Much has been written lately regarding Turkey’s apparent turn towards political Islam. The incumbent government, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) led by Prime Minister Erdoğan, has been repeatedly accused of maintaining a surreptitious agenda of creeping “Islamisation” inimical both to Turkey’s established secularism and its claim to “European values”.

Recently, the JDP’s attempt to forward a candidate, Foreign Minister Abdüllah Gül, for the Presidency has brought things to a head. Vigorously disseminated, yet wildly exaggerated, reports of mass protests on Turkey’s streets (quite arbitrarily characterised as driven by the reasonable concerns of Muslim “moderates”) and threatening references to the importance of guarding the guiding principles of Kemalism from the military elite prompted the Constitutional Court to prevent parliament from electing Gül with a ruling which, the judges themselves acknowledged, has no basis in Turkish law. The result was the withdrawal of Gül’s candidature and the scheduling of general elections for July.

Has this crisis really been about Islam’s role in the political sphere? Evidence for such a conclusion is scant. Apart what Erdoğan’s and Gül’s wives wear on their heads during public engagements and a tentative (and rapidly withdrawn) suggestion to introduce some degree of legal culpability for adultery (immediately pounced upon as the thin of a “sharia-isation” wedge which ends in a Tehran-style theocracy), the JDP have taken no concrete steps to loosen Turkey’s virulent repression of all aspects of religiosity deemed to be a threat. Beards and headscarves are still prohibited from the state-sector and the classroom, Friday sermons remain carefully monitored and Kemal’s legacy of inter-war European fascism continues to be ostensibly venerated in all quarters.

Instead, the JDP has presided over a wide range of liberalising constitutional reforms required to meet European Union accession criteria. Although slowed by Brussels’ lukewarm response, the growth of the far right in many European governments and the rise of discriminatory policies against Muslim minorities in the wake of the Madrid and London bombings, these have succeeded in cutting back the political authority of the armed forces. While little may have changed on the ground – especially in the highly militarised south-east of the country – it is clear that the generals’ capacity to depose a fifth democratically elected civilian government (previous interventions occurred in 1960 (just 10 years after Turkey’s first democratic election), 1971, 1980 and 1997) has been significantly eroded.

Concurrently, the JDP has, under intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and European leaders, embarked upon a wholesale sell-off of Turkey’s public assets. The state-owned telecommunications network has already gone (partly to Vodaphone), its hydrocarbon refinements plants have been broken up and sold and the banking sector, power generation and distribution networks are set to follow shortly. These measures, alongside a series of smaller privatisation initiatives, have proved to be a bonanza for European capital which controls over half of all foreign direct investment in Turkey – an area of the economy which has risen from a value of $1.7 billion in 2003 to more than $18 billion today. Consequently, local manufactures have, in an attempt to remain competitive, cut real wages by almost fifty per cent since 2001 which, with current unemployment levels topping 16 per cent, may be a better explanation of the recent street demonstrations (particularly given that they have been timed to coincide with the build-up to Labour Day on May 1st).

Such an acute rise in the power of foreign capital is also a direct threat to the Turkish military’s vast economic empire – OYAK. Founded in 1961 as a support fund for retired officers, it is now one of Turkey’s most powerful, and profitable, conglomerations with controlling equity investments in twenty-nine companies. Many of these – including concerns in mineral extraction, aggregate production, construction, packaging, agrochemical manufacturing and computing – are very vulnerable to overseas competition. So, while it is true that OYAK has been able to prosper from some of the JDP’s sell-off, its status as a quasi-state corporation (regulated by its own section of the constitution and outside normal auditing requirements) renders its future within a marketised economy uncertain at best.

In my opinion, it is the JDP’s policy of reducing the political role of the military elite, combined with the threat posed to its economic interests from the government’s privatisation programme, which offers the most persuasive explanation of Turkey’s current political crisis. Resisting Gül’s presidential candidature is, in reality, less about religion and more about money. The promulgation of a broader discourse on Turkey’s “Islamic peril” is therefore a useful (both internationally and domestically) device to allow the military elite to intervene should OYAK find itself disadvantaged by the JDP’s bargain bazaar or, perhaps more pertinently for the demonstrators on Turkish streets recently, should the arrival of European speculation capital impoverish Turkish people to a degree that destabilises the economy.


Tim Jacoby
Senior Lecturer
The Institute for Development Policy and Management
The University of Manchester
Harold Hankins Building
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9QH
tim.jacoby@manchester.ac.uk