“In Turkey, President Erdogan has applied himself to dividing the population by assigning behaviors and identities that distance each other”

2023-05-23 12:30:03

En Turkey, 93% of voters went to the polls on 14 May to presidential and legislative elections. This rate of participation was hailed, in particular by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, as the testimony of a civic and democratic spirit well anchored in the customs of Turkish citizens.

Civic spirit? Really ? Wouldn’t it rather be the reflection of a highly polarized society, where everyone trembles to submit to the power of the opposing party? What do these antagonized fragments of society fear? Conservative Muslims fear above all losing the social consideration and privileged rank they have enjoyed since Recep Tayyip Erdogan took office in 2002.

Conservative Muslim citizens, Sunnis, practitioners, it is to them that the largesse of the current president is addressed, candidate for his succession for the third time, who is currently preparing for the second round of the presidential election, scheduled for May 28. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s housing policy has reduced informal and unsanitary housing, promoted home ownership, and significantly improved public hospital conditions.

A Türkiye divided between “us” and “them”

He thus brought out this new middle class which owes him everything. However, more than the economic ease with which he bestowed it, the president sealed the unfailing gratitude and fidelity of this class by valuing and reifying its conservatism, its religiosity, its customs as new city dwellers.

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He assigned it to an uninhibited Islam, which makes itself visible through the performance of religious rites, through non-mixed sociability and recreational uses, prohibiting alcohol and the places where it is consumed, as well as by wearing headscarves for women. He delegated to them the right to say the lawful customs in the district, to represent the ideal type of the national community. This is what these supporters are afraid of having to give up and this is the basis of their aspirations that Erdogan has endeavored to exalt and that he is the only one who can fulfill. They constitute the ” We “ which in the president’s grammar serves to generate ” them “ and invective him.

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” Them “it is the laity, open to the West and suffocating from the absence of freedoms and the rule of law. ” Them “ fear the abandonment of rational and even scientific thought in favor of beliefs, fear the pressure of conservatives on their uses and their lifestyles. They had to give up their position as representative citizens of republican Turkey in favor of conservative Muslims.

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