, with the shift being clearer among young people – more than a fifth of 18-44-year-olds in the UK, according to an FGS Global poll in January.
This should not be surprising. The constraints imposed by fully functioning democracies are valued more than those who remember or have fought against the alternative. Young people growing up in developed economies know only the frustrations of their democratically limited leaders. Equally indicative is that the same polls found that the countries in which democracy is most valued tend to be those already governed by fully entrenched autocracies – Turkey and Ethiopia are together in first place in one of these surveys.
Erdogan once had a dream team in the economic staff, at a time when he saw his political future on the big stage of the center. The first years of his rule were objectively good for his country according to almost all indicators, including civil rights. Within a decade, he went from supporting secularism and sound economic policies—the first time I met him in 2003—to encouraging hatred of anything that is interpreted as Western.
Erdogan promoted the Islamization of education, the empowerment of women and imposed his religious beliefs even on central bank interest rates. It polarized Turkish society between ultra-conservative and less religious. One by one, he threw down the driving forces of Turkey's growth dynamics, and no one was there to stop him. He had changed the constitution to increase his powers and has cleansed the media, courts, police and military of any trace of opposition, a process that ran with even greater intensity after the coup attempt by former allies of the army. No one in his shrunken environment dared to question him.
The only exception was the global financial markets, which are unforgiving. At least it has learned its lesson since it came close to destroying the economy, and relies on a talented finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, as he tries to fix the situation. This was enough to halt the fall in Turkish assets that followed Imamoglu's targeting and drove the lira to an all-time low against the dollar.
For most of this journey, Turkey's leader had a strong base of support that he believed he couldn't go wrong. Any suspicion that it might lead Turkey down the wrong path was met with accusations of conspiracy or Islamophobia. But as his policies produced inflation and difficulties, Erdogan was repeatedly forced to reshape his support base beyond the religious conservative core to keep a majority of voters on his side, appealing first to liberals and Kurds, then to conservative nationalists, and now again to Kurds. This month, however, he limited himself to Putin-level tactics, arresting his main political opponent.
The history of Turkey under Erdogan is one that any voter hoping for the magic solutions of populist politicians should hold back. The main conclusion? It is much harder to restore democratic restrictions that prevent a leader from pursuing illegal or destructive policies, than to abolish them.
Rendering – Editing: Lydia Roubopoulou
