Over and above the referendum, the complicated international outlook could force Erdogan into positions that risk unhinging the internal consensus he yearns for.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s success in the constitutional referendum on April 16 may well turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. The president’s pro-reform campaign prevailed, but the consensus that seems to have buoyed Erdogan until now (having been further boosted following the failed coup of July 2016) is wearing dangerously thin. The “yes” campaign in the vote to modify the Turkish Constitution won a mere 51.41% of the vote, and “no” prevailed in Turkey’s major cities, a result that signalled the president’s weakness more than his strength. In upcoming battles (and there are many on the horizon), the difficulties for the Turkish leader could be particularly insidious.
Far from transforming the president into a sultan, the content of the reform is less dramatic than the Western media have made out. Parliament retains a strong power over the presidential veto, impeachment, the declaration of states of emergency and executive orders. On paper, the president of the Turkish Republic will undoubtedly have more power than before, but no more than his French or American counterparts. What has enabled Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to steer Turkey towards autocracy in recent years has not been (and will not be) this reform or some constitutional or institutional intervention. The real power came from his electoral consensus, obtained by ten years of good governance, during which Erdogan has carried out the largest redistribution of income in the history of the country, encouraging the establishment and development of small and medium-sized firms. All of this has resulted in support for the president, and it is thanks to this consensus and his party’s clientelist approach that Erdogan’s control over parliament has extended to control of the judiciary, police, army and many parts of civil society. He has been able to limit freedom of expression and protest, minority rights and many of the safeguards of a modern liberal democracy without having to make fundamental legislative changes. But facing key battles on the horizon with a reduced consensus (also due to the referendum that he actually won), the Turkish president might be more fragile than before.
The upcoming battles will be fought primarily over foreign policy, in particular towards Syria. Erdogan has long been considered a champion of the Arab Spring and the rebellions against Middle Eastern dictators. For years he has provided Turkish economic, humanitarian and military assistance to the rebels in order to help them defeat Assad. Thus Turkish Islamists have always revered him. But some months ago Erdogan had to change tack due to the Washington’s reluctance to renounce (for now) its alliance with the Syrian Kurds of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the foot soldiers of the international coalition against ISIS. Meanwhile, a more limited US involvement in Syria has pushed Ankara closer to Moscow. This shift towards the Kremlin, with whom two years ago relations had been extremely tense following Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian fighter jet, has been just as fluctuating as it has been packed with consequences. Fluctuating, because immediately after the US airstrike in Syria ordered by Trump as a reaction to the latest use of chemical weapons by Damascus, Ankara immediately repeated its call for the removal of Assad and urged American military intervention with Turkish support in Syria. Packed with consequences because Putin, after having forgiven Erdogan on the eve of the Turkish referendum for his excessive statements following the US airstrike, has recently won Turkish support for the four “de-escalation areas” in Syria. In Putin’s view, that move would enable the isolation of ISIS and Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliates from the rest of the rebellion, which would consequently be weakened, thus reenforcing the regime’s position.
Moving closer to Moscow, Assad’s staunch ally, Erdogan risks losing the support of Turkish Islamists, the core of his electoral base that has long been seduced by dreams of a “neo-Ottoman” approach to Turkish foreign policy. If he had failed to back Russia, however, the Turkish president would have risked being left without friends in Syria, as the US is pursuing a terse and rather weak approach there (aside from its support for the YPG in conquering Raqqa and the ISIS territories). This lack of an ally would have meant that Erdogan would have been powerless to prevent Ankara’s worst strategic nightmare: the birth of an autonomous Kurdish entity directly on the country’s southern border, one that is ideologically linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), considered by Turkey to be a terrorist organization. The more this risk becomes tangible, the more Erdogan loses the backing of the Turkish nationalists. He won their support in 2015 thanks precisely to an escalation against the PKK, with whom up until that point negotiations had been on the cards. Nationalist support has already been waning for the 16 April vote, and some voices in the military apparatus and intelligence services view Kurdish independence as the most dangerous threat to the future of the country.
Caught between the interests of two great powers, neither of which are aligned with Turkey’s, Erdogan finds himself in an extremely complicated position. Following his victory in the constitutional referendum, it seems that the Turkish president wanted to test the water by bombing a series of Kurdish-Syrian positions at the end of April. But the reactions from Moscow and Washington have been negative for Ankara. Both Russia and the US have deployed their own troops in defence of the Kurdish forces, in the western Canton of Afrin and in the eastern Cantons of Kobane and Cizre, respectively. The Kremlin does not want to risk that the rebels to the north of Aleppo (supported by Turkey and allied with other rebels against whom Assad’s forces are fighting on a daily basis) could expand outside of the perimeter area that Putin has conceded to Erdogan with the operation “Euphrates Shield”. That wedge stretches from the Turkish border to the town of Al Bab, and its purpose is precisely to impede the territorial proximity of the Kurdish Cantons in Syria (a sweetener offered to Turkey at the end of 2016, which it had earned by sacrificing its full support of the rebellion, and thus facilitating the fall of Aleppo in December). The White House, in turn, does not want the legitimate concerns of Turkey to impede the only foreign policy objective that Trump has announced concerning Syria: the defeat of Islamic State.
With a view towards the final assault on the Syrian capital of the Caliphate, Raqqa, the US has begun to send sophisticated arms to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the coalition led by the Kurds to fight ISIS. Turkey has protested, but in the recent meeting between Trump and Erdogan in the US, no discord erupted between the two. The Turkish president seems not to want to alienate the sympathies of the new American president, the only Western leader to have congratulated him on his referendum victory and a man that might well change his mind about Syria (recent White House claims about Assad’s crematoriums could signal a new change of direction, following the de facto reconciliation with Moscow in the weeks after the US airstrikes).
So, unless there are further about-turns by Trump, Erdogan seems condemned to face a future in which the Kremlin will slowly suffocate the Syrian rebellion, a rebellion in which it considers Turkey to be playing an active part. Turkey will probably also have to accept the liberation of Raqqa by the SDF, with the consequent legitimization of the Syrian Kurds, strengthening their negotiating hand in the future. Erdogan’s challenge in the coming years will be to prevent this foreign policy stranglehold from eroding his domestic support: on one hand, the Islamists will not stomach a betrayal of the anti-Assad rebellion; on the other, nationalists might consider him weak for allowing the Kurdish threat to gain momentum on Turkey’s southern border. Even with the new Constitution, Erdogan’s prospects for the future can only deteriorate without domestic support.
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Over and above the referendum, the complicated international outlook could force Erdogan into positions that risk unhinging the internal consensus he yearns for.
