2023-05-14 17:15:22
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has for two decades gotten to know the leaders of other regional and world powers. The “reis” with an iron fist knows how to be inflexible when his interests require it. He uses insults to disconcert his opponents or uses them to ally Turkish public opinion. He navigates between the fierce defense of Turkey’s interests and the personal affinities he has for his rivals.
Erdogan, herald of Islam, and Macron, scapegoat
“Our wives get along well, we don’t,” admitted Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a press conference in October 2022 in Prague: the Turkish president has rocky relations with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who had welcomed him to the Elysée in January 2018, a few months after the start of his first five-year term.
The relationship between the two leaders has suffered from the many tensions between their countries. This was the case with the war in Libya, then with Turkish explorations in the eastern Mediterranean, then with Ankara’s support for Azerbaijan, in the conflict against Armenia for control of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Franco-Turkish relationship has also been affected by the question of NATO and the migrant crisis in Europe. The ambassadors of the two countries have been recalled several times.
The reis also wishes to assert itself as a global defender of Sunni Islam and oppressed Muslims and does not hesitate to take secular France as a scarecrow. In October 2020, Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Emmanuel Macron, this “newbie in politics”, “ambitious incapable”to have a ” issue “ with Islam and Muslims. He leaves the media that are subservient to him to castigate in France a country “colonialist” et “racist”.
The Tsar and the Sultan, two figures in search of the lost empire
We wouldn’t qualify them at first sight as nostalgic. And yet Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan have in common to seek to recover lost empires. Both like to summon the past and revisit history in support of their ambitions for power.
The two men came to power at the beginning of the second millennium, in 2000 for Putin, in 2003 for Erdogan, and have remained there ever since. Tempted for a time by a rapprochement with the West, a candidacy for the European Union for Turkey, a less belligerent position for Russia after the events of September 11, the two heads of state then backtracked.
They now share the same distrust vis-à-vis the West, which they do not hesitate to challenge. Common points which allow them to exchange even on the grounds where they defend opposite interests – Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria, Libya, Ukraine.
Despite these antagonisms, the two presidents maintain cordial, even friendly relations. They have seen each other around thirty times in person since 2016. On April 27, the Russian president gave his support to his counterpart, ahead of the elections, greeting a leader at the “ambitious goals” who seeks to “achieve with confidence”.
The reis and the raïs, from friendly neighbors to sworn enemies
Gone are the days of doctrine “zero problems with neighbors”, theorized by Ahmed Davutoglu, diplomat, statesman and former president of the AKP, the party of the head of state. Far also the time when the Turkish president called his counterpart Bashar Al Assad ” My brother “ and welcomed him with his family for a holiday in a seaside resort on the shores of the Aegean Sea.
Bashar Al Assad, who came to power in 2000, and Erdogan experienced a rapprochement from 2008, with numerous and frequent meetings. This idyll was brutally interrupted in 2011 by the Syrian revolution and its fierce repression.
Turkey initially calls on the Damascene power to carry out reforms. Then Recep Tayyip Erdogan asks for the resignation of his « ex-ami » and otherwise promises him a fate comparable to that of the Libyan Muammar Gaddafi. “Butcher”, “terrorist”, “thief”… So many apostrophes which mark the deterioration of the relationship between the two men.
During the civil war, Turkey supported rebel and jihadist groups against the regime. She financed them and offered them her territory as a rear base. However, in February, after twelve years of conflict, Erdogan, whose country hosts more than 3 million refugees, expressed his desire to meet the Syrian president to ” bury the hatchet “. Bashar Al Assad replied in March that he would only agree to meet him when he withdrew his troops from northern Syria.
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