The Human Freedom Index 2021 just came out. It shows a concerning decline in freedom in countries where 83 percent of the global population lives. Among these, there are five countries whose trajectories in the past ten years are the worst of all. These are Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bahrain, and my home country, Turkey.
The graph above, adapted from the Human Freedom Index, puts Turkey’s tragic decline visually: in 2009, Turkey ranked 83rd on the index. In ten years, it declined to 139th place. It is a remarkably downhill slide.
How did this happen? How did Turkey lose its freedom so dramatically?
The answer has lots to do with the man who has ruled Turkey in an increasingly single-handed way in the past decade: President Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP.) But there is also something curious. Erdogan and the AKP have been in power since 2002. This implies that they must have been doing not too badly in their earlier years. In fact, the graph above even shows an uphill trend from 2008 to 2009. (Other measures of global freedom that go earlier than 2008, such as by Freedom House, also shows a slight uphill trend in Turkey in the early 2000s, and then at least no decline until 2010.)
So, it seems that the decline of freedom in Turkey did not immediately begin with the AKP rule in 2002. It began rather in the second phase of AKP rule after 2010. How did that happen?
The answer is complex, but here it is in a nutshell: The AKP came out of Turkey’s Islamist movement, whose ideology was unmistakably authoritarian. But in the early 2000’s, after suffering a “soft coup” by the hyper-secularist military, some of these longtime Islamists claimed to have changed. Now they were “conservative democrats,” eager to make Turkey join the European Union, and even correct the injustices of the old secular establishment. Moreover, they really followed this route in their early years in power, realizing liberal reforms, boosting the economy, gaining the support of many Turkish liberals (including myself), and even earning global esteem as “the Turkish model.”
However, the AKP’s very success, and the power that came with it, initiated a shift in the early 2010s. Now they were not newcomers to the state, correcting its past injustices. Now they themselves were the state, building their own injustices. So, as I put in a 2013 piece, the AKP began to confirm the cyclical view of history proposed by the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, where conquerors soon turn into what they conquered.
It also became clear that the AKP’s ideological transformation was not genuine. As I put in a 2016 piece in the New York Times, “Whatever Happened to the ‘Turkish Model’?”
The AKP adopted a liberal discourse out of mere necessity, without giving it much thought or going through a real ideological transformation. Once the party grabbed power, its members were tempted, intoxicated and corrupted by it. The cadres and classes that now rally behind Mr. Erdogan have found wealth, prestige and glory for the first time in their lives. They seem determined not to lose them — regardless of what that means for Turkish democracy.
To be fair, there were some principled people in the party who remained loyal to the original vision. But they were pushed out one by one, and even condemned as “traitors.” (Two of them, Ahmet Davutoglu and Ali Babacan, are now leading small opposition parties. Another, former president Abdullah Gul, is silently but clearly on the side of the opposition.)
While these saner people were pushed out, the AKP turned into a cult of personality: Erdoganism. Accordingly, Erdogan was the savior that Turkey was awaiting for a century. He was making Turkey great, Muslim, and “independent” again — and that is why he was the target of endless conspiracies cooked up by global cabals. Domestic opposition to Erdogan was also mastered by these foreign enemies of Turkey. Opposition to Erdogan, therefore, was treason to the nation.
This authoritarian narrative appeared in 2013, in a political system which was still democratic and somewhat liberal. But it began to corrode the system from within. By 2015, the trajectory was frighteningly visible, as I put in a New York Times piece on “Turkey’s Authoritarian Drift”:
Mr. Erdogan could simply keep accumulating power, leading to a system with an all-powerful Russian-style presidency without checks and balances… If recent trends continue, more critical newspapers and TV channels could be crushed or taken over by government sympathizers, turning all Turkish media into different versions of the same Pravda. The judiciary could become a mere handmaiden to the government, and even universities, which are all tied to the recently strengthened “Higher Board of Education,” could be disciplined by the state. Turkey could easily become a tyranny of the majority, embodied in the rule of an all-powerful man.
Which is exactly what happened since then. In this, ironically, Erdogan was helped by the plotters of the failed coup attempt of July 2016. It was a real, serious, and bloody attempt — and an illegitimate one, too, as I put it then. Yet, inadvertently, it gave Erdogan the pretext to enact a regime of permanent emergency, with unlimited power to purge any institution and to punish any vocal critic.
To get a sense of these punishments, just look at Turkey’s legal cases on “insulting the President” — a “crime” with prison sentences up six years. Since 2014, the year Erdogan became president, a staggering number of 160,169 investigations were launched over insulting the president, 35,507 cases were filed, and 12,881 people were convicted. Some people shared cartoons of Erdogan on social media, soon to have police at their door, and to be locked up for months. Other people “insulted the president” during a chat on a public bus, only to be arrested at the next bus stop.
In this “one-man regime,” as Turkish dissidents call it, the President, intoxicated with absolute power and surrounded by incompetent sycophants, also found the chance to test his eccentric ideas on the whole nation. The most fateful of these was “Erdoganomics,” a pseudoscience that ruined the Turkish economy, as the President’s ideological obsession with interest rates led to the collapse of the national currency, soaring inflation, price controls, and ultimately shortages.
As I was writing these lines, the economic scene was getting grimmer, with breadlines appearing in poorer neighbors. The New York Times reported from one of those spots, noting “many Turks can’t afford bread, and bakers can’t afford to make it.” The reporter also observed:
Most people did not want to be interviewed for fear of getting into trouble for criticizing the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which frequently detains his critics. Those who spoke declined to give their names.
That understandable fear, and the inexcusable authoritarianism behind it, brought Turkey to this sad point. As the Human Freedom Index 2021 shows, in the past ten years, the nation gradually lost much of its freedom. Consequently, it is now also losing much of its wealth — and even its bread.
