A university student (or a military cadet) might remember the post-modern coup in 1997 but would have been born after the last old-fashioned, soldiers-occupying-the-railway-and-radio-stations sort of coup in 1980. That same student would only have a fuzzy memory of the Motherland Party (ANAVATAN), which ruled Turkey after 1983 during the difficult transition back to civilian rule but which was to implode of its own accord once its founder, Turgut Özal, assumed the presidency. And even someone in their dotage would have trouble remembering the 11 different coalitions that governed Turkey during the 1990s. Most of those parties have also evaporated. The exception to this is the Republican People’s Party (CHP), whose leadership, public opinion polls suggest, has long outstayed its welcome. It’s strange to think that a primary school child born in 2000 is actually two years senior to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party).Turkey’s youth is often seen as an excuse for its institutional immaturity, an explanation for why public institutions are inchoate or still operate in a lower gear. Forget for a moment the slugfest between the courts and the military. Most people don’t even know if the current president is serving a five-year term and eligible for re-election or whether he is subject to the old rules and will serve out a seven-year, non-renewable period in office. It is as if the country is making up its institutional framework as it goes along.
One source of this immaturity is precisely the grey area between civil and military authority. At periods in Turkish history it is almost as if politicians behaved with child-like indulgence, feathering their own nests with a degree of blatancy that was almost an invitation for the high command to slap them on the wrist. The Welfare Party (RP)-True Path Party (DYP) government, whose downfall the military engineered in 1997, was not so much a coalition as an economic suicide pact in which cronyism was the order of the day and the reporting of public finances made the Greek bureau of statistics look like a seekers of divine truth. Yet more often than not the military (not to mention the press) tolerated political corruption as the bit of back-scratching that allowed them free rein. What was the Susurluk car accident (1996) if not evidence of that politics, the military and organized crime traveling together in the same back seat?
The current government rode into power on the back of serious discontentment with a political system that failed. And it is clear that their ability to fix that system has been compromised by constant assaults on their own legitimacy. They have had to fight closure cases in the Constitutional Court and, it would seem, far more nefarious efforts to drag them off their throne. Yet what is also clear is that the public now expects them to perform. Opinion polls (I cite the ones produced by MetroPOLL released at the end of last week) suggest that people really care less about the integrity of state institutions and more about is the state of the economy. Unemployment is the sample’s biggest headache (39 percent) followed by the recession in general (13 percent) and the cost of living (11 percent). Less than 1 percent of respondents list Ergenekon as their greatest worry.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that Turkey is not a so young as it might sometimes appear. The nation celebrates Oct. 29 as a national holiday -- the date in 1923 when the republic was first declared. From that perspective, Turkey has older institutions than a majority of European nations. And so while one can only hope that the current wrangles in the courts end with a victory for the principle of democratic accountability, such a victory will extract a price. Turkish institutions will have to acquire the demeanor of middle age.
