He's destroying the other side completely, whether they are lawyers or government janitors. But in theory courts and military can stop him. He purged the military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%93present_purges_in... so it's just the court now.
Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
The voters can also stop him. Instead, Turkish voters not only re-elected him multiple times, they even voted in one special election to give him even more power.
The Turkish people are getting the government they've voted for.
>Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
Yes, but what can you do when a nation of people democratically decide to give someone absolute power? If you try to prevent this, then you're working against democracy.
It's not that simple. Erdogan massively repressed his rivals, such as the parties representing the Kurdish part of the population and their sympathizers (HDP) and the whole Gülen movement, not to mention the young movement protesting in the Gezi Park a few years ago. So we cannot pretend that the elections held were fair and open, e.g. the results aren't representative of the entire population of Turkey.
Results of any election are never representative of the entire population. That's the nature of democracy. If you have 99.999% of the population voting for the same person (like in Saddam's Iraq), then it's obvious the election was a sham. Democracy is all about the majority getting to choose the leaders.
As for repression, Erdogan didn't do that all by himself. Autocrats like that persist because they have a power structure under them that supports them and keeps them in power. In a democratic country like Turkey, this is supported by the people voting to keep these power structures in place. In short, the majority of the people there do support him. Yeah, it sucks that he repressed minorities, but that's one of the dangers of democracy: if the majority doesn't care about protecting minorities and their civil rights, then the minorities get stomped on. The only thing that makes a democratic system better than a completely autocratic system (like North Korea) is that at least in the democracy, there's a chance the majority will protect the minorities, and whatever institutions have been built in the system of government to do so and prevent leaders from having too much power. But as Turkey shows, and also in Germany in the 1930s, it sometimes falls apart, mainly because the people allow it to.
It's more complicated than that. The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them, often exerting power for the cult's interests[0] and topping off with the coup attempt in 2016.
In turn, the religious cult was allowed (by Erdoğan, with the 2010 referendum) to colonize the military and the judicial system because previously they were colonized by hardliner modernists who had a history of doing coups or closing down political parties when someone they don't like come to power, and explicitly threatened Erdoğan[1][2].
> The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them
Ok, just so we're clear on this: that's ridiculous nonsense, conspiracy theories basically, but you're using it to justify the indefensible actions of a hard-line authoritarian ruler.
While I wouldn't call the Gulenist movement a cult, they certainly engaged in conspiracies. The irony was that their infiltration into the army and civil service was supported by Erdoğan earlier, as a counterweight to the Kemalist establishment.
Turkey is the country that the term "deep state" was coined to describe. I don't know what to believe about the so-called coup.
Gulenist movement was certainly a cult, I live in Turkey and been to one of their school. I have the first-hand experience of their brainwashing methods and Gulenist indoctrination.
To me it always seemed like Gulen is the most internationally interviewed Turk for criticisms on Erdogan, whilst his own ideology doesn't seem so "modern" as well.
Would really appreciate If you could explain what Gulenism is about and particular where it differs from the Erdoganian Muslim Brotherhood ideology.
Didn't the same thing happen in South Korea with the Prime Minister being a puppet of some cult or such? What he says doesn't sound far-fetched, just unsubstantiated at this point.
Claiming a coup attempt as staged looks more like a conspiracy theory to me. Luckily, that was dismissed by the head of German intelligence[0].
> “The coup attempt was not initiated by the government. Before July 15 the government had already started a big purge so parts of the military thought they should do a coup quickly before it hit them too,” Kahl said.
In [0], Kahl dismisses the possibility that the Gülen movement did the coup. However, he fails to mention which other group in the military "feared" the purge and was big enough to attempt a coup.
If you combine that with:
- the 2010-11 purge of nationalist-modernists from the army was directed by Gülen people[1][2] (and supported by Erdoğan[3])
- all 4 military schools were totally infiltrated by Gülenists[4]
you would see that the Gülen movement was certainly in the army, and after the purge of nationalist-modernists, there was no other group in the Turkish army big enough and pissed off with the govt enough to attempt a coup. The testimonies of suspected army officers[5] mentioning Gülen is no surprise at this point.
When I see the purge of Gülen supporters to be generalized to Erdoğan opponents, something goes off in my mind. People who are against both Erdoğan and Gülen weren't targeted for that purge. If anything, they were trusted more than before, because many pro-Erdoğan people could get into state positions using Gülen connections pre-2013.
A good guestion to ask here is why did Erdoğan facilitate Gülen's infiltration of the institutions in the first place. As I mentioned above, it was because he feared a Kemalist coup or party shutdown. So, if Turkey didn't have the habit of "fending off populists with coups", none of this would happen. Or maybe it would?
All in all, what I'm trying to say is that the whole issue is more complex than "autocrat bad punish opponents".
That "coup" was merely a staged action. Can't tell me a real coup is over in like three hours and nothing happened. Sounds an awful lot like the german "Reichtagsbrand" which led to political cleanings and more.
We've seen the same script play out over and over and over again every time someone wants to become a dictator. So, rational people don't buy the excuses.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/un-urged-to-ac...