New restrictions on the sale and advertising of alcohol in Turkey are “prompting outcry from citizens concerned about the creeping Islamization of the country,” reports suggest.

Opposition lawmakers accused Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (above) and his ruling AK party of social engineering.

“This is a religious, ideological enforcement,” said Musa Cam of the secular Republican People’s Party. “What they want to do is to redesign the society based on their own beliefs and culture.”  

Secular opponents of the bill say Erdogan — who is sometimes accused of authoritarian tendencies — is increasingly meddling in more liberal lifestyles, Associated Press reports. They say the measure is an affront to personal choices, and some accuse his ruling party of trying to gradually impose an Islamic agenda.

“The AKP heralds democracy; its more seasoned politicians have participated in free elections for two decades,” says the Brookings Institution’s Ömer Taspinar.

But Turkey remains polarized, with its opposition parties ever more concerned about creeping authoritarianism and Islamism. Opponents call the government a civilian dictatorship and deplore its use of the judicial system to neuter the military, the opposition media, and rival political parties. The “increasingly authoritarian” Erdogan’s hubris has even led to a falling out with Turkey’s most powerful Muslim cleric, The Economist reports:

Fethullah Gulen (left) is the spiritual leader of a global network, the Hizmet (meaning service), that includes media outlets, schools and charities. These have spread his pacifist, modern-minded Islam, often praised as a contrast to more extreme Salafism. Much of the network is financed by Anatolian businessmen.

Erdogan was affiliated with Necmettin Erbakan’s more traditionally Islamist “National View” movement which joined forces with the Gulenists against Turkey’s military, the paper notes:

After AK swept to a second term in 2007, it set about declawing the generals through the “Ergenekon trial” of hundreds of alleged coup plotters. This was helped by prosecutors said to be close to Mr Gulen. But the alliance has frayed amid allegations of Hizmet infiltration of the judiciary and the police. Mr Gulen’s image was bruised by suggestions that Ergenekon had degenerated into a vendetta. “They shared power with AK but they kept wanting more,” says an observer.

The rift became clearer after the 2010 Mavi Marmara affair, when Israeli commandos killed nine Turks aboard a Gaza-bound vessel; Mr Gulen suggested the flotilla should not have been allowed to sail.

The Turkish premier is also losing much of his international prestige, observers suggest:

“When Erdogan sat down with TIME editors in New York City in 2011, he was buoyed by the winds of history,” writes analyst Ishaan Tharoor:

Erdogan basked in the events of the Arab Spring and was styled in the foreign media as a neo-Ottoman Sultan, poised to reign supreme in the Arab world. Authoritarian regimes were giving way to democracies that many assumed would emerge in the image of Erdogan’s Turkey: moderately Islamist, prosperous, stable. He was feted as a hero in Tripoli, Cairo and other Arab capitals. No country seemed more regionally relevant in the Middle East than Erdogan’s Turkey.

Two years later and Turkey’s vaunted soft power looks more soft than powerful. The Arab Spring has soured and the Syrian war has turned a region’s optimism into despair; Erdogan, too, cuts a smaller, humbler figure on the world stage.

The AK government has also failed to empower Turkish women, says Andrew Finkel, the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know,” and a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy:

While Turkey has a decent record of getting girls through school, it has an appalling record of getting women to work. The rate of female employment was under 30 percent last year, the lowest among all the industrialized countries in the O.E.C.D. The figure wasn’t even close to the next-lowest: more than 43 percent, for Mexico…. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap put Turkey pretty much at the bottom of the league, ranking it 124 out of 135 nations, just above Egypt and Iran.

RTWT

In the ten years since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) scored an overwhelming victory in parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (above), has pushed through policies that have transformed the country’s political institutions – for good and ill, write Arch Puddington and Zselyke Csaky. 

The AKP’s triumph represented much more than a normal rotation of power between one traditional party and another. As a party—or, perhaps more accurately, a movement—with roots in moderate Islamism, the AKP stood poles apart from the secularist parties that had dominated Turkish politics for much of the previous century.

Erdogan’s policies have substantially transformed many of the country’s political institutions. Most significantly, he has reduced the military, long regarded as the ultimate source of political power and guarantor of Turkish sovereignty, to a position subservient to civilian authorities. Under the AKP, elections have become more competitive and fair, prison conditions improved, and, for a while at least, rights for Kurds were enhanced.

But there is a darker side to the AKP record. The reformist bent of Erdogan’s early years in office has been replaced by policies that are meant to entrench AKP power. The government has launched mass prosecutions against military officers, journalists, academics, and political figures accused of involvement in a deep-state conspiracy, called Ergenekon, that allegedly sought to bring down the government. AKP loyalists have increasingly come to dominate the judiciary. Erdogan has intimidated the media through legal cases brought against outlets that supported the opposition. Indeed, the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists has marked the AKP’s 10th anniversary in power with a scathing report on the state of Turkish press freedom.

Perhaps most worrisome is a sense that despite its own history as a target of repressive efforts, the AKP is now embracing methods employed with considerable effectiveness by outright authoritarian regimes.  

This extract is taken from a longer post by Arch Puddington, Vice President for Research at Freedom House, and guest blogger Zselyke Csaky. The post also includes a chronology that highlights Turkey’s record of adherence to democracy and human rights norms during the period of AKP dominance, drawn from reports published in Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s annual survey of political rights and civil liberties.

“Over the past decade, Turkey has simultaneously become more European, more Muslim, more democratic, and more modern,” says a new Council on Foreign Relations–sponsored Independent Task Force. This development confirms that the rise of the religiously oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP) party “is not inconsistent with democracy, modernization, or economic liberalism.” 

“Yet, for all the positive political change that the AKP oversaw in 2003 and 2004, Turkish leaders have sometimes resorted to authoritarian measures to intimidate and curb opposition to their agenda,” notes the bipartisan group, chaired by former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright and former national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, and directed by Steven A. Cook, CFR’s senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies. 

Turks have demonstrated that they are capable of undertaking a wide range of political and economic reforms, the group contends in the following extract. But in light of recent concerns about democratic reversals, the Task Force recommends that the United States and Turkey’s other partners in the Community of Democracies offer support and advice toward reenergizing its political reform program, including contributions from leading democracy assistance groups.  

More than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, political and military considerations are making way for a new agenda for US-Turkish relations that reflects not just changes in the international system but also Turkey’s remarkable transformation from a military-dominated society to a fledgling democracy and rising power in a greater Middle East experiencing unprecedented upheaval.

To be sure, Turkey’s transition is not yet complete. Journalists and government critics are arrested in troublingly high numbers and progress on concluding a new, more fully democratic constitution has been unnecessarily slow. The government has not gone beyond small, initial steps to better integrate its Kurdish minority. While economic growth has been impressive—on the order of 6 percent per year over much of the past decade—much of the dynamism has been fueled by buoyant consumer spending that is unlikely to be sustainable. Concerns also remain within and outside Turkey about the influence of Islam in the country’s politics. 

The Task Force offers recommendations on how the United States can support Turkey’s continued emergence and build a deeper working relationship that acknowledges Ankara’s growing importance. It encourages the United States and other democracies to urge Turkish leaders to follow through with their commitment to writing a new constitution that better protects minority rights and basic freedoms. 

Today Turkey is more democratic, prosperous, and politically influential than it was five, ten, and fifteen years ago. Although left out of the exclusive club of countries widely regarded as rising powers—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and, most recently, South Africa (the BRICS)—Turkey very much belongs in the category of economically successful countries that are emerging global powers. If current trends in Turkey persist and the international system continues to undergo a redistribution of power, Turkey will in the coming decade be among the most important actors in the broad region surrounding and beyond it.  

Some trends are worrying, however: the prosecution and detention of journalists, the seemingly open-ended and at times questionable pursuit of military officers and other establishment figures for alleged conspiracy against the government, the apparent illiberal impulses of some Turkish leaders, the still-unresolved Kurdish issue, and the lack of progress on a new constitution. How these issues are resolved will have a major impact on the future of Turkey and its democracy. Indeed, for all the positive political change that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) oversaw in 2003 and 2004, Turkish leaders have sometimes resorted to authoritarian measures to intimidate and curb opposition to their agenda. 

The AKP’s rise intrigued political activists in the Arab world, who wondered whether any lessons were to be learned from Turkish Islamists’ accumulation of political power in an officially secular political system. For both Arab liberals and mainstream Islamists, the AKP had something important to offer. From the perspective of Arab liberals, if the AKP could be emulated in the Arab world, it would go a long way to resolving a central problem of Arab politics whereby citizens were often forced to choose between the authoritarianism of prevailing regimes and the perceived theocracy of Islamist groups. Indeed, an Arab AKP-type party would give people a way out of this dilemma, providing hope for a more democratic future. For Islamists, the AKP provided a lesson on how Islamists could not only overcome barriers to political participation, but could also come to power and, with broad public support, embark on a wide-ranging program to dramatically remake a once-hostile political arena.

The United States needs to recognize that today it is dealing with a dramatically changed Turkey and, as a result, that the bilateral relationship between Washington and Ankara is undergoing fundamental change.

American officials, members of Congress, and other observers must jettison their stereotypes of Turkey. In particular, the decline in the role of the military in Turkish political life does not mean that Turkey is inexorably headed toward theocracy or movement away from NATO. The rise of the religiously oriented AKP party is not inconsistent with democracy, modernization, or economic liberalism. The United States must not view the sum of U.S.-Turkey relations through the narrow prism of particular issues, whether they be Armenia, Israel, or ties to NATO.

The United States and Turkey have resources, assets, and skills that will be complementary in places that have not historically been areas of U.S.-Turkey cooperation, including helping various Arab countries achieve democratic transitions; ending the bloodshed in Syria through the departure of President Bashar al-Assad and the creation of a democratic, cross-sectarian outcome; and dealing with the challenge posed by Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, support for terror, and intervention in the affairs of its neighbors. 

Over the past decade, Turks have demonstrated that they are capable of undertaking a wide range of political and economic reforms. In light of recent concerns about democratic reversals, however, the Task Force recommends that the United States and Turkey’s other partners in the Community of Democracies—which was created in part for precisely this purpose—offer Turkey support and advice toward reenergizing its political reform program. It would be best if the EU could, as it did in 2003 and 2004, serve as an anchor of Turkish political change, but the stalled EU membership negotiations make that impossible.

In its place, the United States and other democracies have a role to play in encouraging Turkey to write a constitution that will advance and deepen Turkish democracy. They should encourage their Turkish colleagues to ensure that the drafting process is open, inclusive, and transparent. The resulting document should enshrine the principles of both majority rule and protection of minority rights, recognizing that democracy does not mean that those with the most votes can impose their values on others.

The constitution can help establish the proper relationship between military and civilian authority—enshrining respect for the military but remaining under civilian control, free from military tutelage. It can also codify Turkey’s unique approach to the relationship between religion and the state—using Prime Minister Erdogan’s September 2011 statement in Cairo about the importance of secular politics in Muslim societies as a starting point—and thus provide a useful model for post-revolutionary Middle Eastern states struggling with this question.

The enduring protection of political rights requires that they be embedded in a system of checks and balances: not just a popularly elected parliament, but also a free press, independent political parties, mechanisms for citizens to pursue their grievances through politically neutral institutions, and an independent judiciary. As discussed earlier, this last element requires a judicial appointments process that provides public confidence in the quality and impartiality of those appointed and constitutional provisions that spell out clearly an appropriate but limited role for the judiciary that is consistent with a democratic system.

Yet a new constitution should not be the only measure of Turkish political reform. After all, given the particularities of Turkey’s electoral laws, it may not be politically possible for the Turks to write a new constitution. As a result, Washington and Ankara’s other international partners should urge the Turks to abolish or reform nondemocratic laws, regulations, rules, and decrees that, in tandem with the existing constitution, undermine Turkey’s democratic practices. These include Article 301 of the penal code, which makes insulting Turkishness a crime. Despite the limited use of Article 301 recently, it remains in place and thus contributes to persistent questions about Turkey’s democratic transition. In addition, Turkey needs to abolish the internal service codes of the armed forces that previously served as the legal justification for the military’s intervention in politics and legal provisions constraining freedom of religion, including those that prevent opening the Greek-Orthodox Halki Seminary, which was shuttered in 1971. As a final matter, Ankara should reduce the threshold for parties to enter parliament, which stands at 10 percent and limits the voices represented in the Grand National Assembly.

Turkey could go a long way toward putting to rest questions about the rule of law, criminalization of political differences, and press freedom in Turkey by ending the investigations of the Ergenekon case— either completing the legal proceedings against those accused of crimes or releasing them—and resolving the cases of the ninety-six journalists now detained in Turkish jails. Turkey should also restructure its court system to ensure timely trials that do not drag on for years, or even decades.

Finally, a major challenge to Turkish democracy is the weakness of the opposition parties—recognizing that a vibrant opposition is central to democratic political systems. A number of measures could be undertaken to address this problem and would benefit or be available to all political parties, including the AKP itself, especially when it faces the challenge any party faces in making the transition from its founders to a long-lasting institution. Indeed, as the party is now into its third term, questions have arisen in Turkey about leadership succession within the party—a particular concern if the prime minister or president leaves the political scene in the next few years. Whether part of the constitutional drafting process or not, Turkey’s political parties law needs to be brought in line with those of its fellow members in the Community of Democracies.

In addition, Turkey’s partners within the Community of Democracies that sponsor organizations such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute should make them available to legal Turkish parties to offer technical advice on party building. They can also promote exchanges between political parties from countries in the Community of Democracies and the full range of legal Turkish parties on issues such as human rights, rule of law, and the protection of minorities. This could be part of a broader program of people-to-people exchanges, exchanges between civil society groups, and congressional and parliamentary exchanges.

Read the rest.

The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute are core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Can Turkey be a “source of inspiration for democratizing Arab states,” despite a “gathering air of authoritarianism” around Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) and his ruling Justice and Development party (AKP)?

During Erdogan’s decade in power, Turkey has refuted the conventional wisdom that when it came to “Islam, democracy, and secularism, one could have any two but never all three,” writes Nora Fisher Onar, an assistant professor at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University.

And that’s not the only reason the ‘sick man of Europe’ has “re-emerged as a regional power,” note David Gardner and Daniel Dombey:

Its economy has grown at near-Chinese speed, spreading wealth and healthcare, schools and roads, while a new breed of “Anatolian tiger” entrepreneurs has risen up against the incumbent handful of business conglomerates. The ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), refined from the debris of two banned Islamist parties into a Muslim version of Christian democracy, has sidelined the secular elites that had ruled as of right the republic created by Ataturk.

On the downside, they observe, Turkey last year “leapfrogged Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the number of cases brought against it at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, its 159 cases outstripping Russia’s 121.” This month’s release of Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik, journalists detained for investigating the Gulenists, a semi-clandestine Islamist movement, “still leaves 104 journalists in jail, 69 of them from the Kurdish minority and more than Iran (42) and China (27) combined……The old joke about committing journalism has real bite.”

In a note from prison, Dexter Filkins writes, Sik wrote that the case against him had been fabricated by the Gulenists: “The ongoing investigations are not a democratic process; they are an attempt to silence the voices of opposition.”  

“The cumulative impact of Sik’s reporting, including the way he detailed how the Gulenists have sought to manipulate the judicial process and put sympathizers in key positions, is devastating,” says analyst Gareth Jenkins.

Leaving aside concerns of authoritarian drift, the Turkish formula may not be replicable,” writes Onar, a Ronald D. Asmus Policy Entrepreneur Fellow with the German Marshall Fund:

Civil-military relations in Turkey have undergone a double-sided transformation over recent decades. As a consequence of the army’s intermittent censure, political Islamists had to moderate their demands and practices; simultaneously, the army….increasingly relied on civilian allies to pursue its agenda vis-à-vis the AKP. Eventually, the military relinquished control of crucial institutions (like the National Security Council), and the final showdown over control of the presidency in 2007 was fought not with bullets and tanks, but with web declarations, public rallies, and court cases.

“A similar tipping point regarding civilian control of the state is hardly a foregone conclusion in countries still under transition where national militaries continue to exert a dominant presence in political life,” Onar suggests.

Furthermore, she writes in Sada, the Carnegie Endowment’s Arab reform journal, Arab states have not experienced the “trajectory of Turkey’s economic development—particularly, the export-driven rise of the middle class experienced by religious constituencies across the Anatolian periphery—something that has underpinned the AKP’s moderation, political success, and interregional presence.”

But the AKP’s moderation was the result of clear constitutional red lines and the sobering effect of the military’s Damocles Sword, analysts suggest, but in their absence or dilution, the party’s illiberal instincts are unconstrained.

“Erdogan and the AKP displayed a clear sense of purpose in reducing the political influence of the army,” says Sinan Ulgen, head of the liberal Edam think-tank in Istanbul.  But they “failed to show the same dedication to building a stronger democracy. The quality of Turkish democracy today remains problematic due to an intolerance of dissent, the weakening of individual freedoms and lack of constraints on executive power.”

On taking office, Erdogan and the AKP feared and expected resistance from Turkey’s derin devlet, or “deep state,” writes The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins:

The deep state is a presumed clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed and sometimes murdered dissidents, Communists, reporters, Islamists, Christian missionaries, and members of minority groups—anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order, established in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk. The deep state, historians say, has functioned as a kind of shadow government, disseminating propaganda to whip up public fear or destabilizing civilian governments not to its liking.

Erdogan not only outmaneuvered the deep state’s hardline secularists, Filkins notes, he also presided over Turkey’s transformation into what some observers consider “an indispensable Islamic democracy,” presenting a template for Arab transitional states:

But Erdogan’s rule has another, darker side, which the West seems intent on ignoring: an increasingly harsh campaign to crush domestic opposition. In the past five years, more than seven hundred people have been arrested, including generals, admirals, members of parliament, newspaper editors and other journalists, owners of television networks, directors of charitable organizations, and university officials. Some fifteen per cent of the active admirals and generals in the Turkish armed forces are now on trial for conspiring to overthrow the government.

“There’s no way you agree to disagree in this country,” says Mustafa Akyol, who with reservations remains an AKP supporter. “It’s tantamount to treason if you do.”

The AKP government dismisses concerns over the widespread arrests of journalists, military officers and political figures as a result of the highly contentious Ergenekon affair.

“These people who are accusing our government of autocratic tendencies or authoritarian tendencies are making a mistake,” said foreign minister Ahmet Davutogylu. But the Ergenekon prosecutions had emasculated the deep state and curbed the military’s political power. “There is only one state now,” he said.

But European parliamentarians today voiced concerns over deteriorating media freedom and  laws limiting freedom of expression. Turkey needs to include civil society in drafting a new civilian constitution that addresses the need for an independent and impartial judiciary, and equal treatment of ethnic and religious communities and women.

“Before the AKP and Arab Awakening, the received wisdom was that when it came to Islam, democracy, and secularism, one could have any two but never all three,” writes Onar:

Similarly, doubts have long been expressed as to whether political and economic liberalism can thrive simultaneously in a Muslim-majority setting. Taken together, it seems that if the purveyors of Turkey Inc. can show that liberal economics goes hand-in-hand with liberal democracy in a country governed by pious Muslims, the Turkish model-in-progress may achieve fruition and offer a timely example for the region.

But Turkey’s exemplary role will likely remain a subject of dispute until an emerging “intricate power struggle” is resolved.

Hardline secularists and some Western observers claim that Turkey’s authoritarian drift is exposing the AKP’s secret Islamist agenda.

“That is a minority view,” say Gardner and Dombey, “and one contradicted by Erdogan’s public defense of Turkey’s secular system as a shield of state protecting all beliefs – including those of Islamists. At the same time, he partakes fully of a winner-takes-all political culture in which the AKP has resorted to the same methods its enemies used to try to deny it power.”

Turkey’s current political pass “can be seen as a drama within a paradox,” they suggest:

The drama is not the secularists’ specter of creeping theocracy but that the opposition has proved unelectable, trapped in the past and reliant on generals and judges to win back what it keeps losing at the ballot box. The paradox is that Mr Erdogan and the AKP, although now lords of all they survey, behave as though they were still in opposition.

The conflict likely to determine Turkey’s political trajectory, they suggest, will not be between the AKP and secular Kemalists, but between the AKP – a self-described conservative party with an Islamic orientation – and the “shadowy Islamist” Gulenist movement.

In overcoming the deep state, analysts suggest, the AKP may have also facilitated the emergence of an equally sinister parallel power structure.

In Turkey, Filkins writes:

Gulen’s followers own the newspaper Zaman and the TV channel Samanyolu, which editorialize on behalf of the A.K. Party and the Ergenekon prosecutions. (While Erdogan himself is not believed to be a Gulenist, President Gul is said to be one, as are several other senior members of the government.) Gulen is thought to have between two and three million followers in Turkey, including as many as sixty members of parliament—about ten per cent of the total.

The Gulenists insist that the organization is too diffuse to function as a political movement. But many Turks say that the Gulenists have ambitions and that these may or may not include Erdo?an. A former member of parliament who was once a confidant of Erdo?an’s told me that, in 1999, he met Gulen in Pennsylvania. Gulen, he said, told him that he had a twenty-five-year plan to take control of the Turkish state, and that this would be accomplished by a group of followers he referred to as “the Golden Generation.” “There isn’t any question that Gulen wants political power,” the former legislator told me. (A spokesman for Gulen denied that he had ever advocated “regime change.”)

The Gulenists operate a global network (right) of Islamist schools and other “clusters of invisible power” that some observers characterize as a semi-covert strategy or “creeping coup” designed to infiltrate and seize Turkey’s institutions. The movement’s success in penetrating  the police, judiciary and security services has reportedly proved too much for Erdogan himself.

“There was good co-operation between the AKP and the Gulenists but at a certain point their demands became too much,” says one party insider. “They wanted to be not just in the police but other places as well, and somebody had to tell them to stop.”

But the country’s most powerful Gulenist could yet take the top job.

“With two five-year terms allowed, Erdogan could stay in power until 2024, which would make him the longest-running leader in Turkish history,” writes Filkins. “One possibility often discussed is that Gul and Erdogan will switch jobs, bringing to mind the Putin-Medvedev maneuver in Russia.”
RTWT

Turkish police today used tear gas and water cannon to disperse hundreds of demonstrators protesting against a court ruling to drop charges against five radical Islamists charged with killing 37 liberal intellectuals and writers in 1993. The decision came a day after another court freed four journalists (above) awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government in a case that has focused international attention on the country’s record on media freedom.

The two court rulings are raising fresh concerns about rule of law and freedom of expression in a country that is being promoted as a model for transitional Arab states.

According to Reuters: The five have never been found and the opposition blamed Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party, which emerged from a series of banned Islamist parties, for a failure to launch a serious search. The judge at the Ankara court hearing ruled that the 1993 killings did not amount to crimes against humanity and therefore the statute of limitations applied as more than 15 years had passed.

“This is an affront to humanity, and this is where the polarization of society starts,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party

“Some of the killers got married, did their military service, held weddings, sent their children to school, but could not be found,” he said. “The AK Party is responsible for the failure to find the perpetrators of the Sivas massacre.”

But Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin insisted that the state’s “administrative organs have made all the efforts they can in this case.”

The case has raised questions about rule of law in Turkey, including the politicization of the judiciary:

The Supreme Court of Appeals last year upheld life sentences against 25 members of Hizbullah, a Turkish Islamist militant group, notes Reuters, then immediately freed them after ruling the courts had failed to complete the trial process within the allotted time.

“The statute of limitations has always been one of the ways to save the AKP. They always point to the path of the law, then delay it until the statute of limitations,” wrote Yalcin Bayar, a columnist for the Hurriyet newspaper. “AKP supporters have saved themselves in many cases with the statute of limitations.”

Two of the journalists released yesterday, Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik, have spent over a year in jail on charges of belonging to an illegal terrorist group.

“This is not just about press freedom, this is about freedom of expression,” said Sik upon his release. “There are 100 journalists in jail but freedom of expression is not just a problem for journalists,” he said, pointing out that 60 students and thousands of Turkish citizens are in jail because of Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws that curtail freedom of expression.

“The government must go beyond this mere gesture and release all journalists incarcerated under Turkey’s vague penal and anti-terror laws,” said the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Fundamental reform of the country’s legislation to align it with international standards is also essential.”

Human rights and media monitoring groups “have accused Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government of repressing freedom of speech through a mixture of intimidation and arrests,” The New York Times reports.

More than 300 people, including journalists, academics and politicians, have been detained as part of a wide-reaching investigation into the alleged Ergenekon conspiracy to undermine and overthrow the AKP government.

Sener, a reporter for the daily Milliyet, wrote extensively on the 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink before his arrest, CNN reports. Sener accused the state apparatus of purposely overlooking mounting signals indicating a plot on Dink’s life.

“Sik and Mr Sener’s supporters argue that the entity behind their prosecutions was not so much the central government as the Gulenist movement, an Islamic ‘community’ widely thought to have great influence among Turkey’s police and prosecution services,” the Financial Times reports:

The prosecution against Mr Sik focuses on The Imam’s Army , a book he wrote describing alleged Gulenist infiltration of the police force, while Mr Sener wrote a book about the police’s alleged failings concerning the 2007 assassination of Hrant Dink, a Turkish Armenian journalist.

Sympathisers of the Gulenist movement say its influence over Turkish institutions is much exaggerated and that it has no political ambitions, focusing instead on moderate Islam and interfaith dialogue.

“Turkey, while championing pro-democracy protests in the Arab world, has jailed more than 100 journalists, hundreds more pro-Kurdish activists and several dozen prominent secularists in cases the opposition says are politically motivated,” reports suggest.

International pressure helped secure the journalists’ release, said Ilhan Cihaner, an opposition deputy and a former prosecutor.

“The gradually increasing pressure from the EU and foreign media had a great effect on today’s decision,” he said.

“Turkey recently marked the 15th anniversary of what pundits call the ‘postmodern coup’: the military’s success at pushing out the Islamist-led coalition that was in power back then,” writes Andrew Finkel, the Istanbul-based author of the book Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.

“The generals managed that in large part by press-ganging the print media, even forcing newspaper owners to fire prominent columnists who did not support their campaign to discredit the government,” he writes. “The tables have since turned. Now the politicians have the military in retreat.”

The decision to release the journalists “is extremely good news,” said Hakan Altinay, chairman of the Open Society Foundation in Turkey. “But I don’t think it changes anything about the state of authoritarianism in this country. It just means fewer people have to endure completely pointless detention. Just because other people in detention are less known doesn’t make their cases less important.”

Turkey’s highly partisan and politicized media in ‘are a poor champion of freedom of expression,” notes Finkel, a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group:

Previous government coalitions depended on the press for support because they were politically weak. But the AK Party came to power, in 2002, with a strong working majority. Just as it was able to tame the military, it has shown the old press barons the door and created its own media empire. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law is the C.E.O. of a holding company that owns the Sabah-ATV television and newspaper conglomerate, which was purchased in 2008 for $1.25 billion with financing from state banks.

The incentives to play ball are great. The government continues to allow press groups to gain unfair advantage in other business sectors — never mind anticompetition laws. And it leans on potentially dissenting voices, sending in auditors and tax inspectors to keep opposition media outlets in line.

One lamentable result of all this is that some of Turkey’s best known commentators and television presenters have been fired for trying to raise issues the government would prefer to keep under the carpet.

That the media in Turkey are a poor champion of freedom of expression, I discovered for myself back in the old era of 1999, when, after reporting from the southeastern and Kurdish part of the country, I was charged with causing the Turkish military to be held in contempt. (Penalty: up to six years in jail.) My quarrel then was less with the courts — I was eventually acquitted — than with my Turkish newspaper, which failed to rally to my defense.

RTWT

The Big Chill: Press Freedom in Turkey is the subject of a meeting organized by the Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy today, featuring: Nina Ognianova, Committee to Protect Journalists; Ilhan Tanir; Vatan Daily, Hürriyet Daily News; Berna Turam, Northeastern University. Moderated by: Richard Kraemer, National Endowment for Democracy. With remarks by Carl Gershman, President, National Endowment for Democracy.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012. 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. 1025 F Street, NW, Suite 800, Washington, D.C. 20004.

Almost 80 percent of survey respondents in the Middle East had a favorable view of Turkey, and three out of five consider it a model for a modern Islamic state, according to a recent survey by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), a non-governmental think-tank.

The survey confirms earlier poll findings that Turkey has emerged as the biggest winner – at least in terms of soft power – from the Arab Spring. But a transatlantic spat between Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and acclaimed New York-based novelist Paul Auster (left) is drawing renewed attention to Turkey’s credibility as a model of democracy for the Arab world.

Erdogan took exception when Auster highlighted constraints on freedom of expression in Turkey and declined to visit the country so long as so many journalists and writers remain in prison:

“Supposedly Israel is a democratic country, a secular country, a country of limitless freedom of expression, individual freedoms and human rights. What an ignorant man you are … Israel is a real theocracy,” Erdogan said. “Didn’t [Israel] shower Gaza with bombs? Didn’t [Israel] launch phosphorus bombs and use chemical weapons?”

Auster quickly shot back: “Whatever the Prime Minister might think about the state of Israel, the fact is that free speech exists there and no writers or journalists are in jail.”

At least 70 journalists and writers have been jailed under Erdogan, according to rights groups and media watchdogs. Turkey is 148^th out of 179 countries on the press freedom index of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders – slightly ahead of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but behind Morocco (138), Jordan (128) and Lebanon (93).

What some observers call the “Putinization” of Erdogan has raised questions about his tolerance of opposition and the depth of his AK party’s commitment to genuine political pluralism.

“You are all liars,” celebrated writer Mehmet Ali Birand wrote this week. “I’m talking about you: politicians in power, business circles, military, members of the judiciary.”

“You credit those who protect your interests as ‘good journalists,’ but drag through the mud those who have contrary views. And then you dare to talk about freedom in this country.”

A recent attack by Erdogan on a visiting delegation from a German democracy assistance groups also raised eyebrows.

But the AK party leader’s illiberal side is less of a reflection of his Islamist politics than Turkey’s accommodation with modernity, writes Mustafa Akyol, a journalist and author of Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty.

“Turkish modernity corresponded to what would be called in the West ‘the dark side of the Enlightenment,’ which produced militant forms of nationalism, including fascism, and an illiberal secularism that suppressed traditional religion,” he argues.

“The AKP is too Turkish – not too Islamic:

In other words, its authoritarian tendencies emerge from the usual problems of Turkish politics, which existed in previous center-right parties as well.

The AKP should come to its senses and curb its temptation to unlimited power if it wants to remain a model for would-be liberal Islamists. Meanwhile, its transformation to post-Islamism remains genuine and meaningful for the Arab Islamists, who are entering an age of power with which they have little experience.

RTWT

The ruling AK party is using the notorious Ergenekon conspiracy to launch a broad-brush offensive against its critics, writes Kemal K?l?çdaro?lu, chairman of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition party.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But independent analysts share his anxiety.

“Many in Washington have been debating whether Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) could be a model for the Arab Spring , as our neighbors in the Middle East aspire to get rid of totalitarian regimes and become true democracies,” writes Turkish researcher E. P. Licursi. “But the reality in Turkey makes clear that the AKP model does not hold.”

While some observers were initially prepared to give the government the benefit of the doubt over the Ergenekon affair, the arrest of two renowned journalists, Nedim ?ener and Ahmet ??k “confirmed that the AKP was targeting its most serious and effective critics” under cover of the investigation.

“Overseas, we are well aware of these shortcomings in democracy,” says foreign policy expert Sinan Ulgen “but Erdogan’s regime keeps on feeding the imagination because compared to political systems in Iran or Saudi Arabia, Turkey’s is preferable.”

The country remains a model for emulation for having “reconciled two dynamics: economic growth and a democratic system put in place by an Islamist-derived party,” he says.

The neo-Ottomanism forged by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has been cited as another source of AKP authoritarianism, as the country distanced itself from Europe and the democratic West. But the Arab Spring has put paid to Davutoglu’s notion of “zero problems” with Turkey’s neighbors and forced a reorientation to the West.

“You can argue that the ‘Arab Spring’ has forced Turkey to reinforce its ties to the West because those are the only stable ones. It’s a question of stability versus instability,” says Henri Barkey, a Turkey analyst at Lehigh University in the United States. “One thing you can say about the West: It is what it is. It’s not going to change.”

Turkey’s vibrant civil society also has a role to play in defending and extending democratic space. The Freedom of Expression Association, for instance, seeks to enhance the role of civil society in the legislative process through public platforms for dialogue with parliamentarians, including 41 small provincial assem­blies in which citizens discuss relevant issues in monthly town hall meetings.

The AKP’s progress in democratizing Turkey and subjecting the military to civilian control is “indisputable,” Licursi writes in a Freedom House blog post on the  Ergenekon case and Turkey’s democratic aspirations,  but there is much still to be accomplished:

 The articles in the penal code that restrict freedom of expression should be removed, the antiterrorism laws should be narrowed in scope, and the judiciary must be reformed to allow for due process and eliminate improper detention. In short, the AKP should use its popular mandate not to marginalize its opposition and attack dissidents, but to implement positive legal and institutional reforms. Far from fettering its stated agenda or diminishing its public support, this would empower the government’s international ambitions, both in Europe and the Middle East.

Reporters Without Borders and the Freedom of Expression Association are grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

Is Turkey’s emergence as a potential model for Arab democracy and counterweight to illiberal forces in the region prompting the United States and Europe to disregard worrying signs of “encroaching authoritarianism”?

Credit: training.journalismnetwork.eu

Two leading investigative journalists – Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener (left and right, respectively) – joined 12 other defendants in court today to face charges of involvement in the Ergenekon conspiracy to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist AK party:

Looking thinner but defiant, Sener, an award-winning journalist who has written books about Turkey’s clandestine “deep state” activities, greeted observers as he entered a packed courtroom saying “Welcome to the theatre” and took a bow.

Sik, who has written books about the infiltration of the police by an Islamist movement led by Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim theologian based in the United States and considered close to parts of the ruling AK Party, derided the case against them.

“Our arrests were political,” Sik told Reuters.

Sener won the 2010 International Press Institute’s World Press Freedom Hero award for his reporting on the case of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007.

Nearly 100 journalists are imprisoned in Turkey, one of the highest rates worldwide, following a crackdown that has also netted non-violent Kurdish activists and other civil society activists.

In another controversial case, journalist Andrew Finkel was dismissed from the Gülen-controlled Zaman newspaper group for taking a stance in defense of journalistic freedom and civil liberties.*

“Today’s Zaman and Zaman newspapers, at the editorial level, have acted in a way in which they have no critical stance on anything in these cases,” said one observer. “It is obvious that the editorial teams of these newspapers see these cases as a matter of life or death for Turkish democracy. “

The European Court of Human Rights received nearly 9,000 complaints of violations of press freedom and freedom of expression in 2011, compared with 6,500 in 2009.

“Turkey’s democracy may be a good benchmark when compared with Egypt, Libya or Syria,” said Hakan Altinay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But the whole region will suffer if Turkey is allowed to disregard the values of liberal democracy.”

The AKP government’s defenders dismiss allegations of authoritarian drift as exaggerated or partisan, highlighting the expansion of political space over recent years.

They have a point, at least when it comes to non-governmental organizations.

The number of civil society organizations increased by 44 percent over the past 10 years, according to official figures released today. The growth was due in part to an a streamlining of procedures and regulations governing NGO start-ups, a notable development at a time when a widespread backlash against civil society has seen many governments introducing restrictions on NGO activity.

Most newly-formed groups address issues of human rights and civil liberties, development, education and the arts:

There is one NGO for every 866 individuals, less than in most of EU member states. In Germany, there are nearly 2.1 million NGOs and nearly 1.47 million in France. There is one NGO for every 40 individuals in Germany, while four out of 10 citizens attend at least one NGO in France, where one-fifth of the population is registered in at least two civil society organizations. The US has 1.2 million civil society organizations and one out of every 15 citizens is a member of these institutions.

Religion-based civil society organizations are the most common, with 15,511, while there are 15,289 sports organizations and 14,789 aid organizations. Among others, 10,291 organizations cover development and 853 focus on civil rights, while 6,253 NGOs busy themselves on social life, 3,707 on culture and 1,594 on the environment.

But many Arab democrats are drawn to Turkey less as a paradigm of democratic governance than as an economic success story, some observers suggest.

The Egyptian, Tunisian and Syrian dictatorships “purported to be economically liberal while running their economies as rackets for tight circles of kleptocrats and cronies,” in a strategy which aimed only to “to widen the circle of insiders (and the regime’s base) rather than genuinely to open up the economy, [that] has discredited the very idea of reform,” writes analyst David Gardner:

That discredit is all the greater insofar as Tunisia and Egypt in particular were held up by the IMF and the World Bank, the US and the EU, as regional pioneers of “structural reform” that would, by gradually building the middle classes, unlock political reform. This was not just a misunderstanding of the nature of the Arab security state. It was a rapacious hoax, behind which lay the most indolent form of crony capitalism.

Pretty evidently, western countries and the institutions they dominate have lost credibility. But Turkey may have an audience. Arabs tend to see in Turkey not just a vibrant democracy but a dynamic economy led by Islam’s equivalent of Christian Democrats. The Turkish economy has tripled in size over the past decade while Turks’ per capita income has doubled. Whether it is direct knowledge of this transformation or a sense of it gleaned from the sensational success of the Turkish soap operas that have swept the region, Arabs like what they see. Success sells.

RTWT

* Andrew Finkel is a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group. 

The resignation of the entire high command of Turkey’s armed forces is a “watershed’ in the country’s democratic evolution, analysts suggest, offering an opportunity to recast civil-military relations. But other observers view the latest events as the latest stage in Turkey’s de-democratization and desecularization, and worry about the removal of one of the few institutional checks and balances to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic behavior.

“The days of Turkey’s military calling the shots are over,” said leading journalist Cengiz Candar. “There’s a new equation in the politics of the country, and anyone depending on the military to score points on a political issue has to forget about it.”

But the episode is a source of concern to some observers that the military will no longer function as a guarantor of the constitutional “red lines” that protected the country’s largely secular democracy.

As one observer notes, “the extent to which the generals are unable to wield the veto power over government they once enjoyed may reflect the changes brought on by the slow but steady democratization of Turkey, and the transformation of its civil society towards a democratic consensus that negates the military’s self-appointed role as overseer of the nation’s leadership.”

While some observers are anxious that the military’s political emasculation removes one of the few constraints on Erdogan’s creeping authoritarianism, others believe the resignations marked a decisive victory for civil society.

“It’s not a crisis, but it is a watershed event,” Henri Barkey, a Turkey analyst at Lehigh University, told Eurasianet.org. “People will look back and say this was the moment the Turkish military was finally civilianized.”

The resignations signaled the end of a long struggle in which the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, “sought to erase a hostile parallel state” say analysts. But the downside for the party, Barkey suggests, is that “Erdogan can no longer play the underdog, blaming a shadowy and hostile state for failures, as he could in the past.”

The senior military figures finally threw in the towel after the government demanded the resignation of officers being tried on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government and arrested a further 22 officers last Friday. The move was the latest episode of the Ergenekon affair in which dozens of AKP critics, including journalists as well as police and officers, have been arrested for allegedly planning a soft coup against the government.

Some analysts view the Ergenekon affair as a creeping judicial coup against democracy itself. The “fight against anti-democratic forces in Turkey has resorted to self-defeating anti-democratic methods,” said Andrew Finkel, a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

In any case, the affair has polarized Turkish public opinion.

“Those who believe the A.K.P. is a party with a democratic agenda are now applauding it and believe we are moving abruptly toward democracy,” said Sanci University’s Ersin Kalaycioglu. “Others believe the A.K.P. is another conservative party with a conservative agenda trying to consolidate power in a new form of authoritarianism or even the dictatorship of one man.”

Turkey’s neo-Islamist Justice and Development Party won a remarkable  victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, securing its third successive majority with an increased share of the vote. But, Ragan Updegraff writes, strong gains by the social democratic and Kurdish opposition parties  denied the AKP the 330-seat threshold required to amend the constitution, requiring Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to do what doesn’t come easily to any Turkish politician – negotiate and compromise with his political rivals.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) returned to power following Turkey’s parliamentary elections, but the party lost seats and failed to secure the 3/5 majority needed to amend the constitution without gaining support from other parties. In a bizarre twist, the AKP increased its share of the popular vote while losing seats—the result of a high 10% threshold required to enter parliament and a skewed system of closed-list proportional representation. (For a full accounting of the results, click here.)

The elections yielded a few other surprises. The Kurdish nationalist Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which is closely affiliated with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), captured 36 seats, a 70% increase. In the months leading up to the election, the AKP ratcheted up the Turkish nationalist rhetoric in an effort to keep the rightist National Action Party (MHP) from meeting the 10% threshold and thus assuring itself a 3/5 majority. In the Kurdish stronghold of Diyarbakir, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan not only denied the Kurdish problem, but accused the BDP of converting Kurds to Zoroastrianism and subverting Muslim identity. In the end, the MHP met the threshold while AKP succeeded in further alienating Kurds, especially the BDP. Given the current bad feeling between the two parties, it will be difficult for the prime minister to build the consensus needed to solve the Kurdish problem.

Meanwhile, the chief opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), gained 38 seats after securing 26% of the popular vote. Though the party performed below the high expectations it set for itself, it proved itself a formidable challenger while offering something new to Turkey’s rather stagnant party politics. The CHP has undergone serious changes since the ouster of its former nationalist leader last year, adopting a liberal, pro-European platform while taking a progressive stand on the Kurdish problem.

Though the AKP lost seats, Erdogan has emerged as the most popular leader in the history of Turkish electoral politics. The party has increased its share of the vote in each parliamentary election since it came to power in 2002. It is unclear whether this confirmation of popular support will further embolden Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies or if he will, as promised, seek compromise and consensus on the party’s plans to pass a new constitution.

Erdogan’s ultimate ambition is to introduce a presidential system (and run for the office himself), which given the leader’s increasingly illiberal attitude and policies, has raised serious concerns. According to the OSCE, Turkey now has more journalists in prison than any other country in the world, including China. And, like China, a new Internet regulation that goes into effect Aug. 22 will set up an online filtering and surveillance system under which every Turkish citizen may be monitored by the government using an online profile. The AKP is also governing according to its conservative values, as demonstrated by a gradual increase in taxes and restrictions on alcohol sales as well as the closure of LGBT associations for violating standards of public morality.

These developments are all the more disturbing given the ongoing Ergenekon investigation, supposedly directed against the infamous “deep state,” but demonstrably targeting AKP’s political rivals. Since September’s constitutional referendum, close friends of AKP deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc have been appointed to head two of Turkey’s top three courts. Meanwhile, little progress has been made in addressing the continued use of torture, prolonged periods of detention, impunity for police and other security officials, prison conditions, and myriad draconian restrictions on freedom of expression.

Most important of all is the stalled European Union accession process, the primary fuel behind the rapid-pace reforms that constitute Turkey’s democratic successes at the turn of the millennium. However, more than four years have passed since accession negotiations began, wherein the country has made little progress in fully meeting the EU’s Copenhagen criteria for democracy and human rights.

The main problem is a ruling party that has distanced itself from the liberal democracy it once embraced to instead champion a majoritarian conception of rule by the people whereby minorities, opposition figures, and political dissenters are becoming less secure in their rights.

Increasingly, Turkey is polarized between those who support the AKP and those who do not. The AKP’s critics include not only the secular elite, but also liberals, Kurds and other minority groups, and others who fear the intolerance with which the party deals with difference and dissent.

However, the new parliament presents fresh opportunities for compromise and reconciliation. All parties agree that Turkey should adopt a new constitution, and given the CHP’s progressive turn, the country now has a genuine opportunity to pass a liberal democratic constitution that will respect and affirm the rights of all citizens.

Nevertheless, and despite Prime Minister Erdogan’s acceptance speech yesterday in which he vowed to seek compromise on a new constitution, it is possible, even likely, that the AKP will promote its agenda with minimal compromise and consultation (as it has in the past). Such a unilateral approach increases the likelihood of the new constitution entrenching the illiberal practices evident in the AKP’s current exercise of power, including the targeting of journalists, libel suits, increased reliance on executive and administrative orders, enhanced cabinet powers at the expense of parliament, limited minority rights, and restrictions on freedom of association and civil society.

Turkish civil society is crucial to ensuring that Erdogan seeks compromise with the other three political parties that have entered parliament. In this context, civil society will prove just as key to saving Turkish democracy as it did during the optimistic years after the EU accepted Turkey’s application for membership in 1999 and major reforms started coming down the pipe. Support for strengthening political parties and institution building has been enormously successful, but further progress is unlikely without funding and empowering civil society to hold the government and political parties in check and goad them to respond to democratic demands.

A democratic regression in Turkey will not only mark the end of a regional success story but also set back Islamist/conservative democrats in other Muslim states who view the AKP as an exemplar. As recent survey research attests, 66% of Arabs view Turkey as a democratic model.

Turkish democracy is neither a mission accomplished nor a lost cause. Authoritarian trends can be reversed and the AKP government may yet return to the more liberal politics of its inception. However, this will take serious work and dedication from the government, opposition political parties, and civil society. These elections and upcoming plans to draft a new constitution provide at once a strong impetus for reform and a new starting point.

Ragan Updegraff is a Research Associate in the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy and writes on the Turkish Politics in Action blog.

Will Turkey’s June 12 elections spark a shift from relatively liberal democracy to competitive authoritarianism?

Nobody doubts that the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, will win a handsome majority. But if it secures more than 330 out of 550 seats, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right) would be able to draft a new constitution based on his own preference for a strong presidency.

“It would be better for the country if he gets less than 330 votes,” says Sahin Alpay, a politics professor at Bahcesehir University. “That would give Erdogan the message that if he wants to resolve the country’s issues, he needs to work together with opposition parties. If he gets more than 330, he will attempt to do this on his own, based on his principles, which will not be healthy.”

Erdogan’s “increasingly autocratic streak and intolerance of criticism,” reflected in his moralistic strictures – for instance, that women should have at least three children – and government curbs on freedom of expression, are prompting analysts to caution that Turkey is no model for the Middle East.

The Turkish Journalists Association reports that 61 journalists are currently in prison and under the terms of a controversial new law, Turks will only be allowed to access the Internet via one of four state-regulated filters. Some 10,000 lawsuits are pending against writers and broadcasters, and  Turkey has fallen to 138th place in the press-freedom ranking of Reporters Without Borders, below Iraq and only slightly ahead of Russia, according to Katinka Barysch of the London-based Centre for European Reform.

The AKP has increased the size and power of the police force, reportedly as a counterweight to the secularist army. Two internationally celebrated journalists were jailed in March and have yet to face trial after they launched an investigation into claims that police ranks are increasingly dominated by supporters of the influential Islamist leader Fetullah Gülen.

When Ahmet Sik, a renowned human rights specialist, was arrested on charges of complicity in the reputed Ergenekon conspiracy, police confiscated drafts of his forthcoming book, “The Army of the Imam,” which reportedly contains new revelations about the movement.

Since 2007, the government has arrested dozens of uniformed and retired military officials, secular dissidents, intellectuals and journalists for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government, but others describe the affair as a creeping judicial coup in which the “fight against anti-democratic forces in Turkey has resorted to self-defeating anti-democratic methods.”

The arrests have contributed to a major increase in self-censorship as reporters and owners try to avoid the scrutiny of the authorities, says a leading commentator on Turkish politics.

“What’s true is that 80 percent or 60 percent if what goes into the newspapers is reliable and good. It’s what doesn’t get reported – the way the news is packaged — that is really damaging,” said Andrew Finkel.

“Finkel himself was a victim of that chilling effect,” a recent report notes. He was dismissed from his post as a columnist for Zaman, a newspaper supportive of the government and associated with the Gulenists, after he filed a piece defending Sik’s book.

Turkey’s electoral system is one of disproportional representation, which exaggerates the AK party’s power and gives it no incentive to compromise, says Soner Cagaptay.

Turkey has the highest threshold for parliamentary representation among liberal democracies at ten percent, effectively disenfranchising smaller parties. As a result, in the 2002 elections, he notes, the AKP won 66 percent of parliamentary seats in with only 34 percent of the votes.

“Although the party had campaigned on a platform of promoting a liberal agenda,” he writes, “the inflated political power that the threshold granted the AKP allowed it to embrace authoritarianism instead, because after all, the party was not accountable for almost half of the seats it received.”

If this month’s election produces a supermajority for the AKP, Turkey could undergo a pronounced shift to the kind of illiberal democracy associated with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, according to Soli Ozel, international relations professor at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University.

“We will be facing a more powerful Tayyip Erdogan and we will probably be facing a more authoritarian Turkey,” he says. “There is something in political science called electoral authoritarianism, or competitive authoritarianism, in which you have elections, you have institutions and stuff but power is terribly concentrated.”

Andrew Finkel is a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.