Turkish drift

Turkish police at the entrance of the courts in Sincan (near Ankara), last Thursday.

Turkish justice handed down a sentence of enormous relevance in the recent history of the country on Thursday.

A court sentenced 333 soldiers and four civilians to life imprisonment for their role in the July 2016 coup in Turkey, which killed at least 250 people - mostly civilians and police loyal to the Government - and was bombed on Parliament and unsuccessfully attacked the presidential palace.

Another 70 people were acquitted in the most outstanding process of the many who judge that reprehensible uprising, attributed to the political-religious sect of Fethullah Gülen.

The Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, defined it as "a gift from God."

It certainly meant a bankruptcy in the history of Turkey, which opened the spigot for an accelerating drift towards an openly authoritarian regime.

Some 250,000 people were arrested, 26,000 of whom are still imprisoned.

About 126,000 civil servants were dismissed from the public administration, especially from the police, the army and the judiciary, but also from the school system.

Others have suffered retaliation in the private sector, including in the media.

The repression against the coup leaders extended to the entire opposition, notably the Peoples' Democratic Party and its leader Selahattin Demirtas, imprisoned for four years despite the adverse ruling of the Strasbourg human rights court on preventive detention .

The 2016 coup meant the final confrontation between Gülen and Erdogan, close allies since before the latter came to power in 2003. There are many unclear questions about the nature and responsibilities of the unacceptable coup, but the authoritarian evolution offers no doubts. of the regime, its tight control of justice and the loss of civil liberties.

In this scenario, the maximum vigilance of international institutions is essential in the face of the evolution of a country that is a member of the Atlantic Alliance and still a candidate for the European Union, at least on paper.

Some factors work together to make external pressure work better.

On the one hand, the change of Administration in the United States, with the departure of a Trump complacent with authoritarian leaders and the arrival of a Biden much more committed to democratic values.

Second, the economic difficulties that Turkey is going through complicate the position of Erdogan, who has just renewed the economic direction of his government and the central bank.

The leader seeks in parallel gestures that improve the bad image of the country and attract foreign investment.

It will be necessary to push the maximum so that the changes are not cosmetic, but substantial, starting with the release of political prisoners and the end of hundreds of criminal proceedings of a clearly political nature.