President Erdogan of Turkey has been the strong man of Turkish politics for quite a long while, surely after the failure of the pathetic coup in July 2016. Since then, he and his government have ruled by emergency decrees, after detaining tens of thousands of real and presumed political opponents, and dismissing well over 100,000 teachers, judges, government officials and other public servants.
Still, the Turkish President wanted more slices of the government pie ― in fact all of it. He wanted changes in the constitution which will make him the total ruler of Turkey until 2029, and be able to do whatever he wants, whether by decrees or by declaring emergency rule at will.
He surely declared this referendum intended to confirm all these constitutional changes because he was certain of a landslide. Well, no landslide, but a very modest victory with a margin of 2-3 percent only. Yes, a victory by even a margin of one vote is a victory, but there are situations in which a small majority may become a liability, rather than an asset, and Turkey, a nation of 80 million people is experiencing exactly such a situation as of tonight.
Government spokesmen admit, that the margin of victory was disappointing, though Erdogan himself declared full victory, whereas the two main opposition parties, the Republican People Party [CHP], and the Kurdish Party[HDP], claim that large scale shenanigans enabled Erdogan to win.
To start with, we have a battle over legitimacy, a situation which can destabilize the country rather than ensure smooth transition to a one-man show as envisaged by Erogan. The debate over the actual legitimacy of the results will make it much harder for Erdogan to engage in the real goal which he has had in mind ever since his AK Party came to power in 2002-to dismantle the Kemalist secular Republic.
To do away with the revolution of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who turned the state established on the ruins of the Ottoman Jihadist Khalifate into a secular, Western-Oriented state in which the separation between state and mosque, unheard of until then in the Muslim world, was the main pillar of the new constitution.
What made Ataturk [the Father of the Turks in Turkish] one of the greatest though least-appreciated revolutionaries of the 20th Century was his victory over Western Imperialist designs in the name of nationalism, in order to become a Western state, rather than to fight the West. He proved that it was not only in the name of Islam, that Muslim people could successfully resist Western political and cultural domination. Erdogan has a completely different vision.
It is not only the opposition to the anti-Islamic Ataturk revolution, it is also a renewal of the old opposition to the West in the name of Islam. It is not an attempt to have a modern-day violent Jihad against the West, but a more nuanced version of being part of the Western political world, for example, to continue being in NATO and if possible, also to join the EU, but to maintain and strengthen Turkey’s separate cultural identity, than that of the rest of the Western world.
Whereas in Europe leaders like Angela Merkel and others promoted and defended multi-multiculturalism [much less so now], Erdogan wants cultural isolation, and Europe has rejected this notion, and will continue to reject it in the future. In fact, Erdogan, a master politician, a strategist as well as a tactician, made the maximum political capital from Europe’s display of antagonism towards Turkey, and it will not be a gross unrealistic assumption to argue that his ability to play the Islamic card alongside the Turkish nationalist one may have contributed to his narrow victory, while many public opinion polls predicted a different result until very recently.
The narrow margin of the victory was achieved by the big majority which he gained in rural Turkey, where it has become clear for many years that the Kemalist revolution was less popular than in the big cities. In fact in Istanbul, Ankara and other big cities the No vote had the upper hand, though not all the No vote is Kemalist-oriented, as many of the opponents are Kurds, traditionally anti-Kemalist element of the population and not a small one.
Altogether though Erdogan can claim victory, but he will have to be very careful in terms of making good on it. The Kemalist camp is still around, weakened but not completely defeated, and it is in the big cities where popular, mass opposition to Erdogan can still and may very well erupt again in ways, which will cause internal disorders. Erdogan is going to face a challenge he did not expect ― how to deal with his win.