Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Anatolian Tiger

MUSTAFA KEMAL’S GHOST is finally being laid to rest in 2023, the centenary of the republic he had erected on the putrefying corpse of the Ottoman Empire. It is a case of surrounding the cities with the countryside, one that the Chairman might even have approved, except that the cities are no longer with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who will continue dismantling the Turkey, or Republic of Türkiye, that Atatürk had willed into being. In the three big cities—Istanbul, the capital Ankara, and İzmir (the Greek Smyrna of antiquity)—Erdogan and his Justice and Develop­ment (AKP) Party are finished. A wide belt in and around Istanbul, hug­ging the Aegean coast all the way down to Adana, voted for Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, as did a large chunk of the easternmost corner of Turkey around Diyarbakir, in what was once part of historical Armenia. But then there’s the vast Anatolian plateau, discounting the sea of dissent in and around Ankara, which refuses to fall out of love with a son it’s still proud of.

Erdogan, Turkey’s most significant helmsman after Atatürk, hasn’t done away with the great man yet, but in 20 years, he has reduced Mustafa Kemal to a memory. The big departure was in 2016, when Erdogan doubled down after the failed coup and emerged near-invincible from his most vulnerable moment. In retrospect, it was the 2013 Gezi Park-Taksim Square explosion that had sealed the trajectories of Turkey and its leader. That divided, or polarised, country has hardened the two halves of its identity intractably since, facing off 52 against 48 per cent on May 28.

Erdogan won because in Anatolia he is still the boy from Rize on the Black Sea coast—although he was born in Istanbul’s notorious Kasımpaşa—who defined himself against the urban, secular and Westernised elite that had ruled Turkey after Atatürk and barely acknowledged the rural, poor and conservative Anatolian. Erdogan has given that elite, which had put him in jail for reciting a religious poem as mayor of Istanbul, what Anatolia’s sense of justice demanded. He put them in jail, banned their newspapers, called them terrorists and purged their military allies. He changed the constitution in pursuit of power in perpetuity, made the country a presidential republic, built himself a thousand-room palace, and elevated Turkey to a heavier geopolitical player even as the economic gains of his early years began to get eroded, not least because of serial terrorist attacks.

Behind the growth in jobs and incomes that had fuelled the rise of a new middle class was an infrastructure push—the big boom levelled by the twin earthquakes of February this year, bringing home the fact of largescale corruption. The prowess of the ‘Anatolian Tigers’, industrial towns that took their moniker from the vanished animal, is questionable. But Anatolia is not done with Erdogan. It wants him to finish the job. Because he shares their anger and aggression. And nothing demonstrated those attributes more than the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque again in 2020.

Thus the congratulations came fast. From a delightedVladimirPutinto an expressionlessJoeBiden to a fickle Emmanuel Macron. For, Erdogan’s Turkey will quickly resume its role of broker in the Ukraine war, trading with Russia from which it had bought a missile defence system—as a NATO member!—while helping Ukraine’s defensive effort. Without Turkey, there would have been no Ukrainian grain deal out of the Black Sea. Without Turkey, Sweden—still waiting after Finland’s delayed entry—cannot join NATO. And Erdogan still controls the refugee valve. He doesn’t care for European Union membership anymore since he has found gainful national aggrandisement in the pursuit of his ‘independent’ foreign policy. But for all that, the unambiguous verdict of the Western media must be juxtaposed against the fact that Turkey is still one of perhaps only two functioning democracies in a long arc from the Maghreb coast to the eastern Aegean. Erdogan has been re-elected because people voted for him.

The old Indo-Turkish warmth had persisted in the early days of Erdogan till the foundational Islamism of his politics broke through to the surface and, somewhat like Israel, India began to see his Turkey as a lost cause. But he is still a pragmatist. India’s help in the aftermath of the earthquakes didn’t go unappreciated. As Erdogan begins a third decade in power, New Delhi knows only too well that a clean slate has never been a diplomatic necessity.

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Sudeep Paul

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