Erdogan is not afraid to break taboos. In the final days of his campaign, he and his deputies dropped a number of rhetorical bombshells on the Turkish public. After a female journalist questioned whether a "Muslim society is able to question" authorities, Erdogan charged her with insulting Muslims and Islam, calling her a "shameless militant." Days earlier, deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc — a leading contender to assume Erdogan's position as prime minister and party leader — grabbed headlines when he delivered his guidance on female chastity and morality, lamenting the supposed indecency of women laughing in public.
In trying to discredit his opponents, Erdogan also tried to play the ethnic card. Referring to Republican People's Party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and People's Democratic Party leader and pro-Kurdish presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas, Erdogan earlier said "Kilicdaroglu, you are an Alevi and I am Sunni. You should state this openly. Demirtas, you are Zaza. Don't be worried about speaking out about this." (Alevis are a liberal sectarian subset of Shiite Islam often at odds with the religiosity of Turkey's ruling Sunni-dominated Justice and Development Party — better known by its Turkish acronym, AKP — and Zazas are a subset of Turkey's ethnic Kurdish group.) When he was asked about these remarks on a nationally televised broadcast, Erdogan pushed the ethnic boundary even further when he said, "Let all Turks in Turkey say they are Turks and all Kurds say they are Kurds. What is wrong with that? You wouldn't believe what they have said about me. They have said that I am Georgian … they have even said uglier things — they have called me Armenian, but I am Turkish."
Such remarks have naturally had a polarizing effect on the electorate and beyond Turkey's borders, but these were not political blunders. Erdogan is very consciously redefining Turkishness in a Turkish republic born out of a multiethnic empire.
The Ataturk Connection
Like many things in Turkey, this all comes back to the father of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In a speech commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Republic of Turkey in 1933, Ataturk coined the phrase, ne mutlu Turkum diyene, which translates to "how happy is he who calls himself a Turk." This phrase can be heard and seen frequently in Turkey, and was even recited daily in Turkish schools as part of the pledge of allegiance until it was removed by Erdogan's decree in 2013 in recognition of the Kurds. The phrase remains on plaques below a bust of Ataturk in many Turkish schoolyards, provocatively including those special schools established for Turkey's recognized minorities, Armenians, Greeks and Jews.
The indoctrination of a super-Turkish identity was part and parcel of the nation-building process. Ataturk led an ambitious project to pick up the pieces of Anatolia left by war and create a Turkish nationalist identity that would somehow erase the religious and ethnic lines of the Ottoman Empire. By the time Ataturk's new republic was declared, most of Anatolia's Armenian population had been eliminated by ethnic violence that began in the 19th century. The die was thus cast for the creation of an ultra-Turkish polity. Meanwhile, the Greek population exited most of Anatolia in the 1920s as part of a League of Nations project to avoid a repeat of earlier slaughter. And when Ataturk died in the 1930s, his heir followed only a few years later with a special tax on non-Muslims that devastated those remaining communities. The remaining Greek population of a quarter million began exiting after a series of anti-Greek pogroms in the 1950s.
Throughout the decadeslong purge of non-Muslim minorities, the young Republic held onto non-Turkish Muslims, including Kurds, Turkmen, Laz (from the Black Sea region near Georgia), Circassians (descendants from the northern Caucasus), Arabs and Alevis (a blanket term for a group of heterodox religious minorities, some of whom are an extension of Syria's Alawites and others who relate more closely to Twelver Shiism practiced in Iran). Ataturk and his heirs had effectively fashioned a 99.8 percent Muslim country. However, Islam was not to be the ultimate binder of the new republic. From this patchwork of ethnic and religious groups, Ataturk created a nation that would look to Europe's secularism for moral and political guidance and would consider themselves as Turks and only Turks, without exception.
The experiment was flawed from the start. Religiosity and ethnicity can be blurred, manipulated and suppressed, but cannot be erased. Kurdish nationalism underpinned by left-wing radicalism surged in Turkey in the 1970s, along with a revived Alevi consciousness. A slow-building political campaign led by Anatolia's conservative class took root with the long-term goal of bringing down the Kemalist secular elite. Rebellion on multiple fronts ensued over decades, and the military upheld Ataturk's legacy of Turkish nationalism through violent crackdowns and military coups.
The AKP Transformation
Fast-forward to the present, and Turkey is virtually unrecognizable. Under Erdogan's AKP, the right to practice Islam has been fiercely defended. Meanwhile secular habits, from drinking alcohol in public to women wearing lipstick, have come under scrutiny by a leadership that speaks for the conservative masses.
Ethnic identities have meanwhile emerged from the shadows. A Kurd is running for president, a peace process with the Kurdistan Workers' Party is under way and the term Kurdistan has become a regular feature of Turkey's political discourse. Erdogan is openly calling out his candidates' ethnic roots, effectively telling them to embrace them. The fact that Erdogan comes from Rize on the Black Sea and has ethnic Laz roots is frankly unremarkable, as are the many politicians, business leaders and military officers with full, partial or mixed Kurdish, Laz, Circassian, Zaza and Armenian roots. These are the products of an empire that uniquely straddled two continents in perhaps the most diverse region of the world. Ataturk's austere definition of Turkish nationalism began to erode decades ago, and Erdogan is simply hurling that reality in the public eye with all the controversy that entails.
In trying to differentiate himself from Erdogan, Republican People's Party presidential candidate Ihsanoglu led his campaign with the message that it is time to end the abuse of religion for the sake of politics. Alevi voters who have thrown their support behind the Republican People's Party are at the same time warning that Erdogan is taking Turkey down a dangerous and discriminatory path. But all of Turkey's political factions are playing the ethnic and religious card in different ways. Erdogan and the AKP have legitimized the most serious peace process with the Kurdistan Workers' Party to date and expect Kurdish votes to follow the party at the polls. Even as Demirtas is unlikely to win, his candidature symbolizes the growing political clout of Turkey's Kurds. The Republican People's Party, which has traditionally attracted votes from Turkey's Kemalist pole, is now trying to compete for both Kurdish and AKP votes by asserting it will be just as supportive of a peace track with the Kurdistan Workers' Party and more open to the sensitivities of Turkey's religiously minded voters.
On one level, these are short-term political tactics designed to differentiate or assimilate depending on the voting bloc, a trend that will continue through the 2015 parliamentary elections. But there is an underlying reality to these campaign strategies. Just as the strict Kemalist definition of Turkish nationalism was unsustainable, so too will be the conservative authoritarianism embodied currently in Erdogan. Erdogan remains in a strong position for now. While he speaks just for roughly half the electorate, the other half is too divided to pose a serious challenge in the 2014-2015 election cycle. Turkey's growing religiosity and ethnic consciousness points to a much more fractured political landscape in the longer term, one that increasingly reflects, rather than subsumes, a pre-republic identity that no one party will be able to easily dominate.
