On the night of Aug. 10, when Turkey’s powerful prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, won the presidential elections that added five more years to his already 12-year-long reign, I had mixed feelings.
Here was a leader I had supported for years — both as a voter and a columnist — as he battled against Turkey’s authoritarian secularists, especially the coup-prone military, which had executed or imprisoned some of his predecessors.
I still support Mr. Erdogan’s historic peace process with Kurdish separatists, which is likely to save Turkey from a decades-old bloody conflict. But in the past three years, I have become disillusioned with his growing authoritarianism.
How we got here is an interesting story. The Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., was born in 2001, under the leadership of both the defiant Mr. Erdogan and the more erudite and courteous outgoing president, Abdullah Gul.
They both came to power in 2002, and initiated a widely praised era of political reform, economic progress and international outreach. Back then, I saw the party as a promising case study on the compatibility of Islam and political liberalism. But the story wasn’t over.
In 2007, Mr. Gul was elected president, which required him to drop his party affiliation. Since then, Mr. Erdogan has consolidated his own personal authority, marginalizing all other party figures and galvanizing a cult of personality around himself among the party’s base.
Meanwhile, the A.K.P. has adopted a bluntly majoritarian notion of democracy, which venerates ballots but disregards civil liberties and press freedom.
Mr. Gul, who still preserved the party’s founding principles, kept advising restraint and moderation to his old comrades. He opposed Turkey’s reckless support of Syrian opposition fighters and tried to keep channels with Egypt open despite the July 2013 coup. He opposed Mr. Erdogan’s crackdown on peaceful protesters, as well as his ban on Twitter.
That’s why some Turkish liberals, including me, who supported the A.K.P. in its early years, hoped that once Mr. Erdogan became president, Mr. Gul would return to party politics and become the new A.K.P. leader and prime minister.
We also hoped that Mr. Gul would restore and the liberal ideas of 2002-2007 and offer reconciliation to a deeply polarized society.
But Mr. Erdogan had different plans for A.K.P. 2.0. After his presidential triumph earlier this month, he took calculated measures to make sure that Mr. Gul could not be re-elected as the party’s leader, despite the latter’s overwhelming popularity throughout Turkey and among the party’s rank and file.
Mr. Erdogan also announced that the party’s three-term limit for holding office would remain valid. This means that in about one year, 70 founding members of the A.K.P. — including key figures like Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc and other moderates, who have occasionally dared to disagree with Mr. Erdogan — will disappear from the political scene.
The new A.K.P., Mr. Erdogan repeatedly declared, will rise on the shoulders of “youngsters,” who know that they owe their seats to the party’s boss and who will be very disciplined. As one of his advisers openly said, “Erdogan’s will” is going to be paramount. Mr. Erdogan’s supporters praise this ever-deepening concentration of power in the hands of one individual as the advance of democracy.
By this logic, because Mr. Erdogan wins elections, he represents “the nation,” and his dominance over all aspects of life — from media to universities — is the realization of “the national will.” Those who oppose Mr. Erdogan are seen as adversaries of the nation itself; they are branded as either traitors or spies, or at best “anti-democrats” who need to shut up.
Such a winner-takes-all democracy is likely to continue polarizing Turkish society, and there are very few obstacles left in front of Mr. Erdogan if he chooses to further consolidate his power.
One hope is Mr. Erdogan’s famous pragmatism, which has repeatedly served to balance his personal and ideological dictates. Another is the new prime minister he announced on Thursday: Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.
Although Mr. Erdogan chose him because they seem to agree on all major issues, Mr. Davutoglu could still help Turkey by bringing his gentle, polite and smiling persona to the country’s bitter and hate-filled political scene. The new prime minister could help explain to his comrades in the party that democracy is really not just about ballots, but also the checks and balances and liberties that the A.K.P. itself once praised.
Mustafa Akyol is a columnist and the author of Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty.