To judge from Western newspapers, the elections on June 24 in Turkey brought a crisis for democracy. The “crisis” is that Turks will continue to be governed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the perennially popular Islamist former mayor of Istanbul, for whom they voted overwhelmingly, and not by Muharrem Ince, the secularist darling of Western journalists, who lost to Erdogan by 20 percentage points and 11 million votes. In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine calls Erdogan Turkey’s “first elected sultan,” a “master of manipulation.” In London, the Financial Times alluded to opposition warnings of a “one-man regime.”
This is certainly a crisis for something. Erdogan has been a mischievous participant in the Syrian and Iraq wars, and an unreliable NATO partner. He appeases ISIS. He buys air-defense systems from Russia. He single-mindedly sabotages America’s Kurdish allies. He has become perhaps the loudest voice against Israel on the world stage.
But if it is a crisis for democracy, then journalists are using a strange definition of democracy. The most undemocratic-looking elements of the Turkish elections have to do with Turkey’s embroilment in international conflict. The Kurdish candidate, Selahattin Demirtas, waged his campaign over YouTube, from jail. That is because the war Turks have waged against Syria’s Kurds allows Erdogan to classify their sympathizers (including Turkey’s Kurds) as “terrorists.” This may be an injustice, but it is one in which the United States is, to put it mildly, not blameless.
Many journalists have spoken, too, of Erdogan’s “worrying track record on rights” since the attempted military coup against him in July 2016. Journalists have been jailed, the army reformed from top to bottom, and more than 100,000 government employees fired. This may be quite excessive. But most news coverage misses the point: When a country’s armed forces try to overthrow its democratically elected leaders, a responsible politician might believe he has higher priorities than, say, building day-care centers.
Nothing was ever the same after the coup. Some people surely find it a worse country to live in. But when Erdogan’s enemies speak of “one-man rule,” what they are most often referring to is the reform of the constitution, passed by referendum last year. It does make the executive more powerful, primarily by replacing a parliamentary system like Britain’s or Germany’s with a presidential system like that of France or the United States.
There are rich constitutional arguments, many of them by American Anglophiles and English Americanists, over which system is better. James Madison, Lord Bryce, Woodrow Wilson, Lani Guinier—such scholars have sought the right balance between giving a voice to dissent and providing for what Alexander Hamilton called “energy in the executive.” European journalists covering Turkey appear to consider the matter settled. For them, the difference between presidents and tyrants is an unimportant one. As the Financial Times puts it:
Heaven forfend! This is the American system. Whether one favors such powers for the Turkish head of state or not, they were secured by a democratic vote, and any victor in the last election would have enjoyed them.
One journalist noted: “The amended laws do leave a small space for checks and balances, making control of the 600-seat parliament crucial.” But if taking parliament is crucial, then there would seem to be a large space for such checks. And Erdogan lost ground in this new parliament, which he controls only through a coalition with the nationalist MHP party.
Germans have been particularly anguished over the Turkish result. With its population of 1.5 million Turkish citizens, Germany is an important Turkish electoral district. And German Turks, with their years of exposure to Western liberalism, turn out to be considerably more pro-Erdogan than their cousins back home: Whereas 53 percent went for Erdogan in Turkey, 65 percent did in Germany. The leading German tabloid, Bild, asked Turkish residents why they liked Erdogan so much. “He doesn’t let himself get pushed around,” one said. “Not by the USA, not by Chancellor Merkel.” And for many, especially the self-described “headscarf people,” the most important thing is that Erdogan is a pious Muslim.
From a western perspective, Turkey has a culture problem: It is increasingly Islamist and theocratic. It has an economy problem: It is dependent on fickle foreign investment. But it does not have a democracy problem. In fact, in setting their own path, its people are less impeded by unaccountable elites than many Western peoples are.
Turkey has a problem with democracy only to the extent that the word democracy has been altered to mean something like “the stuff respectable journalists and board members in New York and Berlin approve of.” C. S. Lewis, in a great 1944 essay, used democrat as the prime example of that class of “words which were once insulting and are now complimentary.” Like villain and gentleman, the word has become a crude value judgment. “The truth,” Lewis wrote, “is that words originally descriptive tend to become terms either of mere praise or of mere blame. The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker’s yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.”
