2023-05-28 22:16:02
The outgoing president has prepared for the celebration of his third term even before the second round this Sunday, which should see him beat Kemal Kiliçdaroglu.
“The right person at the right time” (Right time, right man). From posters to brochures, the flagship slogan of the Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to escape any form of temporality. As if the Turkish president, almost certain winner of the second round of this Sunday, May 28, had prepared in advance the story of his stay in power. To the point of anticipating the festivities.
Monday, May 29, while the official results will parade on the banners of all televisions, it is in Sainte-Sophie, recently converted into a mosque, that the strong man of the country, at the helm for twenty years, has already planned to go pray. Double symbol in its calendar, the date coinciding with the anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople (a certain May 29, 1453) by Mehmet II, followed, at the time, by the transformation of the Byzantine basilica into a mosque, before Atatürk turned it into a museum in 1934. It will be an opportunity to celebrate “his” revenge and especially that of the Turks of his pedigree, new city dwellers from modest and traditional rural backgrounds, to whom he believes he has given back “pride” et “visibility”, on the urban elites who inherited the secular Republic of 1923. “Atatürk wanted to erase us. Erdogan gave us visibility,” says Mahmut Nedim, entrepreneur from the conservative Fatih district and loyal voter of the AKP, Erdogan’s party.
obsession with revenge
Yet sensitive to the economic crisis as well as to the mess in the management of the earthquake of February 6, there remains a “faithful servant” of reis. “Opposite, the opposition has nothing to offer us, apart from the risk of plunging back into the same instability and insecurity of the 1990s”, he justifies himself, assuming without blushing the choice of “the order” against the «chaos» mentioned on television channels.
In a country where 90% of the media are in tune with power, Erdogan’s story has for many turned into a success story, where nationalist and religious fibers are constantly tickled. “Erdogan’s whole story is based on the idea that the state is going to be refounded, but this time as a state that reclaims the values of the Ottoman Empire while reconciling them with the values of the modernity and technology, observes political scientist Zeynep Gambetti, citing the major infrastructure and military development projects of recent years.
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But in Turkey d’Erdogan, neo-Ottomanism, like politics, is an exercise in variable geometry. Depending on the circumstances, his lengthy speeches are a clever mix of poetic quotations, verbal attacks against his rivals and references to the various sultans of yesteryear: Mehmet the Conqueror, Suleiman the Magnificent for the grandeur of his construction sites, or even Abdülhamid II for his pan-Muslim and Arab policy. “If Erdogan were to write a book, he could call it ‘History of a nation rejected, History of a nation revived’», remarks the American historian and specialist in Turkey Howard Eissenstat. Able to perfectly endorse his victim fabric, Erdogan “knows perfectly, he said, play on the strings of an emotional harp like any good populist”.
At the risk of usurping the past. On a video, available on YouTube and dating back several years, the Turkish president evokes, during a meeting, the “sadness” of the assassination of Abdülhamid II, when the sultan was simply dethroned: a slip revealing an obsession with death, and revenge, as he was able to experience it during and after the failed coup of 2016 , the starting point of an acceleration of its authoritarian drift.
If Erdogan were to write a book, he could call it “History of a Nation Rejected, History of a Nation Revived”.
Howard Eissenstat, American historian and specialist in Turkey
In summary of his referential eclecticism, a “martyr” of the XXe century is regularly mentioned: Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, overthrown by the military in 1960, then executed. The politician, known for his liberal positions towards Islam, had come to power on… May 14, 1950: a special day in Erdogan’s symbolic calendar and which he chose, not without calculation, as the date for the first round of the 2023 presidential election.
Overtake Ataturk
A follower of the past, Recep Tayyip Erdogan also wants to be the proud guarantor of continuity: promises of social aid, future constructions, new hospitals, like that of Defne, in the south-east of the country, freshly built in the middle of the earthquake ruins. «On continue», announces a scrolling billboard on Taksim, projecting its voters into the “new century” to come – an allusion to the centenary of the Republic. In a Turkey that is more polarized than ever, where uncertainty about the future predisposes it to give in easily to the reassuring sirens of propaganda, the slogan speaks to its base as well as to its far-right allies.
It is on this central square of Istanbul, adjoining Gezi Park, the scene just ten years ago of the repression of the major demonstrations of the same name, that the reis recently erected a huge mosque… just in front of a very Kemalist symbol, the Republic Monument. The message, highly symbolic, does not consist in erasing “the unique man” (single man), as Atatürk sometimes called himself, but going beyond him: a perfectly metaphorical synthesis of Islamo-nationalism marching on the buds of an unfinished spring.
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