Turkey faces some tough choices after army plot

What Arabic-language writers are saying about the attempt to topple Recep Tayyip Erdogan

People apprehend a Turkish soldier who participated in the attempted coup. Selcuk Samiloglu / AP

On Friday night, a faction of the Turkish military tried to stage a coup to overthrow president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. However, forces loyal to Mr Erdogan succeeded in quashing the attempt.

Writing in the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, columnist Abdullah Nasser Al Otaibi noted that Mr Erdogan had won all the elections in which he had stood and would win the coming presidential elections. He would pursue the approach he had always adopted, which is based on his view of Turkey as a latent empire that could solve all the world's problems, not an average country spread across Asia and Europe.

The writer called the coup attempt “an unwelcome approach, not just by this faction of the military, but also by dozens of thinkers and intellectuals who had voiced their objections to the renewed ‘Ottomanisation’ of Turkey”.

One of the most vocal writers on this subject was Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk who told an Italian magazine three months ago: “The Turkish are paying the price for bringing in all of the world’s problems. They are suffering from the restriction of democracy and from the pressure on freedom of speech.”

In the pan-Arab Asharq Al Awsat, columnist Ahmad Mahmoud Ajaj wrote that "under Mr Erdogan, Turkey has become relatively liberated from the West in its decision-making. Case in point: the American-Turkish disagreement over the Syrian crisis.

“The West was used to taking decisions, but it is now facing complaints about its politics in the region, and its perceptions are rejected and sometimes opposed in places like Turkey.

“Such aggravated relations between Turkey’s political Islam and the West are historical. Turkey’s political Islam in its historical entity sees itself as an empire, just as Vladimir Putin sees Russia.”

Mr Erdogan believes that having won the First World War the western powers had weakened the Islamic Turkish entity and had imposed the historical and political model that led to modern secular Turkey.

Also in Asharq Al Awsat, Tariq Al Humaid noted that even though the coup crumbled, it aggravated Ankara's crisis.

“It is true that the attempted coup took the Turkish people and the world by surprise, but it is no secret that Turkey was mired in an internal political crisis as well as critical external political fluctuations,” the writer noted.

“Today, after the failed coup, it is hard to believe that the Turkish president has come off victorious and one cannot say that he is broken.

“Rather, he is now surrounded by crises from everywhere, both internally and externally, and as yet he has no intention of rationalising political positions internally, or of using this internal crisis as an opportunity to reorganise the situation inside Turkey first.”

The writer went on to say that Turkey faces a number of crises on its borders, from Iraq, Syria and ISIL, not to mention the Kurds.

He also noted that Turkey was at odds with the United States, which is home to Fethullah Gulen, a former imam whom Mr Erdogan accuses of staging the coup.

To top it all, the writer said, an economic crisis loomed in the wake of the failed coup.

“The truth is Turkey’s crisis has escalated and Mr Erdogan is facing tough choices,” he concluded.