Surprisingly European

Mr Erdogan and his Islamist AK Party are not the obvious people to take Turkey into the EU

THE government now enthusiastically leading Turkey towards EU membership is an unlikely candidate for the job. Its two most powerful figures, the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, have strong Islamist roots.

Mr Erdogan, the son of a sea captain, was born and raised in a poor district of Istanbul. He earned his political spurs as mayor of the city in the 1990s, when he was notably successful in cleaning up its dreadful pollution and getting its gridlocked traffic moving.

As chairman of the one-year-old AK Party when it surprisingly but convincingly won the general election in 2002, Mr Erdogan was unable to take a seat in parliament immediately because of a 1998 conviction for inciting religious hatred by reading a poem in public. In the months it took for him to change the rules and obtain a parliamentary seat, Mr Gul stood in as prime minister.

Mr Gul himself was a member of parliament and minister for a strongly Islamic party, Welfare, which briefly headed a coalition government in the mid-1990s. In 1997, however, the party was expelled from the coalition in a forceful nudge by the armed forces that did not fall far short of a coup. The soldiers felt Welfare was pushing its Islamic agenda too strongly, forging links with the Arab world and looking to adopt elements of sharia law. Ziya Onis, a professor of international relations at Koc University in Istanbul, says that the armed forces in Turkey have always intervened to “re-equilibrate democracy, as opposed to a desire to assume power for its own sake”. And so it proved on this occasion.

Both Mr Erdogan and Mr Gul are distinctly more religious than any of their predecessors. Their wives wear headscarves and rarely appear in public. When her husband first took office, Mr Erdogan's wife, Emine, who comes from the town of Siirt in the Kurdish south-east of the country, would not even shake hands with other men, but now she does.

Mr Erdogan is regarded as a pragmatist who has changed since his days as an Islamic firebrand. In September 2004 he was persuaded by the EU and his country's armed forces to withdraw a proposal to criminalise adultery that had plenty of support within his own party. At a conference of European Green parties held in Istanbul in October 2004, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a fiery leader of student riots in Paris in 1968 and now the respectable co-head of the Greens in the European Parliament, said that Mr Erdogan, whom he had first met ten years earlier, “has changed as much as me”.

In his speeches, the prime minister likes to get away from the past and look to the future. “The past” might mean Kemalism, but it might also refer to previous Islamic-leaning politicians. When Mr Gul went off on a peace-broking trip to Israel and Palestine at the beginning of this year, Mr Erdogan said that Turkey was now ready to fill a gap in the region left by its retreat into itself years ago.

In his government, Mr Erdogan wants idealists who always see the glass as half full, not half empty. His party's goal is to “develop every corner of the country and redistribute national income”. That befits a politician brought up in the slums of Istanbul, a city with great and highly visible extremes of wealth.

Apart from Mr Gul and the American-educated economy minister, Ali Babacan, few of the AK Party's ministerial team speak foreign languages, but outsiders who know them are impressed by their efficiency. Kemal Dervis, a senior World Bank official who was called back from Washington, DC, to become finance minister under Mr Ecevit (after one of Turkey's periodic financial crises in 2001), has said that if the government he served in had been anything like as efficient as this one, it would still be in power today.

The AK Party has learnt lessons from Welfare's experience, dropping many of its predecessor's more radical Islamic policies but holding on to the reputation for honesty in public affairs that, after many years of sleaze in both the public and the private sectors, had propelled it to the top in the first place. The letters AK stand for Adalet ve Kalkinma, Justice and Development. But the word ak in Turkish means white, and by implication clean and pure.

Look west

The party soon made it clear that its priorities lay not to the east or the south, but to the west. On hearing of his election victory, Mr Erdogan said: “Our most urgent issue is the EU, and I will send my colleagues to Europe...We have no time to lose.”

Showing enthusiasm for EU membership was hardly controversial. Opinion polls at the time of the 2002 election suggested that some 70% were in favour across the country as a whole, and as many as 95% among the Kurds. If the experience of the ten countries that joined the EU in May 2004 is anything to go by, those figures will fall as Turks begin to realise that most of the 80,000 pages of EU rules that they must take on board are not negotiable. If they join, all sorts of things - from the size of their apples to the state of their factory toilets - will be decided in Brussels.

But none of this is likely to affect the results of the next Turkish general election, which is due in 2007. The AK Party's popularity has increased steadily, to the point where opinion polls now give it more than 50% of the vote. It won the 2002 election with a mere 34%, but under Turkey's electoral rules that gave it 363 seats in parliament, two-thirds of the total.

The only other party to win any seats was the Republican People's Party (CHP), led by Deniz Baykal, whose 19% share gave it 178 MPs. This has been one of the few occasions in Turkey's short democratic history when the country has been free from the constraints of coalition government. But AK's parliamentary majority is so overwhelming that some think democracy would be better served by a little more opposition.

This arithmetic hinges on the 10% threshold for parliamentary representation. (Germany, which some people see as a model, has a threshold of 5%. But it also has a long tradition of effective coalition government, which Turkey does not.) Kurds complain that the system leaves them entirely unrepresented. DEHAP, a pro-Kurdish party, got more than 6% of the total vote in 2002 (and more than 45% in the five main Kurdish provinces), yet it ended up without a single seat in parliament. However, this parliament contains more Kurdish MPs than any previous one, probably over 100. And the 10% threshold had the advantage of keeping out of power a man several members of whose family have been found guilty of massive fraud. The Youth Party, led by Cem Uzan, won 7% of the votes in the election.

Despite Mr Erdogan's nigh-impeccable record so far in both economic and foreign affairs, most of the Kemalists in Istanbul and Ankara suspect that he has a hidden agenda which, once revealed, will show the AK Party in its true colour: an intense Islamic green. They sincerely believe that it is merely using the prospect of EU membership to reduce the power of the armed forces before turning the country into an Islamic state, something akin to Iran.

They are not reassured by the argument that, just as approaching EU membership protects civilian rule against military interference, so it defends it against religious takeover. Ah yes, they say, but EU membership will never actually come about. Somewhere along the way it will be vetoed. And then Turkey will be left in the hands of the AK Party, and all the good works of Ataturk and his republican successors will be undone.

Article is part of an Economist survey on Turkey and argues that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, are not the obvious people to take Turkey into the European Union.

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