Right up to the wire, there was a hope that Turkey might say “no” to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s eternal-seeming authoritarian regime. It was not a big hope, admittedly. Having jailed thousands of his opponents, including one of his presidential rivals, muzzled the media and tamed the courts, all the tools were at his disposal in the June 24 elections.
Despite the overwhelming odds against them, however, Turkey’s fractured opposition parties mounted a surprisingly robust challenge. As Balkan Insightreported, at one point it seemed Erdogan might be forced into a second round in the presidential race and be deprived of an overall majority in parliament.
That hope, or fear, has now gone – and Erdogan’s victory will have consequences way beyond Turkey’s borders, because his win marks another step towards the completion of a new political architecture for Eastern Europe, the Balkans, included, defined by the rule of strongmen.
A new “Eastern Bloc” is being formed, along much the same geographical lines as that described by Britain’s Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, when he warned of an “iron curtain” descending across Europe.
As the UK Guardian’s Simon Jenkins put it on Monday, following the Turkish election: “Populism is becoming the norm across a swath of states in eastern Europe, characterised by personal rule, xenophobia and the suppression of parliamentary and media opposition.”
This new “curtain”, of course, is not made of communist iron but of much softer material, and it cuts right through the European Union.
But it has its own distinctive characteristics, marked, as Jenkins said, by the rule of patriarchal strongmen, high-octane nationalism, the stigmatization of opposition as treasonous – and by hollowed-out democratic institutions.
These, in turn, are marked out by weak media, pliant courts, tame parliaments, parties that act as little more than choruses for the leader and a political culture of secrecy and unaccountability.
There were significant differences in the countries of the old Eastern Bloc – and there are differences in the new one, too.
Putin and Erdogan operate at the extreme end of the illiberal spectrum, unsurprisingly, given democracy’s shallow roots in both Turkey and Russia.
Viktor Orban and Aleksandar Vucic have to tread more warily and pay more lip service to their countries’ democratic traditions. They both have to be careful because Serbs and Hungarians and both “peoples of the barricades” – submissive one minute, not the next.
Orban and Vucic have to be strongmen of a different, milder type. They control most of the levers of power, but neither can, or possibly wishes to, simply arrest their opponents.
But, together – and they do work together – the strongmen of Hungary-plus-Serbia and Russia-plus Turkey form an axis that increasingly defines their own region, and sets its countries apart from Western Europe.
And, with Erdogan confirmed in post, the remaining more liberal polities in Eastern Europe – those states in which power is genuinely dispersed – are starting to look isolated.
From being the norm in the 1990s, they are becoming exceptions. The pluralistic exceptions are also, in the main, the smallest and weakest states in the region, such as Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania.
In this context, in which strongmen [Hungary, Serbia, Russia and Turkey] or strong parties [Poland] increasingly define the “political weather”, the outcome of events in Romania may be decisive.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
