Erdogan

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has never been so weak – nor so strong. At home, he is facing the most potent challenge to his power since an armed coup in 2016, in the form of a serious electoral challenger whom he has just jailed, causing massive protests and unsettling the money markets. Internationally, though, he has never been stronger. Every major power bloc in the world, it seems, needs Turkey’s help, with issues ranging from immigration to peacekeeping and energy supplies. Instead of sinking his main rival’s candidacy, the Turkish president has created a martyr For Europe, Erdogan remains a major gas supplier and an essential bulwark against immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan.

‘Kilicdaroglu’ is a pronunciation nightmare for the non-Turkish. Yet after this Sunday’s presidential elections, international news presenters, who have struggled for 20 years with President Erdogan’s soft ‘g’, might have to work harder to articulate the name of the social democrat leader of opposition. ‘You may call him Mr Kemal [his first name] until he wins,’ I’ve been saying to journalist friends. It’s the kind of simplification that people from complex, non-western countries are self-trained to give so our maddening realities can be better understood: ‘To feel Turkey, imagine the acute polarisation during the Brexit referendum continuing for 20 years. Add to that a far more ruthless Trump with political genius and Islamist aspirations.

Turkey’s twentieth-century experience was very different from that of most European countries. During World War One, the late Ottoman Empire joined forces with Germany, a decision the sultans not only came to regret but that ultimately led to the fall of their monarchy. The Turkish War of Independence followed, touched off by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who transformed the Ottoman Empire into the secular Turkish Republic that still exists today. During World War Two, Turkey remained neutral, because of its previous experiences with joining a German military campaign, but also because it was in dire economic shape. In 1952, Turkey joined NATO, and has since been an ally of the West.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that the country will be heading into its first full lockdown. An early success story, this time last year Turkey was being hailed as a model for its swift actions that ensured the country saw a relatively small death-toll, relative to its size (39,000 people in Turkey have died so far in the course of the pandemic). Now infections are surging: Turkey recorded a total of 61,028 daily cases of Covid-19 and 346 deaths last Tuesday, the highest since the pandemic began. And Erdogan is panicking. There was some hubris in Erdogan’s early declarations of victory against the virus last year.

On Thursday, Turkey Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu will land in Brussels to meet with European Union officials to start to ‘build Turkey’s future in Europe’. Next week, Turkey is expected to resume talks with Greece to resolve their maritime disputes after a five-year hiatus. The clash in the eastern Mediterranean between Ankara and Athens has brought the two states to the brink of war and is one of a long list of reasons why Turkey has so far failed to ‘build’ that ‘future in Europe’.

Jamal Khashoggi’s murder has been dissected by the world’s press, perhaps none more so than in Turkey, where the journalist met his grisly fate. Fresh information is still being leaked about his final moments inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. In a recording of his murder, Khashoggi can be heard putting up a fight. He orders his killers to release him and warns they’ll be brought to account. But will they? Or are there bigger fish to fry? And what is Erdogan hoping to achieve by making life uncomfortable for Saudi's Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Khashoggi has been described by some as a Saudi dissident. Turkish media say he saw himself instead as a ‘proud patriot’ who was homesick as a result of his self-imposed exile.

Many people I know woke up yesterday morning with a knot in their stomachs. ‘Another five years,’ I heard one person mutter. They were referring of course to the victory secured by President Erdogan in Turkey. He won nearly 53 per cent of the votes in an election that many had hoped would see him defeated, especially as his regular ‘Ace’ card, the economy, has been rather rocky these past few years. The result showed his main rival wasn’t even close: Muharrem Ince garnered a little shy of 31 per cent in the poll. The 64-year-old president thanked the country for putting their faith in him once again. He told crowds from his HQ in the capital Ankara that ‘the winner of this election is each and every individual’ in Turkey.

Istanbul It is a bad time to have an ally on the fence. With US military action in Syria looking more likely by the minute, and the West’s frosty relations with Russia in danger of deepening into a new Cold War, Washington is eyeing the actions of Turkey’s President Erdogan with concern. Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, the ally with the second biggest army and the only one to share a border with Syria, has spent the past two years cosying up to Russia. Ankara is part of the Astana troika alongside Moscow and Tehran – an initiative that has snatched the peace-broking lead in Syria from the UN and Western-back Geneva talks.

Istanbul The most dramatic part of President Erdogan’s visit to Washington this week was the punch-up between his security guards and Kurdish demonstrators on the lawn outside the Turkish embassy.  The protest was nothing unusual for a president who seems to provoke adoration and disgust in equal measure wherever he goes. Neither was the violent scuffle a surprise; Erdogan's bodyguards did the same last time he was in the States. The news barely touched the Turkish press, and not only because there are few titles left on the news stands which offer opposition to Erdogan. When similar fights break out in the Turkish parliament, as they have done regularly over the past year, such scenes are barely worth writing about.

Well farewell then Turkey.  Or at least, farewell the Turkey of Kemal Ataturk.  It’s a shame.  Ataturk-ism nearly made its own centenary. But the nation that he founded, which believed broadly in progressive notions such as a separation of mosque and state, has just been formally snuffed out.  President Erdogan’s success in the referendum to award himself Caliph-like powers for life finally sees the end of Turkey’s secular and democratic experiment. Perhaps the poll which gave him victory was rigged.  Perhaps it wasn’t.  In the same way that perhaps the ‘coup’ last summer was real.  Or perhaps it wasn’t.