In Turkey, Ecevit became hugely popular. He decided to exploit this, with an immediate election, which would let him dispense with his odd-bedfellow Islamic ally. But parliament would not allow early elections, and fell into paralysis; when they were held, six months later, Ecevit narrowly lost. Demirel and the smaller parties put forward a ‘National Front’ government, with a majority of four seats, early in 1975. In the provinces, and some of the ministries, the smaller parties, Nationalists and Islamists, used their power disproportionately for changes of personnel; and besides, their strength was such that an institution designed to train clergymen (Imam-hatıp) was opened for ordinary schoolchildren, segregated between boys and girls, and subjected to solid religious education, including koranic Arabic, which Turks simply repeated syllabically, without understanding; prizes went to the hafiz, who knew the lot off by heart. They had been started (in effect) in 1951, and grew from seven to over one hundred in 1975, and 383 by 1988; in 1971 they were functioning at middle-school level as well, and were teaching 300,000 pupils. Half of the curriculum was religious, and the secularists grumbled. Under Demirel’s National Front governments (1975-7 and after the June election, 1977-8) the desecularization of modern Turkey, in a sense, got under way. In some universities, during Ramazan, the canteens closed; there was tension between observers and non-observers since the observers got up early to have something to eat before sun-up, and woke up the non-observers by their talk about football and so forth, while non-observers’ smoking after lunch similarly irritated observers; there were fights and, on occasion, ambulances. The call to prayer was now heard, loudly amplified, in the very centre of great cities, and in Ankara there was a big row when the mayor put up a statue of one of the secularists’ symbols, the stag of the Hittites (Indo-Europeans, not Arabs), and the religious-minded interior minister stopped construction again and again until the courts ruled otherwise. On one level, no doubt desperately childish, but on another deeply serious, and to do with the nature of the country and the upbringing of children, especially daughters. At any rate it divided the country very deeply. Perhaps Demirel and Ecevit themselves would have preferred to co-operate, as the great industrialists (Vehbi Koç and Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı) wanted them to do. But each was prisoner of his supporters, in no mood to compromise. When Ecevit visited an Alevi centre in Cappadocia (Hacı Bektaş) his cortège was fired on by the orthodox Sunni in Nevşehir; in the mixed town of Maraş a regular battle developed between Alevis and Sunnis, and a hundred people were killed. The police lacked training and equipment, as only seventeen of sixty-seven provincial sections even had a camera; and the prisons were in chaos, some of them unable to pay their telephone bills because prisoners abused their rights to long-distance telephone calls (in a country where in any event talking on the telephone is a national curse). In 1979 a Fascist murderer, Mehmet Alı Ağca, was able to slip out from Ankara prison, where he had been tried for the murder of a famous newspaper editor, Abdı İpekçi (from an old dönme family, a stout secularist, and descendant of Jews who had converted). Ecevit sought a way through the mess with a combination of nationalism and restated left-wing orthodoxies. He approached the Soviet Union (in vain) for oil; he toured Yugoslavia and irritated the army chiefs by praising its supposedly non-professional and voluntary territorial defence system. In 1978 he made a considerable blunder, of refusing to apply for membership of the European Economic Community at precisely the same moment as Greece did apply. His government fell apart, and Demirel returned, with a minority government.
Demirel could at least bring back the Americans. There had been a revolution in Iran, hitherto America’s ally. Turkey was needed again, even more so when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happened, and support was offered. However, this would mean new men. Demirel therefore had, as under-secretary for planning, a very clever one, Turgut Özal, who had worked in the World Bank and knew America very well indeed. His title was lowly; in that way, he would not appear to be a political threat to better-known people. However, the under-secretary for planning had the right to countersign anything; Özal became the centre of the regime. On 24 January 1980, as the Guardian correspondent struggled up through the snows towards Çankaya, Turgut Özal produced his set of economic measures. But to put them through was very difficult: Demirel’s was a minority government, and parliament was by now so paralysed that in 1980 the deputies would not agree on a new president: in farcical repeats, they voted more than one hundred times without result.
The financial position was terrible — a debt of $20bn, with low exports and high inflation. And by now the ‘Friedmanite’ medicine was proposed, the businessmen’s association, TÜSİAD, being in sympathy. Ecevit in effect lost the Americans’ confidence that summer (oddly enough he never gained the Russians’ — they preferred to deal with Demirel, as they did not want a ‘Finlandized’ Turkey, which would be too unstable). American backing meant an end to giveaway finances, strict austerity over credit, a wage freeze. Erik Zürcher, a considerable commentator on Turkey, who wishes it were Holland, mutters about the ‘Pinochet solution’, and that is right. The army was preparing to restore order. In fact its chiefs conducted meetings, in theory to head off civil war, in reality to take power. In December there was a formal meeting at the old Selimiye Barracks in Istanbul, where Florence Nightingale had once nursed. Then, it was decided simply to let the politicians make such a mess that no-one could conceivably object to a coup, which is more or less what then happened. Demirel and Ecevit would not agree on a coalition of ‘repair’, Ecevit denouncing the Özal proposals of 24 January. He remained incorrigible — even secretly approaching Erbakan for informal alliance, and refusing a deal with Demirel.