London - Is secularism synonymous with liberal democracy, being civilised, modern, free and firmly pro-West?
If you believe the narrative emanating from the US, UK and the EU – from politicians, business, media and NGOs – in various countries, it definitely seems so.
Never mind the ungodly hold of the evangelical movement on far-right politics in the US; the fact that the daily business of the UK House of Commons starts each morning with the Lord’s Prayer and despite the head of the Church of England, King Charles III, preferring to be the ‘Defender of Faiths’ instead of the Faith; and that the EU, despite its supposedly liberal instincts, in the immortal words of past proponents such as ex-German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, remains a staunchly “Christian Club”.
Never mind the fact that the Swedish government chose to “defend” democracy, free speech and the right to protest, when it saw fit to turn a blind eye to the public burning of the Holy Qur’an by a far right Islamophobe outside the Türkiye Consulate in Stockholm.
Never mind the fact that several EU countries have laws in place which ban Holocaust denial, and yet give succour to Islamophobic legislation, socio-cultural denunciations and media attacks, and the blatant and closet institutional and societal racism as espoused by the vitriol of the bigoted fans of Valencia FC directed against Real Madrid’s Brazilian star Vinicius jr in a La Liga clash only days ago.
Never before has this false narrative fed so viciously and gratuitously into a free democratic election such as the 2023 presidential poll in Türkiye which culminated on Sunday in a second-round run off between incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development (AK) Party and his supposedly “softly-spoken, mild-mannered and bookish” opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) who heads a six-party Nation Alliance with the unflattering sobriquet “Table of Six”.
The 69-year-old Erdogan fell just short of an absolute majority in the first round, mustering 49.52% of the votes followed by the 74-year-old Kilicdaroglu at 44.88%.
A third candidate, the ultra-nationalist Sinan Ogan, obtained 5.17% and a few days ago declared his support for Erdogan. Hence the second-round run-off.
In parliamentary elections held concurrently with the first-round presidential poll, the ruling AK Party emerged as the largest with 268 seats (down by 27 seats on the 2018 election), followed by the CHP at 169 seats (up 23 seats on the 2018 election).
Erdogan has already forged an alliance with the nationalist MHP and together they have secured a majority of 322 seats in the 600-seat parliament.
Whoever wins, what is at stake in Türkiye is not whether the elections are free, fair or democratic or whether Türkiye is in danger of turning “Islamist” or secular, or whether it is on a path of “modernist” renewal or hankering retrogressively to the glory days of Ottoman ascendancy.
It is the very strength of Turkish democracy, warts and all, and the debunking of a neo-colonialist mindset in the West, especially the so-called “liberal consensus” that it is the only guardian of liberal democracy at any cost, which has chauvinistically and conveniently couched it in the divide-and-rule paradigm of neo-conism, “us or them.”
So obsessed are the metropolitan elites and chattering classes in Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya and Ankara to buy into this mindset that equates democracy with secularism per se, being modern and “civilised” – ie, staunchly pro-West and capitalist – that they are prepared to jettison their own heritage by scoffing at the notion of hankering for the past and lampooning globally popular “Made-in-Türkiye” TV series such as Destan, Dirilis Ertugrul and Kurulus Osman which highlight the origins of the Turks and the founding of the 600-year Osmanli Empire – albeit with ample doses of poetic licence.
Parker is an economist and writer based in London
Cape Times