Is Islamism Democratic? Sebnem Gumuscu on Islamist Parties in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey

If these Islamist organizations want to stay in these contexts and keep playing the democratic game, they need to commit to the democratic game in the longer run.

Sebnem Gumuscu

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Sebnem Gumuscu is an associate professor of political science at Middlebury College and the author of Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:31
• What is Islamism - 2:48
• Liberal and Electoralists - 19:23
• Role of Elites - 35:16
• Islamism in the Long Run - 37:09

Key Links

Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia by Sebnem Gumuscu

"How Erdoğan’s Populism Won Again'" by Sebnem Gumuscu and Berk Esen

Follow Sebnem Gumuscu on X @sebnemisback

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu on the Disappointing Elections in Turkey… or How Democratic (or Autocratic) is Turkey Really?

Shadi Hamid on Democracy, Liberalism, and the Middle East

More Episodes from the Podcast

More Information

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Learn more about the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at https://kellogg.nd.edu/

Transcript

During the Arab Spring, it was the conservative parties who were the most active in elections. They were part of a movement called Islamism. They embraced democracy as a means to bring religious values into politics. However, many questioned whether they believed in democracy or just elections.

Islamism challenges and confounds our traditional notions about democracy. It’s difficult to imagine Islamic fundamentalists as champions of democracy. At the same time, many believe the type of democracy Islamists support falls far short of what we expect in terms of minority rights, checks and balances, and the rule of law. So, do Islamists really believe in democracy?

Sebnem Gumuscu has studied Islamist parties in Egypt, Tunsia, and Turkey. She is an associate professor of political science at Middlebury College and the author of Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. You might remember her from an episode a few months ago about the Turkish elections. It featured Sebnem and Berk Esen.

Sebnem and I discuss why some Islamist parties promote democratic values, while others merely support elections. Her explanation sheds light on how other political parties behave as well. So, while Islamist parties might sound like a special case, they reveal quite a bit about what makes democracies work.

If you like this podcast, please give the show a 5-star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been speaking to organizations and companies about sponsorship opportunities on the podcast. A few should start early in 2024. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the podcast, I want to talk to you. Please send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Sebnem Gumuscu…

jmk

Sebnem Gusmuscu, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

Thank you for having me.

jmk

So, Sebnem, I actually really loved your book, Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. I thought it was one of the best books of the year and that means a lot because we're at the end of the year. I've read a of books in 2023 and I think that this book just put such an interesting spin in terms of political parties by looking at it in terms of Islamist parties specifically. So, we're going to be talking about Islamism, but I think that a lot of the concepts help us understand ideas about democracy and understand how political parties work within democratic and even authoritarian contexts. I’m really excited to be able to talk to you about this.

But as we kind of kick off, one of the problems I have whenever I think of the Middle East and I think of Islamist parties is I'm struggling to understand what is Islamism. In fact, I talked to Shadi Hamid about it and I asked him, what is Islamism? And I'm not even sure that I got an answer that I feel great about. So, I want to hear from you, just your explanation, just a broad overview, about what unites these different parties together that describe themselves as Islamist.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

That's a great question. I'm teaching a seminar on political Islam and it takes an entire semester to unpack that question and we still end up with more questions than answers by the end of the semester. So, I really like this definition of Islamism, which I borrow from an amazing scholar, as activism in the name of Islam. But I also understand that that's very broad. You know, what is activism in the name of Islam? What is the content of that activism in the name of Islam? It can actually take very different shapes and forms. Then Islamism, in my view, is a family of ideologies and movements that are motivated by some Islamic principle and that Islamic principle that they're inspired by may be really different. We're going to talk about it in greater detail in this hour.

So, it can be very much in line with democratic principles. It can be very much in line with theocratic principles. That's why we actually have this range or spectrum of Islamisms. That's also what I think we need to talk about Islamisms rather than Islamism as if there is one monolithic ideology that actually describes all of these different organizations that we observe in different contexts.

There are Islamisms on a wide spectrum that can take very different political orientations and different tactics and different strategies. Some of them are violent. Some of them are nonviolent. Some of them are very much happy to participate in elections. They're really doing an amazing job in electoral races. Some of them are really eager, like in the case of Iran, to establish a theocratic state. So, there's a very wide range of movements and ideological orientations within the broader umbrella of what we call Islamism.

jmk

So, you would include Iran and some of the more authoritarian forms of Islamic government under Islamism? In fact, I'm wondering whether you would even go so far to include something like Hamas that is terrorist organization and, I don't know, maybe Saudi Arabia that has a very theocratic government, but has been an enemy to Islamist movements. I mean, again, this is part of the reason why I'm struggling with what is Islamism.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

That's the difficulty. Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example, have very different structures. They both self-identify as Islamic states. One of them is basically run by the clerical establishment, the mullahs in the Iranian regime. The other is an absolutist monarchy that gets significant support from Sunni Ulama. Then we have Hezbollah and Hamas who are actually using violent means as well as electoral means to appeal to their constituencies and meet their needs. Then we have those political parties that I study closely where there is no word of violence, no word of a theocratic state. They completely reject the idea of theocracy and they're in tune with what they call a civil state where there is no space for a theocratic establishment.

They argue that Islam is perfectly fine with a space of political parties, pluralism, and diversity of opinions. They can run in elections if they get the support of their people, then they can come to power, and then implement policies. So, all of them are actually within that larger framework and family of Islamisms. But it's important that we understand there is no underlying core beyond the idea of activism in the name of Islam.

jmk

So, if I talk to somebody who's part of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and defines themselves as a member of that movement and thinks of themselves as an Islamist and I asked them, is Saudi Arabia an Islamist state? Is Iran an Islamist state? What would they tell me?

Sebnem Gusmuscu

That's a very good question. This is really about Muslim Brotherhood's ideology. It won't be generalizable to all Islamist organizations. So, a Muslim Brotherhood member, depending on what faction they're close to, would argue that neither Saudi Arabia nor Iran is the proper Islamic model of governance, because they're eager to participate in democratic politics. They would say Islam actually has a democratic space entrenched, embedded in it, and a proper Islamic political space should actually give some power to the people rather than establishing an absolutist monarchy.

Indeed, in Saudi Arabia, the strongest opposition movement to the monarchy, absolutist monarchy, came from movements that actually joined or kind of shared a Muslim Brotherhood understanding in the 1990s and late early 2000s. The Saudi regime basically crushed them because they felt really threatened and they were also threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood's one year presidency in power under Morsi. They were intimidated by that example, because that space was democratic, despite its problems much more democratic than Saudi Arabia can ever be. They were concerned that this is a space where Islam and democracy can coexist and ‘we really do not want our people to see that model.’

jmk

So, in the countries that you looked at, Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey, I get the impression that for the people who live there, Islamism is connected, if not to democracy, at least to elections to legitimate the rule of those in power. Am I understanding that right?

Sebnem Gusmuscu

Yes, in a nutshell. Many people have been arguing Islam and democracy may not be compatible. What I tried to do in this book is to argue against that understanding, that assumption, by showing that indeed, especially these parties, what I call mainstream Islamist parties that pursue nonviolent activism in a civil democratic space, are really good with elections. They accept elections as a legitimate form of electing a leader and they're really good at organizing their grassroots movement and build connections with their constituencies, understanding their needs, responding to those needs, and then when they come to power in elections, they really do a good job in providing public services and goods. So, when you think about democracy, they understand how democracy works and play the game really well.

But the real issue is what is democracy and what do these Islamist parties understand as democracy and democratic? That’s what I'm trying to unpack here. There are clear disagreements within each of these political parties, Ennahdha, the Muslim Brotherhood, FJP, and AKP in Turkey. They all have a different understanding. Different factions have different understanding of what democracy should be.

jmk

Just to kind of put a face to these ideas, people in the democracy space, democracy movements, have generally described Turkey today as authoritarian. They don't describe it as a democracy any longer. So, a lot of people would bristle if we describe Erdoğan as a Democrat, a small-d democrat. However, I've come to find that elections make up a big part of Erdoğan and the AKP's political identity. That they wouldn't want to get rid of elections wholesale, because it would undermine the way that they think about politics and governance. So, even though they might attack free speech, even though they have a very repressive state in terms of the press, elections are very important to them.

So, when we think of these states, even if they're authoritarian, even if we don't describe them as democracy, sometimes we have to make sure that we recognize the fact that they are embracing elections, not just as part of the state, but almost as part of their political identity.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

Absolutely that has something to do with Islamism and the tradition of Islamist imaginary that these parties rest on. The reason why I say that is Islamism, yes, it's inspired by Islamic principles, but Islam is completely silent when it comes to governance and political systems. So, there is nothing in the Islamic tradition that actually tells us what an Islamic state should like. There is no idea of an Islamic state to begin with. So, this is really a modern ideology that pops up with the 19th century's trauma that Muslim societies are facing with the rising power of European colonizing empires and they feel really threatened. In response to that threat, they're responding that the idea of Islam can actually help us salvage our societies and establish some kind of counterforce to what we are facing from European imperial powers.

So, there's a historical trajectory there. Most of these activists who are inspired by Islam start to imagine an Islamic state, Islamic society that could fight against European colonialism. But Islam is still in a shell, a set of principles that is still silent when it comes to politics. It doesn't say anything about what an Islamic state should look like. It's all about these activists within their own context starting to imagine what an Islamic society or state would look like in their own contexts.

jmk

Kind of reminds me of what Americans go through with the Christian right where Christianity doesn't necessarily say that governance has to work a specific way. But at the same time, there are some very clear interpretations of what some people would like governance to look like who adopt more religious themes. So, is that a fair parallel or is that a little bit of a stretch?

Sebnem Gusmuscu

No, no, I think that's a quite fair parallel because going back to your earlier question one of the key issues of some of these political parties that I study was to bring back the role of Islam and Islamic principles to the public space, because they were very much at an unease and discomfort with ongoing secularization of their societies, with ongoing westernization that started in the 19th century in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey. They were all part of the secular Republican and authoritarian trends. So, they're very much Muslims who have conservative attitudes. They want religion to play a prominent role in the public space, in family life, in social spaces. They feel like their religion and religious values are sidelined and they cannot even practice their religious beliefs properly because of the secular Republican authoritarian framework that is imposed on them by some elite.

In reaction to that, they take up two things. Number one is democratic activism, because these republican secular norms are imposed on them in an authoritarian manner. So, democracy now becomes a tool available to them to fight back. ‘Okay, let's establish a political party and let's fight against this authoritarian imposition of secular ideas and maybe we can bring Islam back into the public space through democratic channels.’ So, Erdoğan, for example, looks like an autocratic leader, but he was really a democratic figure early on, because he was carrying the mantle of conservative Muslims who wanted to see greater freedom of religion and freedom of conscience in Turkey. The same goes for Ennahdha in Tunisia and the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt. So, there is an interesting tension between democratic politics and bringing religion and religious values back into the political and social space.

jmk

Yeah. I don't think a lot of people remember how the AKP was a democratizing force around the turn of the century where some of the more religious laws that they put in place weren't so much about imposing religion, but allowing people to express their religion. For example, women able to wear the hijab at universities or work. It was illegal to do that. In America, that would just blow people's minds if they were told that they weren't able to just do the basic expressions of their religious faith in their school or at work.

Not imposing the religious ideas, but just to be able to do the things that they thought were necessary like wear a cross or a Muslim person to be able to wear a hijab. Things like that are just taken for granted in the United States. In Turkey that wasn't the case. So, the AKP looked as though it was liberalizing the Turkish state when it made these changes that allowed for greater religious expression.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

Exactly. That's why the AKP and some of these Islamist parties are really puzzling because they can serve democratization and liberalization in their societies, especially if they are playing a role to provide greater freedom of religion for the people. Interestingly, all three of these countries that I study are Muslim majority countries. So, the majority of the population identify as Muslims. Maybe they're not all conservative, but they still have a Muslim identity. It's very interesting how the AKP in its earlier years was indeed talking a lot about a different type of secularism to define the Turkish polity and Turkish society. Not a French laïcité kind of almost restrictive, not almost, but definitely restrictive secularism where you cannot wear a cross, you cannot wear a hijab in the public space. That's completely refused.

I was in college in 1997 at the time when the government passed that legislation to make it impossible and illegal for women to wear the hijab. That's against the freedom of religion. Then AKP came to power. The way they talked about secularism was very much a liberal understanding of secularism. Let people practice their religious beliefs. Whatever they want to do in the public space in terms of their expression of their religious belief that should be fine and that should not be defined or restricted by the state. That is very much close to what we call an Anglo-Saxon understanding of secularism like what we have in the United States.

jmk

So, you see a divide between Islamists who are, on the one hand, liberal and believe in what on this podcast we would describe as a thicker version of democracy versus electoralists that are a little bit closer to authoritarianism and maybe embracing almost a competitive authoritarianism where you have elections, but doesn't feel like a free society at the same time. Let's focus on the liberal side for a moment here. Why are some Islamists liberal? Why do they embrace liberalism? Why do they embrace pluralism? What makes them Islamist at the same time?

Sebnem Gusmuscu

Again, great question. There can be multiple factors that explain why some Islamists end up on the liberal end of the spectrum. It can be about personal experiences. It can be about their exposure to different ideas. It can be about their political learning curve or their family upbringing and some personal experience that defines their ideas and norms. Maybe they start at the electoral end of the spectrum and they may end up in the liberal spectrum because they face some kind of repression, perhaps at one point, or they were exposed to more liberal democratic practices when they were in exile in the United Kingdom or the United States. So, there may be multiple reasons why one would end up being a liberal Islamist. It's really hard to theorize that because it's so personal at the same time. It's really hard to theorize.

But what we need to maybe pay attention to is to that diversity of opinions that exist within every Islamist party, every Islamist organization. They're never monolithic. They never have consensus or full agreement on what the movement should do and what the movement should strive for. That is what I'm trying to unpack, but I also appreciate the complexity of the question for why some people would end up on the liberal end and some people would end up at the electoral end of that spectrum.

jmk

Let's put a face to the idea. Rached Ghannouchi is a great example of somebody who's both a liberal democrat as well as an Islamist. He was the leader of Ennahdha over in Tunisia. That was the most successful case of democracy to come out of the Arab Spring and really the most successful democracy that we've seen in the Arab world thus far. So, why don't you just explain this concept through the experience of Ghannouchi and explain how he came to embrace liberalism and see it as complementary to his ideas about Islamism.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

Ghannouchi was from the get go very friendly with the idea of democracy. He was very much like, ‘No, we need to establish a political party and that political party should be part of the political space and it should run in elections and if it comes to power, it should have power to implement policies.’ He never had a question about Islam and democracy. It was very clear to him as early as the 1980s. Then we see him moving into a new phase in the 1990s where he starts to explore the connection between Islam and democracy from a theoretical perspective and trying to unpack what it means to have an Islamic democracy.

He has an intellectual journey that happens when he is in exile in the United Kingdom. He's living in a liberal democratic society now and observes firsthand what it looks like. At the same time, he unpacks Islam and democracy and the relationship between the two. Eventually he arrives at a point where Islam informs liberal norms and liberal democratic norms and values for him. That is exactly what I mean by liberal Islamism. That may sound a bit strange to many people. How can Islamism be liberal? The idea is that liberal Islamists believe that Islam indeed informs some of the key principles that underlie liberal democracy. So, Rached Ghannouchi is insistent on the idea that democratic values and norms, pluralism, and liberal democracy is not a Western concept exclusively.

Islam actually underpins some of the critical aspects of equality, social justice, and freedom to pursue your goals as individuals, because we as human beings are reflection of God on earth and we are all enjoying those rights, equal rights. In a nutshell, he's basically rewriting the theoretical foundations of democracy in the Muslim world. He argues that people have inherent rights. given by God, and they should exercise those rights given by God in the political space. No one can actually take those rights away from them. That's a complete rejection of autocratic rule, theocratic rule, and at the same time opening a wide space for pluralism and democratic politics. But of course, maybe one thing to keep in mind is that liberal democracy is about diversity and pluralism. But it's not really about social liberalism.

So, I want to say that many of these liberal Islamists would be hesitant to accept gay marriage, for example, because that's the social aspect. But they would not discriminate on the basis of religious creed. If you're an atheist, you're fine. You have citizenship rights. If you are a non-Muslim practicing Christianity or Judaism, it's fine. You have full citizenship rights.

jmk

What I find amazing about the Tunisian experience is that Ghannouchi went out of his way to make sure that different voices were actually represented within Tunisian government. I mean, Ennahdha probably could have dominated those first few elections and just written the constitution completely on their own, but he really tried to show restraint within his party. I believe at one point they didn't run a presidential candidate so they wouldn't dominate the government. They wanted to have a voice, a very strong voice, but he didn't necessarily want it to be the only voice. He wanted there to be multiple voices. I mean, that's a very sophisticated version of democracy that not many political parties would adopt, even in very liberal democratic countries.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

Absolutely. They did a very fine job in submitting to two main norms of democratic politics that Levitsky and Ziblatt specify in their book, institutional forbearance and toleration. Tolerating the other, the political other, and institutional forbearance, which is about not dominating the political space, even if you have the power to do so is really a distinguishing factor. Ghannouchi and Ennahdha were really mindful of that. They did everything in their power to not dominate that space. They established a coalition government with secular parties from the get go and they opened up the space for drafting the constitution to pretty much everyone. They had multiple conversations with civil society organizations.

They could very easily, again, have dominated that space, as you said, but they chose not to because they understood democracy as having partners in the democratic space, rather than delegitimizing their rivals and trying to capture all the power. They were insistent that they were going to share that power because building a new democratic system was a transitional moment. They thought that it would only be possible if they had partners that would become rivals later on. So that was again, as you said, a very sophisticated understanding of democracy, very much in tune with liberal democratic norms.

jmk

Let's talk a little bit about the different experience that we see in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood. How did they adopt a different path? What did it look like over in Egypt?

Sebnem Gusmuscu

It was the exact opposite actually. So, Ennahdha refrained from dominating that space. The Muslim Brotherhood did everything in its power to dominate the new space that was opening up after the revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood had a very righteous, majoritarian understanding of democracy as Pahwa defines it. They were really like, ‘Okay, it's our time now. We've been waiting for this moment for 80 years and we are really good in organizing our political constituency. We are really good at mobilizing our support at the ballot box. We are going to win all of these races and we're going to gain power.’

Once they gain power with multiple elections, they indeed did their best to capture every single part of the political system that was emerging at the time. They dominated the constitutional process, drafting the new constitution. They dominated all the parliamentary committees that were trying to formulate policies. They also captured the presidency and they started to rule single handedly - eliminating lots of people in the meantime, of course, all the revolutionaries that were united against Mubarak. They practically excluded everyone from power and they centralized and monopolized power in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood.

jmk

Now, these are two countries that are trying to develop their political institutions. The constitutions don't exist yet. They have some traditions, but they're trying to figure out how to incorporate elections. How do we incorporate democratic institutions into our governance model, into our political culture? But at the same time, I mean, I'm seeing so many similarities with experiences I see in liberal democracies. These are not tendencies that are Islamist. I mean, we see in the United States and different state parties, Republicans or Democrats taking power and not listening to the other side.

We see in other countries that are described as liberal democracies having conflict and real tensions within their democratic systems because some parties take a much more majoritarian stance in terms of how they think about democracy and don't want to include those who lost in the previous elections. They don't want to include the views of other people within society. I found it really interesting to think in these two cases, how important it was to be a political party that really had a sense of what it meant to be democratic and how that actually changes the way that democracy actually works for that country.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

That's a very important observation and I would like to argue that that's one of the key takeaways of this book because this is really not about Islamist parties. It is actually about political parties, writ large, because political parties are all composed of factions. We have different factions and tendencies within each political party and it doesn't have to be an Islamist party. It can be any party, conservative party or more leftwing parties. It doesn't matter. They all have factions within and those factions may have very different orientations when it comes to what it means to hold power. So, when I win an election, I can basically say this is winners take all. I have the power. I can do whatever I like because people voted for me.

So, if that's the understanding of a particular faction that dominates a political party or captures a political party, then democracy is in trouble because they have a very problematic understanding of democracy that excludes everyone else from power. They see this as an opportunity to subvert democratic institutions in their own favor and maybe play the game in a very dirty manner. The game is no longer fair and the playing field is actually getting tilted. If I come to power with that understanding of winners take all, I start changing the judicial system and if I have enough power, I can tweak the constitution. If I don't have that much power, I can maybe pass certain legislation that would change or undermine freedom of speech and freedom of the media.

This is really problematic not just for these three countries that I study, but the case for all political parties, because all political parties are factionalized. If you have certain factions with a different understanding of democracy, a very instrumentalist understanding of democracy, and they lean towards majoritarianism, then we have a problem in whatever democratic context we're in.

jmk

The AKP is really fascinating because it shifts from being more of a liberal democratic party to being more of what you describe as an electoral party. One that adopts more authoritarian tendencies. We see that under Erdoğan. I mean, Turkey has become very authoritarian, even though it continues to hold elections and embrace the electoral process. Those elections don't necessarily feel free and fair because of the laws that surround them in terms of speech and in terms of freedom of the press. I mean, there's just so much repression within the country that it no longer feels like a democracy even though elections exist and continue to be held. Why did the AKP shift from being more of a liberal party to becoming an electoral authoritarian party?

Sebnem Gusmuscu

It's all about the distribution of power within the party organization. The AKP, when it was established in 2001, was a very different party than what we observe today. We can basically speak of two AKPs, perhaps, so that early AKP was really a different party because there was a very strong liberal faction within. Erdoğan was still powerful. He had a lot of charisma as the party chairman, but his faction was not as prominent and dominant within the party organization in its early years. That liberal faction, for example, led by Abdullah Gül, former president of the Turkish Republic, had resources and they had expertise and they were populating key seats. Also, he sat in the cabinet.

All of that started to change when Abdullah Gül got elected as the president in 2007. At the time, the constitution required the president to be a nonpartisan figure. So, he had to leave his party, resign, and his ties to the party were basically cut off. Then we see his faction getting increasingly marginalized by Erdoğan, who is now feeling more comfortable as the prime minister and the chairman of the party. No more competition coming from or checks and balances within the party coming from Abdullah Gül. So, that was a huge space for him to fill in. Also, at the same time, he sidelined anyone who would be closer to the liberal understandings of democracy. He uses lots of different resources to make sure that he can provide the right incentives to whoever's left in the party to be loyal to him.

jmk

The way that you've been describing these parties, though, it sounds like it's very elite driven. Ghannouchi shapes the way that Ennahdha thinks. In Turkey, the AKP is shaped by these two different leaders, Erdogan and a more liberal group that, again, are elites. They are the ones that are seen as the leaders of the party. Is the direction of these Islamist parties, or really any kind of political party, more determined by its membership or is it determined by its elites?

Sebnem Gusmuscu

That's a very good and difficult question. I tend to put a lot more emphasis on the role of the elite for sure. One of the reasons is, especially in the Turkish context and maybe in the Tunisian context as well and I would include Muslim Brotherhood too, these organizations are hierarchical, oligarchic organizations. Indeed, scholars of political parties since early 20th century, like Robert Michels actually argue that political parties are by nature oligarchic. You have the leadership playing a very important role in setting the course of the party, setting the trajectory of the party.

So, I am putting a lot of emphasis on the power of the elite in shaping what the membership of the party looks like in shaping the trajectory of the party, its platform, perhaps because these parties have certain ideological tendencies towards having the elite as playing a vanguard role, so they would lead the people who will follow them. Perhaps there's something about the political culture in these countries because it's not just Islamist parties that have clear oligarchic tendencies. The same is the case for secular parties as well in all of these countries.

jmk

So, as we look to close, one of the paradoxes that I'm trying to wrap my head around with the idea of liberal Islamism and electoral Islamism is that electoral Islamism seems as though it's more successful at the polls. The Muslim Brotherhood won hands down in Egypt. Turkey has continued to win the presidency and before that it had a dominance in parliament. I mean, Erdoğan has been the most successful politician in Turkey for a very long time. Ennahdha saw their numbers actually decline over time. They actually lost support in Tunisia. But at the same time, they made sure that they were able to have influence within Tunisia far longer than the Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt, because democracy actually hung on for some time. So, I struggle to understand how the democratic incentives work for these Islamist parties.

In some ways I think the democratic incentives encourage electoralism in the long run. But in other ways, if you want to preserve democracy, maybe it encourages liberalism. Do you think that Islamism is compatible with liberalism for a sustainable party in the long term, that they wouldn't be attracted to those potential electoral gains to be able to just win those elections?

Sebnem Gusmuscu

That is such a good question. I think there is a major trade off there for Islamists as you beautifully summarized. The Muslim Brotherhood went for a winners take all logic and they lost all power in a year. Now they're in a huge place where they're basically destroyed by the Egyptian state and many of them ended up in prison or in exile. This is the most severe crisis that the Muslim Brotherhood has observed in its long history. Ennahdha survived a lot longer, but still, now we are actually seeing significant pressure from a different type of autocratic rule, Kais Saied. But they also managed to put the country on a democratic path that allowed the party to remain in the game for a longer durée.

So, there is a very clear trade off there. If Islamists, especially in these more perhaps polarized, hostile environments, are willing to stay in the game, they need to play the democratic game and not take the winners take all logic, because there will be a pushback. These contexts are not friendly to Islamist parties. All of these three countries are deeply polarized along secular-Islamic orientations. So, if these Islamist organizations want to stay in these contexts and keep playing the democratic game, they need to commit to the democratic game in the longer run. But then again, we also have other tradeoffs. Erdoğan’s case is very interesting because he went for winners take all and he succeeded. He won the longer game.

But perhaps we need to think about other factors that may explain what happened in all three contexts. I want to talk about, for example, economic success. The reason why Ennahdha potentially lost support over successive elections is the fact that they did a terrible job in governing the economy. The revolution happened for a reason and that reason was economic. In this sense, people were miserable. They were unemployed and they were not happy in Tunisia. That's why they overthrew Ben Ali’s regime. Ennahdha promised a new society and new economy, a new regime.

The entire Tunisian political elite, including Ennahdha, did an amazing job in establishing democratic institutions and practices. What they couldn't do was in achieving economic success. That indeed undermined their democratic experience. Erdoğan in contrast in Turkey did an amazing job in meeting the economic needs of the people. So, one reason why he was so successful and kept winning these elections is economic growth that he delivered in maybe the first decade and a half of AKP rule in Turkey. Now, Turkey is in a really tough economic position. Yes, that's a problem, but he did a lot for the Turkish people for about maybe 14-15 years.

That is a very important reason for why he could pursue winners take all and win elections and also take that political power that comes with elections and turn the country's trajectory towards a more competitive authoritarian direction and maybe also, at the same time, inject greater Islamic principles into the regime because he had credit from elsewhere, from economic success.

jmk

Well, Sebnem, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a wonderful conversation. The book, one more time, is Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you for joining me today.

Sebnem Gusmuscu

Thank you so much, Justin.​