From the outside this seems strange in light of the current autocratic nature of the government in Turkey where we hear stories of wholesale purges from civil service jobs, universities and etc.
For comparison, it’s not like Russia at all - Erdogan is very vulnerable to just getting elected out and while he does have more leeway in doing what he wants, he ultimately has to do what the population wants him to do or risk losing the next election.
For the things that Turkish population puts less immediate value on is the places where he gets the most leeway, and rule of law in the western sense was until recently one of them. As of now though, he is bleeding out votes because of various issues, like this one, which I would speculate as the everyday person in Turkey sort of discovering habeas corpus is actually kind of important.
I’ve always thought it’s a cultural remnant of the sultans.
It's very easy to win elections when you kill, imprison and lay off _hundreds of thousands_ of your "enemies" and have total control on the press and the judicial system. Westerners nowadays forget that fear is a very, very effective political tool. In fact it's the most effective political tool by far. In Turkey, thousands of people were imprisoned based on just DNS queries that are being logged by intelligence services. Fucking DNS queries! even if your application/website connected to a "terrorist affiliated" server once via some ad or anything you get arrested. Turkey has, and now shamelessly supporting the most dangerous Islamic groups on Earth. How coincidental that after the alleged pathetic coup attempt, within days, around 100,000 people were arrested, how can you arrest a fucking hundred thousand people if these people aren't on lists a priori?. If hundreds of thousands plotted a fucking coup, how on earth could it fail? How can it even be a coup when hundreds of thousands plot it?. This is like Kirov assassination v2.0. It's not even a secret that Erdogan moving extremely dangerous ISIS members in civilian planes from Syria to Libya to destabilize Egypt. The US used an Iraq base and even asked the Russians to clear the way on the Syrian field for the planes that were going to kill Al Baghdadi in northern Syria despite having a big base in southern Turkey that can do the mission in minutes. It isn't hard to get that even the US army and CIA don't trust Erdogan having his men spying on the base and warning AL Baghdadi within seconds
Every day, every fucking day, you open the news and see Erdogan "threatening" somebody, some country, some group, not just in Turkey but everywhere. Since he has been doing this for more than a decade now and nobody stood up to him. He's been seen now as the Caliph by islamists and extremists all over the world. It's the romantic reflection in the islamic legacy of the strong muslim ruler humiliating the infidels. The holy grail for every extremist!
It probably sounds like tin foil hat conspiracy theorists to people unfamiliar with the life in Turkey but in Turkey, there are religious cults that are good for networking and social support. Essentially, they will pay for your education and get you to the top places but expect you to report to them and take orders from them when it comes to. Like the Chinese Govt using its citizens employed in tech companies to steal secrets etc.
This particular one was active since 30-40 years now and was able to scale its operations to enormous size, having people everywhere. The founder was the original podcaster and Youtuber, spreading its message through VHS tapes etc. later creating a business model based on subscription(literally, subscribing to their newspaper multiple times) and expanding into a business network where you get business but you also pay in some of your profits. So these guys were on the radar of the secularist for a long time and are routinely purged from a critical position up until Erdogan teamed up with them. At some point, they got into a fight and Erdogan won and Erdogan had a list of their names of those he directly enabled, the rest were deducted from there. Imperfect but very well educated guess of the cult members, let's say. Probably not too much off since he had at least 3 years before the coup to polish his list of Gulenits.
After the coup, Erdogan gained unchecked power and this is scary stuff. He is trying to be influential leader over the whole region but I am not sure that he is smart enough to do that.
BTW, Erdogan dropped the Islamist rhetoric after the coup. He is now on the nationalistic side of the things, having the support of the nationalist secularist. All those imprisonments of the Gulenists were a wet dream of any secular nationalist. The rhetoric about foreign powers trying to destroy Turkey, evil west etc. is also not stranger to the secular nationalist.
I was here during the fake coup, watching the f16s, watching Tayipp descend from his private jet like he was jesus, his arms stretched out, telling his people to come defend him, hoardes of nationalists swarming the tarmac to his defense.
The whole time it seemed like bullshit. My friend's father, who is 80 and has experienced 5 or 6 coups, went fishing 5am saturday morning. When his children told him not to, he said, "I've been through this 5 times now, and I call bullshit. This isn't a coup, this is a theatrical rendition of 1984, and Gulen is Emmanuel Goldstein.
Interesting anecdote: I met a Gulenist in Ukraine last month. I'm a US citizen living in Türkiye, working for an American firm, and was in Kiev meeting some contract programmers. One programmer, a Tatar from Russia, One found out I was living in Istanbul and approached me really excitedly. He wanted to tell me about the great Turkish organization which funded his education.
I stopped him right there and told him that an in-law of mine was hurt in the fake coup and he would do well to end this line of conversation, but he persisted. When I suggested Gulen was a terrorist, he rather .. aggressively told me "No Erdogan is the Terrorist" and got in my face. I politely told him "Both can be true, have a nice night".
The next day I had him removed from our account due to his actions, but in reality, due to his association with a terrorist group, and let my account manager know what was going on. He's no longer with that consulting company either.
Those thousands, you want to so call "enemies" are actual enemies of democracy, not to mention a shadow-secret cult. It is not like they're coming from an open ideology with open political goals. So we could understand and excuse the coup in some form as a revolution. Even that is questionable considerable ruthless shelling of unarmed civilians during the coup.
This cult have been working on infiltrating military for many years. Only westerners like to omit this fact. Turkish public %100, both left, right all political factions are aware of this.
I don't blame you for believing what you will. Because the narrative you speak of, have been pushed by giant main-stream news organizations in the west. No wonder Turks have a distrust towards "The West"
Same west was not as vocal, when same cult were arresting/killing journalists in co-operation with Erdogan... This whole narrative is so ridiculous. Not only Turks but anyone who has been involved with Turkey for 5-6+ years are probably laughing at it.
I do wonder how free and legitimate they are when he gets to expel those who oppose him.
And of course the big question is would he allow a result where an election would mean he is removed from power.
Re: legitimacy, I’ve been on the losing side of those elections for the last two decades by now. Unfortunately they’re pretty legitimate, he really does have a majority and his majority does not depend on expelling people. Had it been that way, Turkey would make a lot more sense.
The core problem with Turkey lie not with legitimacy of elections, or with the consent of the governed, but within the much more subtle distinction between ‘ruling’ and ‘governing’ what is ultimately a very pluralistic society with a vast range of ethnic and sociocultural backgrounds. Doing legitimate elections is one thing, not assuming they mean ultimate power to squash out your opposition like bugs on a windshield is quite another. In terms of social malaise, Turkey is more similar to Hungary or Poland, rather than Russia.
Again, it’s a weird country, it doesn’t make sense even to its inhabitants so I try to avoid commenting on it from afar.
In Turkey our biggest problems have unfortunately "made in USA" labels :( . One of them is the the Imam of Universe (Fethullah Islamist cult) harbored in Pennsylvania by cold war remnants in Washington around intelligence circles. Those fellows are embedding a network followers in crucial posts in public and in large private enterprises by stealing exam questions, cheating in all sorts of admission processes, eliminating anyone who is just not one of them. At the end they have attempted a military coups for tactical political reasons. Needless to say when they were in power, those pro-western Gulen sect banned Youtube, blogger, Google Sites due to them talking about biological evolution in 2000s.
All this gets prevented by the new municipal government in Istanbul and Ankara.
Erdogan also is on a tight leash these days, and publicly threatened to cut federal funding for both Istanbul and Ankara - it is kind of unheard of because when local government was under AKP ruling they had practically unlimited funding. So now that his party lost the local elections in two major cities, he's trying to make them look incompetent by cutting their funding, in hopes for winning the next election.
Either Mansur Yavas or Ekrem Imamoglu will eventually be a candidate for President in following years, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I've never heard of an autocrat that doesn't directly or indirectly manipulate elections.
Citation? The original article advocates reform, and possibly abolishing permanent secretaries, but nothing like entirely abolishing the civil service
https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-som...
http://theconversation.com/dominic-cummings-wants-to-add-mor...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/01/boris-...
The institution will obviously continue to exist under its current name.
1) continuity of government function in presence of political instability, elections etc.
2) higher level of comptency across government employees ( career bureaucrats)
Essentially you don't want the government to be staffed with incompetent friends and affiliates who either leave or get kicked out after lost election leading to the vacancies, interrupted projects etc.
More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service#Civil_service_in...
I’m not Turkish and at least not in Turkey right now, but I’m sure such a thing ruined lots of people’s lives and certainly will make my life harder in certain situations someone needs to validate my degree
Early on there were stories of folks purged or threatened and doctors and other professionals simply decided it was time to leave before things got ugly.... I don't know if they're coming back.