Ataturk’s complex.. Where is Turkey heading with Erdogan?

5th November 2021

3 minutes read

When Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party lost major cities in the 2019 municipal elections, the tide already seemed to turn against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

A conclusion reached by the French newspaper, Le Monde, in an article written by its correspondent in Istanbul, Marie Guigou, entitled: “Where is Turkey heading?,” in which I addressed the current Turkish situation based on Erdogan’s policies and the impact this has had on the future of the country and men as well.

The newspaper considered that Erdogan’s “ideological affiliation gradually overcame early pragmatism and initial voluntary initiatives”, which opened the way for him to win all electoral events since 2002, despite his “deviation towards tyranny” in many stations.

At the beginning of his political career, and even in his early stages, the man’s pragmatism was an important motive for his election either as Istanbul’s mayor or as president afterward, but a complex quickly surfaced to overshadow gains that diminished over time and accumulated fatal errors.

Going back further, the paper adds, Erdogan’s “desire to consolidate his country’s power in Europe, in ambitions he has articulated loudly and openly in the past, actually pushed the military, which was in a position to block his march toward absolute rule, into a tactic of exclusion”.

During his 18 years in power – including more than 11 years as prime minister (2003-2014), Erdogan tried to make a fake impression by effecting change in the country, but it looked like a mirage that quickly dissipated with the sun’s rise: the man who had promoted himself as the architect of an “economic miracle” was himself one who plunged his country into endless crises, owing to his verbal wars, ideological disputes, foreign interventions, and diplomatic battles regionally and internationally.

As much as at some point, the newspaper says, he is the same man “who mixes his army and mercenaries on all fronts of war – Syria, Libya, northern Iraq, and the Caucasus – to the point where he risks angering his traditional partners: Europe and the United States.

Ataturk complex:

The newspaper also touched on Erdogan’s long-standing dogma, the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, with the Turkish president doing his best to “leave an equal footprint to what the founder of the republic left”, noting: “But the tide has changed recently”.

Erdogan, she continued, was obsessed with the rare history-entering obsession of Ataturk “who didn’t stop denying his legacy, but the weather has changed recently. In the 2019 local elections, the ruling Justice and Development Party, under its leadership, lost many major cities, including Istanbul, the capital Ankara, and Izmir, to the opposition”.

The balance of men in the eyes of his people seems clear through frequent opinion polls showing his popularity collapsing and his electoral advantage fading.

“Now, because of the currency crisis and inflation entrenched in the tens, the camp of Erdogan’s rivals has expanded dramatically,” the newspaper reported.

“Although more than 80 years have passed since Ataturk’s departure, he still holds a high position among Turks, and many see him as having made many achievements, the most important of which was the unification of the Turkish people and the preservation of their identity”.

A legacy widely appreciated by Turks, which “irks Erdogan, who is facing domestic accusations of gradually getting rid of the founder’s legacy in various walks of life, despite speaking the contrary, while some Turkish writers are rare, wondering: “Is there something Erdogan supports in Ataturk’s legacy?”, according to the newspaper.

Obsession of the Sultanate:

Nothing is more important to Erdoğan than the restoration of the glories of the Ottoman Empire, and the Sultanate’s illusion even amounted to the replication of some of the old decorations in his palaces and his bodyguards’ uniforms within them.

“Erdogan’s critics describe him as a new power-hungry sultan, who has created a presidential system suitable for his own goals”, the newspaper said. To the extent that he has full authority, he is the one who “appoints all ministers and imposes monetary policy, and he is the one who tells women how many children they must have”.

The consolidation of power was supposed to be distributed to more than one person or entity as a dedication to democracy, but Erdogan chose the dictatorship’s approach as a way to realize his obsession with becoming the world’s Sultan, in a poor cloning and vulgar hackiness of a history that had its own specificity, context, and timing.