an excuse—is suppressing and punishing all signs of dissent as “terrorism.” As Trump enters the White House, the AKP and far-right nationalist supermajority in the Turkish parliament is this month stripping the assembly of its powers and transferring them wholesale to the presidency. President Erdogan will become an elected dictator able to dissolve parliament, veto legislation, decide the budget, and appoint ministers who do not have to be MPs.
All power will be concentrated in Erdogan’s hands as the office of prime minister is abolished and the president, who can serve three five-year terms, takes direct control of the intelligence services. He will appoint senior judges and the head of state institutions, including the education system. These far-reaching constitutional changes are reinforcing an ever-expanding purge begun after the failed military coup last year, in which more than 100,000 civil servants have been detained or dismissed. This purge is now reaching into every walk of life, from liberal journalists to businessmen who have seen $10 billion in assets confiscated by the state.
The similarities between Erdogan and Trump are greater than they might seem, despite the very different political traditions in the US and Turkey. The parallel lies primarily in the methods by which both men have gained power and seek to enhance it. They are populists and nationalists who demonise their enemies and see themselves as surrounded by conspiracies. Success does not sate their pursuit of more authority. Hopes in the US that, after Trump’s election in November, he would shift from aggressive campaign mode to a more conciliatory approach have dissipated over the last two months. Towards the media, his open hostility has escalated, as was shown by his abuse of reporters at his press conference this week.
Manic sensitivity to criticism is a hallmark of both men. In Trump’s case, this is exemplified by his tweeted denunciation of critics such as Meryl Streep, while in Turkey, 2,000 people have been charged with insulting the president. One man was tried for posting on Facebook three pictures of Gollum, the character in The Lord of the Rings, with similar facial features to pictures of Erdogan posted alongside. Of the 259 journalists in jail around the world, no less than eighty-one are in Turkey. American reporters may not yet face similar penalties, but they can expect intense pressure on the institutions for which they work to mute their criticisms.
Turkey and the US may have very different political landscapes, but there is a surprising degree of uniformity in the behaviour of Trump and Erdogan. This type of political leadership is not new: the most compelling account of it was written seventy years ago in 1947 by the great British historian Sir Lewis Namier, in an essay reflecting on what he termed “Caesarian democracy,” which over the previous century had produced Napoleon III in France, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany. His list of the most important aspects of this toxic brand of politics is as relevant today as it was when first written since all the items apply to Trump, Erdogan, and their like. Namier described Caesarian democracy as typified by “its direct appeal to the masses: demagogical slogans; disregard of legality despite a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political parties and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises to all and sundry; militarism; gigantic blatant displays and shady corruption. Panem et circenses [bread and circuses] once more—and at the end of the road, disaster.”
Disaster comes in different forms. One disability of elected dictators or strongmen is that, impelled by an exaggerated idea of their own capacity, they undertake foreign military adventures beyond their country’s strength. The disaster that Namier predicted was the natural end of elected dictators has already begun to happen in Turkey. The Turkish leader may have succeeded in monopolising power at home, but at the price of provoking crises and deepening divisions within Turkish society. The country is embroiled in the war in Syria, thanks to Erdogan’s ill-judged intervention there since 2011. This led to the PKK establishing a de facto state in northern Syria and Isis doing the same in Syria and Iraq. At home, Erdogan restarted the war with the Turkish Kurds for electoral reasons in 2015 and the conflict is now more intractable than ever. Every few weeks in Turkey, there is another terrorist attack, which is usually the work of Isis or a faction of the PKK—although the government sometimes blames atrocities on the followers of Fethullah Gulen, who are alleged to have carried out the attempted military coup last July. In addition to this, there is an escalating financial crisis, which has seen the Turkish lira lose 12 percent of its value over the last two weeks. Foreign and domestic investment is drying up as investors become increasingly convinced that Turkey has become chronically unstable.
Erdogan and Trump have a further point in common: both have an unquenchable appetite for power and achieve it by exploiting and exacerbating divisions within their own countries. They declare they will make their countries great again, but in practise make them weaker. They are forever sawing through the branch on which they—and everybody else—are sitting.
20 January 2017
Inequality has increased everywhere with politically momentous consequences, a development much discussed as a reason for the populist-nationalist upsurge in Western Europe and the US. But it has also had a significant destabilising impact in the wider Middle East. Impoverished Syrian villagers, who once looked to the state to provide jobs and meet their basic needs at low prices, found in the decade before 2011 that their government no longer cared what happened to them. They poured in their millions into gimcrack housing on the outskirts of Damascus and Aleppo, cities whose richer districts looked more like London or Paris. Unsurprisingly, it was these same people, formerly supporters of the ruling Baath Party, who became the backbone of the popular revolt. Their grievances were not dissimilar from those of unemployed coal miners in former Democratic Party strongholds in West Virginia who voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.
Neoliberal free-market economic reforms were even more destructive of political and social stability in the Middle East and North Africa than in Europe and the US. In dictatorships or arbitrary monarchies without political accountability or rule of law, such changes further crony capitalism: access to the narrow circle wielding political power becomes the essential key to riches. Governments turn into giant looting machines under the kleptocratic guidance of a few ruling families. In Baghdad a few years ago, heavier than usual winter showers flooded the streets to the depth of a foot or more with an evil-smelling grey mixture of water and sewage. I asked an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources why this had happened and she explained, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary, that over the previous decade the Iraqi government had spent $7 billion on a new sewage system for the capital, but either it had never existed, or the sewers were too badly built to carry away rainwater.
In the US, Europe, and the Middle East, there were many who saw themselves as the losers from globalisation, but the ideological vehicle for protest differed markedly from region to region. In Europe and the US, it was right-wing nationalist populism which opposes free trade, mass immigration, and military intervention abroad. The latter theme is much more resonant in the US than in Europe because of Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump instinctively understood that he must keep pressing these three buttons, the importance of which Hillary Clinton and most of the Republican Party leaders, taking their cue from their donors rather than potential voters, never appreciated.
The vehicle for protest and opposition to the status quo in the Middle East and North Africa is, by way of contrast, almost entirely religious and is only seldom nationalist, the most important example being the Kurds. This is a big change from fifty years ago when revolutionaries in the region were usually nationalists or socialists, but both beliefs were discredited by corrupt and authoritarian nationalist dictators and by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Secular nationalism was, in any case, something of a middle-class creed in the Arab world, limited in its capacity to provide the glue to hold societies together in the face of crisis. When Isis forces were advancing on Baghdad after taking Mosul in June 2014, it was a fatwa from the Iraqi Shia religious leader Ali al-Sistani that rallied the resistance. No non-religious Iraqi leader could have successfully appealed to hundreds of thousands of people to volunteer to fight to the death against Isis.
The Middle
