How Much Can One Strongman Change a Country?
Politicians—especially ideological ones—have to eventually deal with the “then what?” question. With Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s narrow victory in a tense April referendum granting him sweeping new powers (amid opposition allegations of voter fraud), he could very well dominate the country’s politics through 2029. He would have more than a decade to reshape Turkey, altering the very meaning of what it means to be Turkish.
In the first decade of its rule, beginning in 2002, Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) presided over a rapidly growing economy, pushed through liberal reforms, and sidelined a military that had undermined Turkish democracy in a series of coups over the course of six decades. Could that, though, really have been all the AKP and its fiery, erratic leader hoped to accomplish?
In a sense, the AKP became a victim of its own success. It could have expanded freedoms and democracy and continued to boost the economy, to diminishing returns. Presumably, Erdogan, a man who saw himself in historical terms, wanted to be remembered not just for improving Turkey, but for transforming it. Being a good, even the best, technocrat could never be enough. Erdogan’s vision had little room for other individuals of stature, a fact that once again became evident during the power struggle with and subsequent fall of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, himself a longtime AKP figure and the architect of the party’s foreign policy.
Erdogan’s steamrolling of both internal and external opposition raises a set of intriguing, if difficult, questions about the role of great men in politics. How much can one man matter in a nation with rich history and traditions and (relatively) strong institutions? Political scientists have long been uncomfortable attributing too much importance to individuals, since this would complicate the quest for causal conclusions and the ability to draw generalizations across cases. Put more simply, it’s quite difficult to
