Turkish Author Ece Temelkuran Sees a Contested U.S. Election Through the Lens of an Attempted Coup

This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which convenes this week in the Greek capital to examine the ways in which self-governance might evolve.

When President Donald J. Trump announced in November 2020 that he had been robbed of victory in the presidential election that month, the author and political commentator Ece Temelkuran (pronounced eh-jeh) drew direct parallels with her homeland, Turkey.

“Make no mistake, this is an attempted coup,” she wrote in an editorial for The Guardian. “If it were happening in Turkey, the world’s media would not think twice about calling it so.”

Ms. Temelkuran spoke from experience. She lived through the July 2016 coup attempt against the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and left the country to avoid the crackdown that followed. Three years later, she published “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship,” a nonfiction book that charted a democratic country’s potential slide into authoritarianism.

Ms. Temelkuran was born into a political family. Her mother was a student activist who was imprisoned after a military coup in Turkey in the 1970s and rescued by a young lawyer whom she would go on to marry.

When she was 16, Ms. Temelkuran started writing for a feminist magazine and went on to become one of Turkey’s most widely read political commentators.

She remains a high-profile commentator today while she lives in Hamburg, Germany, where she is a fellow at the New Institute’s Future of Democracy program.

In a recent interview, Ms. Temelkuran spoke of the threats to democracy in the West and in her native Turkey. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Since you published your book “How to Lose Your Country,” a few things have happened. Mr. Trump is no longer in power. Nor is the British prime minister Boris Johnson, who championed Britain’s exit from the European Union. How do you view the world today?

I think there’s too much optimism, and also too much pessimism. The optimists think that if they get rid of Boris Johnson or Trump, everything will be back to normal in terms of democracy — that we can just fix a few mechanisms in the democratic machine, and we will be fine after that. I think this is a deeper crisis: a cluster of crises, actually, that we have to look deeper into.

The crisis of democracy is very much intertwined with the crisis of capitalism. There is no way out, unless we address the issue of social equality.

You say democracy in its present form is dead, because capitalism is essentially incompatible with democracy. Can you explain?

Right-wing populist movements did not suddenly appear in the last 10 years. We have to go back to the 1980s to understand what really is happening in the world today, especially in terms of democracy.

Democracy stands on the fundamental promise of equality and social justice. Capitalism does not promise social justice. If people are not equal in real terms, meaning financially and economically, how can you promise them equality as citizens?

Why do you believe that capitalism is at odds with social justice?

People pretend as if the rights that workers enjoy — Sundays off, eight-hour work days, etc. — are all thanks to capitalism. In fact, whatever the working classes have achieved or earned has come after a very long and hard struggle against the ruling classes.

The depoliticization of society in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to an infantilization of citizens — to their perception of politics as being dirty. This massive depoliticization contributed to the right-wing populist movements of today. That’s why we have all these masses who believe that Trump is the savior, or that Brexit will make Britain great again.

Another consequence was that we were made to be afraid of words like socialism, social democracy, regulation, financial regulation. These words became taboo after the 1970s.

We’ve ended up in a place where we don’t even allow ourselves to think of a better system than capitalism. It is as if the end of capitalism were to lead to the end of the world.

You use the word fascism to describe political realities in the West. That word has serious historical resonance. Why use it?

Because I think we should use that word. We were made to believe that fascism was buried in the battlefields of the Second World War. The version that wears boots and uniform was buried, yes. But fascism does not just come in a uniform and boots, marching in goose step. If freedom of speech, freedom of organization, and the rights of the working classes are oppressed, that builds up to fascism.

In countries such as the United States and Britain, the democratic establishment is powerful enough to protect itself. But in countries where the political and democratic establishment is not mature enough, you see fully formed oppression. There is no doubt that these are regimes that we can easily call fascism — in Turkey, in India, and in several other countries.

Parliamentary democracies aren’t suddenly going to turn Hitlerian, are they?

They don’t need to. At the time of Hitler, there was a need to be oppressive and violent because there was a massive union movement in Germany and the rest of Europe, a socialist movement. Nowadays, there is no such thing. So why use violence? They can use post-truths or social media to manipulate people, to spread misinformation and so on.

If we can shift global politics to being more progressive, then we can get rid of these movements. At the moment, the center of the political spectrum is empty. Centrist politicians don’t have a story with which to mobilize and organize people. There’s a vacuum.

Take French President Emmanuel Macron, for example. Why is he there? Because everybody is so afraid of far-right leader Marine Le Pen. For the last decade, at least, voting has become a tool to protect us from the worst.

This is not politics. It’s a survival reaction.

Unless the center opens its arms to the left and to progressives, there is no way out for democracy in the world.

Turkey was for a long time a model when it came to the transition to democracy in the Muslim world. What’s going on there now?

It’s a massive form of dictatorship. But then these dictatorships do not have to use violence. Now they’re using a different political tool, which is this very wide web of political money that spans the entire country. Even the smallest sympathizer to the party is getting this money. They have a good life. If you are part of the party, or in the party circle, you have a life. Otherwise, it’s not just economic transactions that are impossible. You cannot exercise your basic rights as a citizen.

There are first-class citizens who are submissive to the party or Erdogan, and the others. The others, as Erdogan has said, are welcome to leave, and they are leaving. There is a massive brain drain from Turkey at the moment. It’s another tragic story. Doctors, nurses, well-educated people, academics: They’re all leaving.

What’s the way out?

The way out, which Turkish political forces are in a very inadequate way trying at the moment, is coming together: for all the opposition parties, despite their political differences, to come together and, in the interests of democracy, participate in elections.