Israel and the Democracy Paradox In the Middle East
The coup in Egypt stirs rethinking about elections and democracy throughout the region.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first to express his vocal opposition to the military coup in Egypt this July, which deposed duly elected President Mohammed Morsi. Given the paltry responses that the rest of the world somehow stammered out, Turkey was conspicuous for its vociferous and blunt denunciation of what took place in Egypt. It did not hesitate to call it what it was — a coup — and even launched a full frontal attack against all those parties that seemed to accept what had happened there.
When the Egyptian army responded with brute force against its opponents, Erdogan went so far as to blame the silent bystanders, especially the United States and the European Union, for failing to protect the protesters. “What right do you have now to talk about democracy, about universal values, about human rights, about freedom?” he asked, tying their reluctance to respond to events in Egypt with the attitude toward President Bashar al-Assad's actions in Syria and their complacent inaction toward the suffering of the Palestinians. If the West fails to act in response to the events in Egypt, he determined, democratic values would be called into question throughout the entire world.
This would not be the first time that Erdogan claimed that the West has a flawed understanding of what democracy really is. He adopted this same approach, juxtaposing “their false democracy” with “our real democracy,” when his government was condemned for the excessive force used by Turkish police against demonstrators in Istanbul’s Gezi Park and Taksim Square in June. “The European Union has no respect for democracy,” he declared back then. Who are they to lecture us about morality? It is the demonstrators who acted undemocratically, he argued, and reminded everyone that “We were elected by a majority on three consecutive occasions!”
The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which Erdogan heads, did indeed win an impressive majority in the Turkish parliament for the first time in 2002, due to changes to the country’s constitution. The electoral threshold was raised to 10%, and as a result, many groups failed to win any representation whatsoever. In the early days of his rule, the Islamist prime minister rode the wave of a flourishing economy and his efforts to see Turkey gain membership in the European Union. In the three elections since then, I called the AKP’s policies “economic Islam,” while others waxed sentimentally about the “Islamic democracy” that Erdogan spearheaded.
