Gwynne Dyer: Turkey: Next stop civil war?

"You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time ... ", begins Abraham Lincoln's famous aphorism about democracy - but in a multi-party democratic system, that is usually enough. In a parliamentary system like Turkey's, 49 per cent of the popular vote gives you a comfortable majority of seats, and so Recep Tayyib Erdogan will rule Turkey for another four years. If it lasts that long.

There will still be a Turkey of some sort in four years' time, of course, but it may no longer be a democracy, and it may not even have its present borders. In last Sunday's vote Erdogan won back the majority he lost in the June election, but the tactics he employed have totally alienated an important section of the population.

Kurds make up a fifth of Turkey's 78 million people. Most Kurds are pious, socially conservative Sunni Muslims, so they usually voted for Erdogan's Justice and Development (AK) Party - which consequently won three successive elections (2003, 2007, 2011) with increasing majorities. Then the Kurds stopped voting for Erdogan, which is why he lost last June's election. In this month's election he managed to replace those lost votes with nationalist voters who are frightened of a Kurdish secession and simple souls who just want stability and peace - but he had to start a war to win them over.

Erdogan threw Turkey's support firmly behind the rebels when the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, mainly because as a devout Sunni Muslim he detested Bashar al-Assad's Alawite-dominated regime. He kept Turkey's border with Syria open to facilitate the flow of volunteers, weapons and money to the Islamist groups fighting Assad, including the Nusra Front and Isis (which eventually became Islamic State).

He even backed Islamic State when it attacked the territory that had been liberated by the Kurds of northern Syria. That territory extends along the whole eastern half of Turkey's border with Syria, and in the end, despite Erdogan's best efforts, the Syrian Kurds managed to repel Isis' attacks. But this was the issue that cost Erdogan the support of Turkish Kurds.

His solution was to restart the war against the PKK, the armed separatist movement that is based in the Kurdish-speaking northern provinces of Iraq. A ceasefire had stopped the fighting between the Turkish government and the PKK for the past four years, but Erdogan now needed a patriotic war against wicked Kurdish separatists in order to lure the nationalists and the naive into backing his party.

He duped the United States into supporting this war by allowing US bombers to use Turkish air bases and promising that Turkish planes would start bombing Islamic State too. (In fact, Turkey has dropped only a few token bombs on IS; the vast majority of its bombs are falling on Kurds.) The pay-off came on Sunday, when the votes of Turks who fear Kurdish separatism replaced the Kurdish votes that the AK Party lost last June. The problem is that the election is now over but the war will continue.

Indeed it will get worse. The Turkish army is already shelling the Syrian Kurds, and warning that it may invade if the Syrian Kurdish proto-state (known as Rojava) tries to push further west and shut down the last border-crossing point that links Turkey to Islamic State.

At home, the independent institutions of a normal democratic state have been subverted one after another: the media, the police, and the judiciary now generally serve Erdogan. State television, for example, gave 59 hours of coverage to Erdogan's campaign in the past month. All the other parties combined got 6 hours and 28 minutes.

So Erdogan's AK won the election, but Turkey is no longer a real democracy. And since the half of the population that didn't vote for Erdogan utterly loathes him, it won't be a very stable authoritarian state either. In fact, it is probably teetering on the brink of civil war.

The people who loathe Erdogan because he is destroying Turkey's free media, perverting its criminal justice system and robbing the state blind - he and his AK colleagues have been enthusiastically feathering their nests - will not turn to violence. The poor will not turn to violence either, even though the economic boom is over and jobs are disappearing. But some of the Turkish Kurds will fight, and they will have the support of the Syrian Kurds just across the border. That will probably draw the Turkish army into invading northern Syria to crush the Kurds there - and once Turkey is fully involved in the Syrian civil war, all of southeastern Turkey (where Kurds are the majority) also becomes part of the combat zone. When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk rescued a Turkish republic from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire after World War I, he was determined to make it a European state. It was a fairly oppressive state at first, but over the decades it gradually turned into a democracy that operated under the rule of law.

That's over now. It took Erdogan a dozen years in power to demolish that European-style democracy, but the job is done. As one despairing Turk put it recently, Turkey is becoming a Middle Eastern country.

-Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.