When a Populist Becomes the Deep State
The American Conservative · R · trust 38/100
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been the most influential Turkish statesman in a century. Will his project survive him?
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The Iran War has, for good reason, subsumed all coverage of the broader Middle East in the Anglophone media, and God knows there’s plenty there to fill the column inches. Still, one wonders: What on earth is going on in Turkey?
In the parlance of the craps table, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is on a heater. Last May, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terrorist ethnic separatist group, was notionally dissolved after its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, called for it to lay down arms. In a visit to Washington last September, the Turkish president secured a memorandum of understanding for developing a civilian nuclear program and grab-bag of defense goodies, including jet engine sales. At July’s NATO summit Ankara, President Donald Trump (who said he was attending the powwow only because of his affection for his Turkish counterpart) made favorable indications about lifting sanctions to allow Turkey to acquire American F-35 jets. European leaders praised Turkey’s role in stabilizing Syria after Assad—in whose ouster Turkish arms and support were decisive—and discussed deeper cooperation with Turkey’s defense industry. References to Erdoğan’s interference with opposition parties and his crackdown on critics in the media were negligible. Nor does his outspoken criticism of Israeli operations in Gaza seem to turn off pro-Israel leaders like Trump. In August, he signed a mutual defense agreement—the Mecca Defense Alliance—with his counterparts from Riyadh and Islamabad.
Erdoğan has contended in the top ranks of Turkish politics for 30 years, but now he is playing at the big table in the international casino—a long way from the uncertainty of the coup attempt of 2016, when he and his future were caught literally up in the air. Despite the president’s high-flying capers abroad, all is not well at home. At writing, Turkey’s inflation rate is almost 30 percent , admittedly far down from a high of about 85 percent in 2022. Growth, which has been robust through the Erdoğan years, is slowing . Even as Turkey’s hard power appears to increase, Turks are feeling less secure; in a July 2025 poll , in the immediate aftermath of the so-called 12-Day War, 71 percent of respondents said that Turkey should start developing nuclear weapons.
At the same time, Erdoğan’s political tactics are becoming more overtly repressive, engendering further public dissatisfaction. Hassling the press has become the standard way of doing business in Turkey, and barely draws international comment anymore. Most recently and spectacularly, the Erdoğan-appointed judiciary in May voided the leadership elections of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the oldest political party in the country and the main opposition party, to instate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as chairman over the somewhat more dynamic Özgür Özel. What ensued can be described only as excellent television: Riot police broke into CHP headquarters physically to remove Özel from the premises. Acrimony broke out, accusations of government stoogery flew, and Özel insulted Kılıçdaroğlu’s mustache. Finally, in July,
Özel and most of the party with him broke away from the court-sanctioned CHP to form a new party, inventively christened the Yeni Parti—the New Party. Among those who endorsed the Yeni Party is the relatively young, telegenic, and popular Ekrem Imamoğlu, the jailed and suspended mayor of Istanbul, who had been expected to be CHP’s 2028 presidential candidate. In his July speech announcing the party schism, Özel accused the derin devlet —the “deep state”—of persecuting Erdoğan’s political adversaries.
This is an ironic and amusing turn of events. “Deep state” is an originally Turkish term, used to describe the elite complex that preserved the republic’s Kemalism—which is to say, in large part, preserving the preeminence of CHP, Mustafa Kemal’s party.
There’s a long and convoluted history here. Atatürk established a secular republic on the continental European model. He removed any reference to Islam from the Turkish constitution, abolished the legal office of the caliph, and launched a series of reforms to cultivate a secular Turkish nationalism and degrade traditionally powerful religious structures: banning Sufi lodges, bringing religious education under the tutelage of the state, imprisoning restive sheikhs, and “purifying” the Turkish language by purging words of Arabic and Persian origin (or finding “Turkish” etymologies for them of varying plausibility). Briefly, the Arabic call to prayer was banned and a Turkish version mandated. Unsurprisingly, much of this top-down, elite program was unpopular with the people; the Turks have been Muslims for a thousand years, and many of Turkey’s ethnic minorities have a particularly close relationship with the practice of Islam, notably the Kurds. Contrary to the impression created by Western-facing Kurdish nationalists, largely dominated by the secularist, leftist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and its affiliates, Kurdistan was the vibrant center of much of the Ottoman Empire’s religious life.
This period engendered the great antithetical poles of modern Turkish politics: secularism versus political Islam, elitism versus populism, nationalism versus pluralism. It is a testament to Atatürk’s greatness that he was able to contain these contradictions. Also to his pragmatism. (For all the work of the language reformers, Atatürk never abandoned his graceful Ottoman prose style. Evidently a single state dinner at which he haltingly delivered a speech written in “pure Turkish” was enough for him.) His successor, İsmet İnönü, was a figure of less stature, who relied more heavily on the tools of state repression to advance the Turkish project, jailing more dissidents—particularly religious dissidents—and for a time banning political parties besides…
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