Erdogan’s Turkey ten years after the attempted coup

The recent confirmation of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s status as a leading figure on the international stage at last week’s NATO summit – sealed by the revolvers the Turkish president presented to the participants – takes on even greater significance today. Exactly ten years ago, at around 10.30 pm, a rebel faction within the Turkish army blocked both ends of the Bosphorus Bridge – the first of the two suspension bridges linking the European and Asian sides of Istanbul, a physical and geographical symbol of Turkey’s pivotal position. This marked the start of the fifth coup attempt since 1960, and the first to fail. The coup plotters had tanks, helicopters and aeroplanes, and shortly afterwards they took control of various areas of Ankara, Istanbul and three other cities, striking several symbolic targets including Parliament. At that point, military leaders announced on social media that the coup was aimed at combating corruption; they stormed the headquarters of the public broadcaster TRT and claimed that Erdogan had violated civil rights, whilst Prime Minister Binali Yildirim addressed the nation to explain what had happened, urging citizens to remain calm. A state of emergency was declared.

The attempted coup lasted only a few hours, partly due to resistance from the population: at 9 am the following day, the government announced that the uprising had failed, releasing an initial toll of 161 dead and 1,440 injured (figures from the European Commission published months later put the number at 241 dead and 2,196 injured, whilst other estimates approach 300 dead). The number of arrests, however, rose by the hour. The preacher Fethullah Gülen, who had been in voluntary exile in the United States since 1999 and who would later die on 20 October 2024, was identified as the mastermind behind the uprising. Founder of the Hizmet movement, which champions the importance of education and interfaith dialogue, Gülen was a staunch ally of Erdoğan until 2013, when some members of Hizmet helped to expose cases of corruption within the government. In May 2026, shortly before the attempted coup, Hizmet had been designated by Ankara as a terrorist organisation, referred to by the acronym FETO (Fethullah Terrorist Organisation), and branded as “a threat to the whole world”.

And so the season of repression began: in the months that followed, over 100,000 people were detained by the security forces on suspicion of links to the uprising. Among them were, of course, many members of the military (around 14,000), but also 21,000 teachers, and numerous civil servants, judges and police officers. Erdogan is very clear, proclaiming that “we will eradicate the virus from all public institutions”. The Turkish press even goes so far as to target the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, accusing him of links to Gülen on the basis of a dossier that later proved to be false. The daily newspaper Aksam then also attacks the Vatican on similar grounds.

In October, the state of emergency was extended. Meanwhile, the ruling AKP party introduced a series of measures to reduce military interference in politics. This has been one of its key battles since its election victory in 2002, and it also enjoys a fair amount of support amongst the population: Turkey has suffered military coups in 1960, 1980 and 1997, as well as the so-called ‘memorandum coup’ against Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel in 1971. However, among the opposition and international observers, the suspicion began to emerge that the Turkish government had used its emergency powers to gradually curtail civil liberties. The following year, the party called a constitutional referendum, which effectively transformed the country from a parliamentary republic into a presidential republic. The victory was anything but clear-cut (51.4 per cent), with massive protests and allegations of electoral irregularities from the OECD and the opposition. The reform also marked Erdogan’s rapprochement with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) led by Devlet Bahceli, the political wing of the extremist Grey Wolves movement and currently one of the AKP’s main allies, despite a history of strong criticism.

Over the years, some have even speculated that the entire coup was orchestrated by Erdogan himself in order to centralise power in his own hands. Setting these theories aside, one fact remains: the Turkish people do not blindly follow this drift towards authoritarianism. As opposition leader Ozgur Ozel wrote in a recent piece for Project Syndicate, “governments confident in their legitimacy rarely feel compelled to regard peaceful dissent, civic activism or the possibility of protest as threats to public order”. Who knows, perhaps the coup plotters, once fiercely opposed by the people, will one day be re-evaluated, as Adriano Sofri suggested ten years ago in "Il Foglio".