Turkey\u2019s prime minister Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, a man whose self-aggrandising style of leadership has already been coming in for increasing criticism, outdid himself in his victory speech following Sunday\u2019s parliamentary elections. Sometimes public figures push themselves to a place beyond parody. This was one of those occasions.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s be clear at the outset, however, that this is not to begrudge Mr Erdo\u011fan his general air of jubilation. He was a convincing victor in Sunday\u2019s election, demonstrating once again his easy dominance of the political scene and copper-fastening his position as Turkey\u2019s most significant leader since Atat\u00fcrk.<\/p>\n
Much in Mr Erdo\u011fan\u2019s speech was to be expected. His avowed commitment to a collaborative process of constitution-making was particularly welcome, even if its sincerity can\u2019t be complacently assumed given some of his words and deeds in office. But what are we to make of the following sentence? What do we make of a national leader who responds to domestic victory with words like these, invoking the international scene in quite this way?<\/p>\n
\u201cBelieve me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as \u0130zmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbak\u0131r.\u201d<\/p>\n
At times, Mr Erdo\u011fan is derided somewhat unfairly for his egomania and his delusions of grandeur. There\u2019s no doubt that he\u2019s possessed of these traits, but to focus on them alone is to ignore unfairly the political astuteness that\u2019s required to build and sustain the kind of success that he has enjoyed. But with this sentence, he really does seem to have conformed to the stereotype and lost the run of himself.<\/p>\n
If one wanted to go out of one\u2019s way to interpret his words charitably, one would suggest that all Mr Erdo\u011fan meant was that Turkey\u2019s neighbours should take succour from Turkey\u2019s combination of (relative) strength and (relatively) democratic institutions. This is the by-now-familiar narrative of Turkey as a model for the nascent moves towards increased democracy in the middle east.<\/p>\n
But of the course the words are more loaded than that. It\u2019s hard to put one\u2019s finger on quite what animates them, but there is certainly a large degree of condescension at work\u2014as if the states (and the Palestinian non-state) he mentions should be grateful to be offered crumbs from the table of Turkish democracy. Lest we forget, Mr Erdo\u011fan speaks as the leader of the state that succeeded the region\u2019s imperial power.<\/p>\n
More troubling still, however, is the mounting enthusiasm with which Mr Erdo\u011fan seems to want to insert Turkey into the flow of events in the middle east. Pursuing an assertive foreign policy is one thing (and I believe that a Turkish government of any stripe would be aggressively expanding its non-European trade and diplomatic ties). But throwing oneself in such a feet first fashion into perhaps the world\u2019s most protractedly poisonous geopolitical cauldron smacks of strategic folly.<\/p>\n
One starts to wonder where this might lead and exactly what Mr Erdo\u011fan understands his own position in the region and the world to be. It is not unreasonable for him to take personal gratification from his sustained domestic electoral success. The AKP\u2019s dominance in Turkey is down in large measure to his individual magnetism, to the comfortable sway that he personally holds over much of the country.<\/p>\n
In Turkey, Mr Erdo\u011fan is simply untouchable at this point in time. But to project that sense of personal invincibility beyond the borders of the Turkish state and into the wider world? That strikes me as one of the more worrying developments in Turkey in recent months and years.<\/p>\n
via Election 2011: a victory for the West Bank, you say? \u00ab istanbul notes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Turkey\u2019s prime minister Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, a man whose self-aggrandising style of leadership has already been coming in for increasing criticism, outdid himself in his victory speech following Sunday\u2019s parliamentary elections. Sometimes public figures push themselves to a place beyond parody. This was one of those occasions. Let\u2019s be clear at the outset, however, that this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":101471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[1018],"class_list":["post-35930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}