Turkey’s democratic façade collapsed on March 19, when Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu – the West’s secular poster boy – was snatched from his bed in the middle of the night and thrown in jail on charges of corruption, bribery and “terror links”. The sultan is now naked – though the story is about much more than Turkey.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a true neo-Ottoman puppet master, struck with surgical timing: Days before Imamoglu’s nomination as the Republican People’s Party (CHP) presidential candidate, hours after his university diploma was inexplicably cancelled. By March 20, Istanbul’s streets boiled with protests met by batons and tear gas.
Brussels, on its part, murmured its usual dismay. However, this is not just about Erdogan’s Putinist ways. It is a glaring symptom of a question the West buries: can Islam, as a governing force, ever come to terms with democracy?
Turkey is supposed to be the closest a Muslim country has come to democracy. Yet its history is a testament to turbulence, not stability. Since 1960, it has seen four military coups – 1960, 1971, 1980, and the chaotic 2016 misfire – each a brutal reminder that the rule of law is a guest, not a resident. Atatürk’s secular republic, forged with iron and blood, promised a Western pivot, but the roots never took.
Erdogan’s two-decade reign is a fine example of autocracy. Elections happen, but the script is largely fixed – media gagged, judges tamed, rivals locked up. In the 2024 municipal vote the CHP beat his AKP in urban strongholds, yet Erdogan endures. He hands out free gas to voters while jailing threats like Imamoglu, whose Kemalist revisionism and genocide denial (millions of Armenians and Greeks erased from memory) should by themselves be a cause of concern in the West – but are not.
Turkey doesn’t flirt with democracy. It flees from it. So can it ever wear the Western mantle of free elections, independent courts and rights guaranteed? History says no, and the why cuts deeper.
Let’s dare ask the unaskable: has any Islamic nation sustained a full-blooded democracy? The pickings are slim.
Indonesia, with 270 million souls, holds ballots, but corruption prevails and sharia tightens its grip in Aceh. Tunisia’s post-2011 experiment, once lauded as the Arab Spring’s lone star, saw the parliament dissolved in 2021 and reforms reversed. Malaysia balances votes with Islamic law, but its Chinese and Indian minorities suffer. Pakistan swings between generals and dynasties. Egypt’s Sisi rules with an iron fist. Bangladesh lies on the brink of full-fledged Islamism. Turkey’s secularism, imposed by bayonet a century ago, frays.
The thread is clear. Wherever Islam fuses with the state, power – be it clerical, military, or populist – quenches the people’s will. Is it faith? Culture? A clash of values? The West will not touch it, but the evidence piles up. Democracy is a rare bird in the Islamic world.
The EU, meanwhile, drowns in its own duplicity. Brussels reacted at Imamoglu’s arrest with lukewarm “concern” on March 21, but Turkey’s NATO clout and immigration blackmail averted stronger criticism – compare that to the crusades against Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Poland’s former PiS government. Turkey jails mayors, shuts down newspapers and cosies up to Moscow, yet accession talks, frozen since 2005, still linger.
At home, the hypocrisy thickens. Europe’s Muslim population hits 5 per cent by 2025 (unofficially possibly much more), yet any debate on Islam’s compatibility with secularism is taboo. Mosques multiply, sharia councils sprout and “islamophobia” suppresses free speech. Brussels expects Turkey to apply democracy abroad while blatantly ignoring its own Islamic riddle. This is not even double standards. It is a spine too weak to stand straight.
Turkey’s chaos is a warning, not an anomaly. A state of 84 million, spread between East and West, cannot embrace liberty if the nation itself rejects it. Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman aspirations and Imamoglu’s Kemalist nostalgia both sidestep the rule of law in favour of ideology and power. In a sense, Turkey cannot escape its tradition. Any authority – even a liberal one – has to be imposed by force.
The EU must stop deluding itself. Turkey is no democracy-in-waiting and Islam’s global track record forces a question Europe dreads to face. The world of the Quran harbours a profound intolerance for the democratic values that the West has collectively developed and established during a period of two and a half millennia.
Some EU nations have first hand knowledge and experience of this reality. Greece, most of all, has danced this dance before – we know the steps, we have faced the crescent time and again. Europe’s turn is coming. Will it listen to the warnings?
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