 Hello and welcome to Newsclick. Today we have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmed and we will discuss the recent results in Turkey and the implications for Turkish society. Ajaz, this election in which we are getting the endorsement as it were of the presidential form of government, how do you see this for Turkish society and Turkish political scenario? I think this is a watershed moment in the history of Turkey. There is a moment of absolutization of power that Erdogan has been seeking over the entire period of his tenure first as a Prime Minister for three terms. Then he became a president in 2014 and then there was the recent referendum last year which changed the presidential system. The referendum was actually very narrowly decided. They won only about 51% or so. But in this new system which is actually Erdogan's brainchild, you have virtually all the power of the legislature and the executive concentrated in the hands of a directly elected president and the post of the Prime Minister is abolished and so on and so forth. So there is absolutization of power institutionally through the kind of process that I just talked about. You also have a situation in which for example 40% of Turkey's generals are in prison, so are many other military officers and so on. A major political party, the HDP, people's democratic party, the presidents of that party had to fight elections from prisons. So you have a system in which within the last three years about half or more of the administrative structure of Turkey has been dismantled, half the judiciary has been fired, half the bureaucracy has been fired. So every institution has been decimated over a period of time with arbitrary power in which Erdogan has placed his own people to the point, you know, in the judiciary, for example, you have a situation where you don't have enough judges. So freshly graduated law students are being appointed judges and they don't even know what the rules in their own courtroom are. So this is a moment of an absolutization of power. What is also very, very worrying is that there is a very radical change going on in the educational system where the Islamization, where he said in 2006, I am going to produce a new generation of Islamist youth. And that is going forward very fast. Public schools are being dismantled in some cases, actually physically demolished. And new schools being created, this Imam Khatib schools as they are called, which is their word for what in India and Pakistan we call Madrasas. And the entire neighbourhoods, you don't have public schools, secular public schools anymore, and you have this. All of these processes, I think, are going to now get even more accelerated. So this is a total transformation of Turkey institutionally, socially, politically, in every respect. And this is a high point of that. The other part of it is that the presidential form of government, he has the right to also appoint judges. That's also not for the parliament. Exactly. And the parliament really has very little powers. I mention only the legislature and the executive, but also the judiciary. And as the head of the religious affairs ministry, he's also the religious head, because all these Imam Khatib schools are actually state run. And he can, with his presidential power, he can legally demolish all the secular schools and replace them with these Imam Khatib schools and allocate immense amount of money. Right now they have huge allocation, new huge allocations for that and so on. So every aspect of Turkish society, the power is this new dispensation, this presidential system, as he's calling it, but it's not a presidential system, the sort that they have in France or anything like that. This is an absolute power. This is actually quasi-monarchical. Sultan Erdogan. Yes, as people figured out 10 years ago, this is the building of the Sultan, who is also something of the CEO of this new liberalized economy. So his part, CEO part, Sultan as some bit said. So yes, it's absolutely theoretical, monarchical part. The other part is, of course, what's happened to the media, that number of media houses have been shut. Again, a huge number of journalists have been either sacked or they're in prison or they're in exile. The highest number of journalists in prison anywhere in the world. Yes. The largest number of journalists. Exactly, as you said. I mean, the number of professors who left the country, the ones who could manage to, but he has been impounding passports every civil servant or an academic or a journalist who gets arrested. The passports are impounded not for him or her, but also their families. So if a military had done it, the Turks have always complained about military coups and so on. No military coup ever meant that far. So you're also holding the families to hostages as it were? Yes. I mean, the whole society is being held hostage. And, you know, the amount of, you know, just the numbers that one can keep rolling off, who are in prison, who have been fired, who had to leave the country, etc. You know, those military coups have grew some as they were. I don't believe reached this far in and they never transformed society the way he has. He's transforming society. So this is Muslim Brotherhood in power because AKP is really Muslim Brotherhood. Now we know what Muslim Brotherhood in power is and that is what was being feared in Egypt. That is what the problem was in Egypt that the Egyptian society was caught between the devil and the deep sea. You had the Muslim Brotherhood on this side and very, very autocratic and corrupt military system of the other. And you basically had a choice between the two of them. But it was very clear that if the Muslim Brotherhood really stabilized their rule in Egypt, this is what would happen. This is what they were carrying. And that was what they were writing into the Constitution. And this is the, you know, it's a great irony of history that the Muslim Brotherhood has come to power with such absolute control over state and society in the one country that was by far the most secular, certainly in the Muslim world, but I think next to the French probably in the world. And that's where, so it's, I mean, the grand job of this achievement is also something that has taken up the knowledge that transforming a country so thoroughly criminalized and secular and modern into this caricature is remarkable. Now, stepping away from the political, since you've raised the larger picture of how the entire society, which was, as you said, Kamalist and secular, though, of course, it also had its authoritarian side to it. Yeah, secular, secular, Kamalist, authoritarian, yes. But at the same time, this transformation from this strong secular, in fact, really banning various even manifestations in public spaces like the fares, the headscarf and so on to this is a huge transformation. But what explains this? What are the social forces which allowed this to happen? Apart from the fact that, you know, there was OK, there is always something which is running, always has its critics. Yeah, well, I think what began to happen was a split in the very Turkish bourgeoisie, where the old established bourgeois houses, capitalist houses, the old bourgeoisie, let's say the Istanbul bourgeoisie, was European, Western, Kamalist, whatever you want to call it and so on. And then there arose what came to be called Anatolian Tigers, which is from medium and large towns of Anatolia. That large sort of hinterland, there was that whole sort of big bourgeoisie, which began to compete and the entire, for example, export sector of Turkey that developed so rapidly was in the hands of those people. The trade with EU was actually in the hands of those people. Even the investment structures between EU and Turkey was usually an alliance. And so when these people actually came to power, they were socially conservative Islamist, but they were very much pro-EU. They wanted very badly to enter EU because of that. But so part of it in terms of classes, that is part of what happened, part of it is that Kamalist secularism did never properly entered. The countries never properly transformed the countryside. They never properly transformed the hinterland of Anatolia. I remember going there first in the 70s and going to smaller cities there and getting frightened at really the difference and how much hold of the imams and so forth there was in those petty little towns. So there was that, that Ataduq actually made a compromise in which this Ministry of Religious Affairs, he nationalized religion, he did not abolish it. So he thought he would control this phenomenon by appointing prayer leaders in every imams and so forth in every mosque and creating endowments which were controlled by the Kamalist state and so on. But that taking that secularism deep into the social structures of the hinterlands and Anatolia and so on, which was a very different kind of project than simply giving them modern education, mathematics and science and so on and so forth. So there was that and there was the transformation of cities like Istanbul, for example, where the as new liberalism began to come in and that came in before Erdogan came. The victims of that whole process in the countryside began to flood into the big cities with their resentments against this high big bourgeois world of Turkey and so on. There were a number of processes of that kind, that's all going on, all along the class scales, very different things but began to gel. Also the Kurdish issue because Kamalists had one problem, which is they did not accept any other identity except the Turkish identity establishment of the Kamalists. People don't remember that Kamal wanted even a part of the Iraqi Kurdistan as his original map of Turkey included Mosul and this, that and the other. Because he said these are Kurds and Kurds and Turks are one people for him and in the original constitution that he had which was suppressed and came out in 1960. There was a clause for full social, linguistic, cultural autonomy for the Kurds. So this Turkish is one language and Turks are one country and etc. Anti-Kurdish business that later Kamalists actually cultivated has nothing to do with the Tatuk himself. Actually his closest general was actually a Kurd who briefly became the president. It's not to do no very famous, very famous figure in the history of the Republic. It was a closest ally, it was actually a Kurdish who then became president. So this was not the other Greeks. It's later day equivalents of that tradition who started doing that. And one of the things was that in the beginning, in the beginning AKP was very, very clever. It understood that in the middle class and liberal middle classes, there was a great hatred of the armies, army for its repeated interventions in the economy. There was a desire for Europe and there was a desire for peace with the Kurds. And Erdogan's forces realized that the threat to them came from the armed forces and they had to conduct a purge of the armed forces. And they therefore Erdogan and his party made all kinds of peace overtures towards the Kurds. There was a period around 2006, 78 when I used to go to Turkey and I found that the most left-wing intellectuals and activists were so pro-AKP because they were making friends with the Kurds and accepting the European human rights protocol for the resolution of Kurdistan. So strategically they were very clever. They won the liberal modern Kamalist middle class on the question of war and split the Republican Party, the Kamalist Party, the Republican People's Party. Because the high command and sort of, you know, the diehards of the party remain anti-Kurds. But their middle cadre became soft on the AKP on the Kurdish question and so on. So they were also strategically based. Now they have brought everybody else together against them. Do you think this is also the result of this election? The Kurds on one side, the left forces, in fact both are with the HDP in this election as well as earlier and in the political process that's taking place. But do you see a sort of getting together of the HDP and the CHP and all this kind of forces against this kind of authoritarian presidential rule? They have been in a certain sense together for now, for several years. This is a process that has been waken. Just last year when there was this 257 mile march from Ankara to Istanbul led by the Kamalist, which culminated in a demonstration of 1.5 million people in Istanbul, which in India, I cannot surprise you all that much, but for Turkey it's a huge number, 1.5 million to be found in one place. So there was all that. And again, they have won elections only by, I mean presidential election, he won only by 51.5% or something. His party did not get a majority and so on. So there is a polarization. But strategically, he has captured all the positions of power, dismantled all the institutions. Now he'll be in power until at least 2023, which is the 100th year of the founding of the republic. And in these years, he will have time to consolidate institutionally and culturally and socially a lot. So what I would say is that there is a polarization, this polarization will only grow. But at the moment, the balance of power is very much in this way. If we see the rise of various, shall we say, right-wing forces in the world, this is obviously one kind of blueprint for the religion. Those who use religion as an identity, and I'm really talking about Muslim Brotherhood, the Hindutva forces, even the Trumpist, ethnic, right-racist forces, if you will. But all of these are essentially on a similar project, dismantle the secular democratic state in some sense and replace it with a clear politics of this kind. Would you say this is a larger project? And I have been actually writing on certain concepts. One that I've been writing on is the whole question of a new kind, historically new form of political state that is arising, which is, which provisionally the term I use is post-democratic, although I'm still looking for a better phrase. A type of state that combines elements, institutional elements of liberalism, and a great deal of practical, strategic elements of dictatorship and fascism. And in some cases they may be secular, although in countries like India and Turkey, the crux is the religious identity that they have. So in the wake of a very great secular consolidation, they have been able to create this massive religious identity, very powerful in both countries by now. So this is, elsewhere it is race, more than religion. In many places, it race and religion get played together. It can be Catholic versus Protestant, it can be, you know, the, in the American case, it is religion is not the predominant element, predominant element is race, but this business of the, you know, the Muslim ban and so on. We had again, we have a situation where, like Turkey in the United States now, all the three branches of state are in the hands of the Republican Party and so on. So you're seeing this emergence of, as the system breaks down and the challenge from the left is still very weak, that you have this emergence from the right of consolidation of this kind of historical kind. So some form of ethno-nationalism, taking the either race, religion, whatever I did, I sort of don't really use nationalism. I think they like saying nationalism. That's why I don't say it. Although in India, of course, it's a redefinition of our nationalism. Yeah, sure. Yeah, but xenophobic, it's a very hysterical form of conducting politics when the rational forms are in crisis, highly irrational forms. Yeah, right, that's what I actually see. Thank you very much, Ejaz. Ejaz, I hope that we'll see your long article that you said you are finishing, that we hope that we'll see it soon and we'll have a conversation on that as well. I think that would be very interesting for our viewers. Okay, Ejaz. This is all the time we have for NewsClick today. Do keep watching NewsClick. Watch our YouTube channel and do visit our website.