Naturally, there are governments that are unhappy with the progress of Turkey’s democracy. This discomfort is the case not only for authoritarian regimes in neighboring countries which fear that their populations, too, will be inspired by the Turkish case, but also for several other countries that are already members of the EU.
There is no doubt that some prominent members of the EU calculate that it will be far more difficult to reject Turkey’s accession to the EU when it becomes a more democratic country, so even if they can’t utter it loudly, they too dislike the idea of the improvement of Turkish democracy.
The existence of foreign countries that are unhappy with a more democratic Turkey is an important matter. However, it is more important to study those segments that are inside Turkey and which oppose the country’s democratization. We can identify two main players in this context: those who gather around the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) or, from a wider perspective, the Kurdish Communities Union (KCK); and those others who would like to get rid of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) at all costs. Theoretically speaking, these two groups are not only in a fight against the AK Party government but also with each other. One of them is generally labeled “pro-state” and the other “anti-state.” These two groups, although they seem diametrically opposed, have something in common: Both are against democracy, peace, the rule of law and transparency.
For many years, these groups lacked any common foe, and their fight between themselves was the only reason for their existence. In fact, they were able to justify their presence through almost only the existence of the opposite group.
Nevertheless, the AK Party government disrupted this equation and offered them the opportunity to work together against a common enemy. In the first years of its rule, the AK Party tried hard to abort their plans and took substantial and courageous steps towards democratization. However, from the moment the AK Party’s democratization reforms slowed down, these malevolent groups intensified their actions in order to push the government into a corner. To escape from this trap, instead of accelerating reform, the government chose to reinforce its ties with the state mechanism and hopes that reinforcing the central authority will solve most of the problems. In the absence of any credible and meaningful opposition in Parliament, those seeking to push the AK Party out through military coups or through terrorism (in other words, Ergenekon and the PKK/KCK) have started to see and present themselves as the one and only opposition that matters against the government in the country.
There remains, of course, one important question: Why does the government, despite the overwhelming popular support it enjoys, not put forward more reforms to improve democratization? It is obvious, for example, that the ongoing waves of arrests and prolonged detentions are being exploited to obstruct the government’s actions, but why does the latter still not undertake the necessary steps to change the game?
The other important question is why the perceptible alliance between the coup plotters and the separatists has still not been fully exposed. However, it is of course not easy to prove that the killers and the ones being killed did not reach an understanding at some point, and it becomes less easy to demonstrate this when foreign powers and their intelligence services are involved.
