Wohin geht die Türkei unter Erdogan?

Turkey's television and entertainment business is having a nightmare season this year. At least 10 popular television dramas have been canceled due to low ratings, but one has created such a storm that even the conservative columnists are having a party discussing it.

“The Lizard” is a television drama that airs on ATV, one of the prime-time stations run by close relatives of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The series follows the story of a petty thief who hides in a mosque and puts on the robe of an imam to get away from the police. He takes the role so seriously that he decides to become a devout preacher.

The Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has gone ballistic against the series, claiming that it discredited imams. Habertürk columnist Nihal Bengisu Karaca, a government supporter, however, came to its defense. Karaca claimed “The Lizard, (now known as “Ziya Hoca”), is someone who regrets the mistakes of his past and becomes a better defender of Islam. She also wrote that the Diyanet needed a good lesson about drama and storytelling.

“While your kids are formatted by TV shows like ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ you will be crying for a lack of movies and dramas that are close to our values,” she said.

Among conservative columnists and thinkers, popular culture remains a thorny issue. They believe it is too secular, too Western, and way out of control. Islamist scholars are struggling to create a popular character who can capture the young hearts and minds of those who attend İmam Hatip schools but also enjoy listening to Lady Gaga.

Advertising revenues have dropped sharply for television companies after the recent change to the ratings system in Turkey. As the sample homes chosen to measure ratings became more and more conservative, mainstream police dramas and comedy shows have lost viewership. Many of them have been canceled after years of success. If this trend continues, the Turkish television market will not be able to find any more television shows like "Muhteşem Yüzyıl" (The Magnificent Century) to export.

Prof. Dr. Tayfun Atay from Okan University said in an interview to Taraf newspaper that there are “two separate nations” on television. He described “The Lizard” as an example of the “Islamization of popular culture.” Atay believes shows like “The Lizard” portray Islam as the ultimate road to inner peace and a good society.

Atay and Karaca’s arguments show us that popular culture needs a better and finer language to tell the stories of secular lives, modest families and Western values. Screenwriters, directors and television station managers have to find a way to strike a balance between Turkey’s modernization ideals and its traditions.

A “lizard” has to shed its skin to run away and fool its enemy. It also has to adapt and change color in order to survive in nature. Maybe secular television shows have something they can learn from this.

As a part of group of journalists and academics, I have spent the past week in Germany as a guest of the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, which has close ties to the Free Democrat Party. One big headline that emerged from the trip is that Europe has learned President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s game and is eager to play it. Before coming to Hamburg and Berlin, we were expecting support for freedom of the press and expression from our German friends. Instead, most of what we heard was the “geopolitical importance of Turkey.”

The bright side of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) crisis is that it has put Turkey on the map of ordinary Europeans again. Germans are following the events in Mürşitpınar and Suruç even more closely than Turkey’s own citizens. Der Spiegel’s cover story about ISIL featured six reporters, two from the field. Not a single day passes without a front-page story in the German papers about Turkey joining the coalition to fight ISIL.

With all this, Turkey’s domestic worries go backstage. Europe wants to view Turkey as it saw it when it was the Cold War’s last frontier against communism: A solid NATO ally, a not-so-democratic-but-who-cares-anyway kind of neighbor.

But there is always a flip side to this story. Dr. Günter Seufert from Germany’s influential think tank Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWF) believes that it is actually the right time to open up more negotiation chapters for Turkey's EU accession process. However, Seufert also said during a meeting with us that "we know Erdoğan does not want Turkey to be a member of the EU.”

“Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, Volkan Bozkır, Ali Babacan, all of these names have very favorable ratings in Brussels, Berlin, etc. But when you look at the party program, or the Cabinet program, you see very little about the EU reform process. So just in order to challenge Erdoğan and Davutoğlu to do more, the EU should open two new chapters for negotiation,” he said.

Seufert’s proposal was to open the chapters on judicial reform and freedom of expression. He also said no EU member could or would drag its feet to stop Turkey’s membership talks anymore.

According to most German experts, Turkey’s military power, for all the country's shortcomings, makes it a dependable fortress to keep ISIL at bay. Turkey is also taking in millions of refugees, thus helping Europe not to take any. However, this dilemma also lowers the chances for Turkey's possible eventual accession.

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), as well as Erdoğan personally, has played the EU game in a very clever way, by adapting a softer approach in European capitals while bashing all Western leaders on the domestic scene. Ironically, the EU capitals have learned the game well and are now using it against Turkey. In closed meetings, they support the intelligentsia that is pushing for reform, but in public they almost appear to cherish the AK Party’s anti-democratic laws.

In a huge U-turn compared to a couple of months ago, most German politicians and experts have now refrained from openly criticizing Erdoğan. “Despite all the corruption charges, all the anti-democratic practices, you still go and elect him,” one said. “After Gezi, he won two more elections. So we look and say, why worry for Turks if they are happy with this guy? It is their problem. We look at Turkey like Putin’s Russia. Big, important but never a member of the EU.”

So once again, we - the supporters of a more secular, more pro-Europe, more democratic Turkey - are left in the dark with our dignified loneliness. The people who we are trying to reach for a better Turkey are simply too busy or no longer there.