Erdogan

Late on Saturday night, just 24 hours after the attempted coup, hundreds of supporters of President Erdogan swarmed into Taksim Square – the pulsating heart of secular, modern Turkey – to celebrate their victory with shouts of Takbir - ‘Allahu Akbar’, meaning ‘God is Great’. Already the story – so hard to piece together – was being put in stone by the AKP mob. ‘We are here to tell the world that we won, and we are the real Turkey. This is a victory against those traitor Gulenists.’ Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic cleric based in Pennsylvania, was once a key ally of Erdogan but relations have been fraught for several years. Erdogan has accused Gulen of being behind the coup.

Boris Johnson is by no means short of a bob or two but when I challenged him to create a limerick for The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition (prize £1,000) he was unable to resist. Naturally, during his interview with me and Urs Gehriger, for the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche – which I call the Swiss Spectator – the subject of the migrant crisis - and the EU’s recent German-driven deal with Turkey to stop the migrant tide from the east - cropped up. And so too did the criminal prosecution in Germany of the comedian Jan Böhmermann, for a poem accusing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of getting his rocks off with goats.

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Has Erdogan brought Europe to heel? In his Spectator cover piece, Douglas Murray argues that the Turkish President has used a mixture of intimidation, threats and blackmail to do just that and throw open the doors of Europe to Turkey. Douglas says Erdogan is a ‘wretched Islamist bully’ who has shown just how the EU works. But in pushing Europe around, is Erdogan now more powerful than Merkel, Juncker and Cameron? And how does the Turkish PM's resignation this week changed the country's relationship with the EU? Isabel Hardman speaks to Rem Korteweg, from the Centre for European Reform.

Nobody should be surprised that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has instituted effective blasphemy laws to defend himself from criticism in Turkey.  But many of us had assumed that these lèse-majesté laws would not yet be put in place inside Europe.  At least not until David Cameron succeeds in his long-held ambition to bring Turkey fully into the EU. Yet here we are.  Erdogan’s rule now already extends to Europe. At the end of last month, during a late-night comedy programme, a young German comedian called Jan Böhmermann included a poem that was rude about Erdogan.  Incidentally the point of Mr Böhmermann’s skit was to highlight the obscenity of Turkey already trying to censor satire in Germany.

Angela Merkel gave a defiant interview last night in which she defended her handling of the refugee crisis. She declared, ‘I have no Plan B’—worryingly, I suspect this is true. But how much worse the refugee crisis could become worse is made clear in leaked minutes of a meeting between the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker. As Bloomberg columnist Marc Champion points out, Erdogan is determined to get far more out of the EU than the 3 billion Euros it is currently offering. He tells them that if the offer is for only 3 billion, the conversation might as well end there: "We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/putinsendgameinsyria/media.mp3" title="Putin's endgame in Syria"] Listen [/audioplayer] Russia’s bombing of the city of Aleppo this week sent a clear message: Vladimir Putin is now in charge of the endgame in Syria. Moscow’s plan — essentially, to restore its ally Bashar al-Assad to power — is quickly becoming a reality that the rest of the world will have to accept. America, Britain and the rest may not be comfortable with Putin’s ambitions in the Middle East, or his methods of achieving them. But the idea of backing a ‘moderate opposition’ in Syria has been proved a fantasy that leaves the field to Putin and Assad.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thenextrefugeecrisis/media.mp3" title="Laura Pitel and Migration Watch's Alanna Thomas discuss the second migrant crisis"] Listen [/audioplayer]In Istanbul, signs of the Syrian influx are everywhere. Syrian mothers sit on pavements clutching babies wrapped in blankets; children from Homs, Syria’s most completely devastated city, push their way through packed tram carriages begging for coins. Arabic adverts offer rooms for rent. It’s almost inconceivable how many Syrians Turkey has taken in as refugees — around 2.5 million of them so far. That’s almost three times the number who have sought refuge in Europe. And while the Turks are hospitable, Turkey has more than any country should bear.

It isn’t just Iran who have been angered by the execution of Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Protests have erupted in Bahrain, Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq, all places where the 1400-year-old Shia-Sunni divide remains a faultline. Iran’s reaction may seem uncompromising, with Ayatollah Khamenei tweeting: ‘The unjustly spilt blood of this martyr will have quick consequences’; but they have also sounded a note of caution. President Rouhani called for the arrest of the mob who stormed the Saudi embassy buildings. Perhaps he knows that, in the long run, Iran’s star is rising and the Saudis’ is falling.