Turkey's Coup Attempt, Six Years On
July 15 Is Losing Its Power
We are approaching the 6th anniversary of the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey. I’d like to take this week’s post to briefly reflect on the significance of the event today.
I was on the streets of Ankara that night and the morning after, and wrote about what I saw here. It was an immensely powerful moment, one that I thought would have a deep and lasting effect on politics. I now think I was wrong. Six years on, the power of July 15 is already fading.
It’s not that the government didn’t try to milk it for it’s worth. In the wake of July 15, they declared a state of emergency that lasted two years, basically rewiring the country’s institutions. The 2017 constitutional referandum that approved the presidential system and the 2018 election that activated it would not have been possible without the coup attempt.
Erdoğan was clear at the time that he intended to raise July 15 to the level of a new national holiday, perhaps the national holiday. The new regime renamed innumerable places after July 15, including the Bosphorus bridge and Ankara’s Kızılay square, produced an unending stream of patriotic TV documentaries, movies and shows about it, and continues to refer to it on a daily basis. The national educational curriculum introduces children to July 15 at grade school level and have them stage reenactments of the night’s violent events (I think they took a break with the pandemic, but will surely get back into the swing of it this year).
So it’s not that July 15 isn’t everywhere - it is. It’s that the day hasn’t spread as widely as it was supposed to. The official name of the holiday is “July 15 Democracy and National Unity Day.” The key word there is “unity.” The day was meant to shift the center of gravity in Turkish nationalism towards the Erdoğan project. Just as the Islamists acquiesced to celebrating the Republic on October 29, so the opposition was now to agree to honor July 15. In time, Erdoğan would become the father of the nation’s “new birth of freedom,” to borrow the American phrase. The regime he built would stretch to encompass the vast majority of the country, far beyond his own voter base.
That seemed to be working in the first few years. Government supporters were immensely enthusiastic in their celebration of July 15, and the opposition too, observed the new holiday, albeit quietly.
Not so in the past couple of years. The pandemic and economic crisis have turbocharged the country’s political metabolism. July 15 now seems light years in the past. The opposition remains opposed to the putschists of that night (the universally reviled Gülenists), but now argues that the government hasn’t been open about what happened and who was responsible. The government, in turn, has given up on having the opposition in the July 15 tent, and brands them as collaborators.
A coup attempt and legitimate elections should not be difficult to tell apart. As we approach 2023, we can’t be sure that government’s supporters will see it that way.
Bonus: Some reference points on July 15 this year.
A SETA symposium, with the support of VP Fuat Oktay, followed by a panel on the politics of July 15 today. Everyone seemed angry about main opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s stance on the coup attempt, and most implied that he was in league with the forces that staged the coup.
I had a very difficult time finding official events scheduled for the 15th. Antalya governorate is an exception - they put up a PDF with all the events taking place at different institutions. I’m sure every governorate is going to put on some kind of event, but I doubt that there’ll be much energy behind it. Except maybe in Antalya. Those guys seem to have their stuff together.
Here is a clip by Kanal Türkiye, the only pro-government sokak röportajı channel, interviewing young people about July 15. An elderly man says it was staged and a young woman says that those who died that night died in vain. Kanal Türkiye seems to have edited the video to “Another Love” by Tom Odell, which strangely captures the doom and gloom in government circles. They really feel like they’ve lost the country on this.
