“The right person at the right time” (Dogru zaman, dogru adam). From posters to brochures, the flagship slogan of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s campaign seems to escape any form of temporality. As if the Turkish president, almost certain winner of the second round of this Sunday, May 28, had prepared in advance the story of his stay in power. To the point of anticipating the festivities.
Monday, May 29, while the official results will parade on the banners of all televisions, it is in Sainte-Sophie, recently converted into a mosque, that the strong man of the country, at the helm for twenty years, has already planned to go pray. Double symbol in its calendar, the date coinciding with the anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople (a certain May 29, 1453) by Mehmet II, followed, at the time, by the transformation of the Byzantine basilica into a mosque, before Atatürk turned it into a museum in 1934. It will be an opportunity to celebrate “his” revenge and especially that of the Turks of his pedigree, new city dwellers from modest and traditional rural backgrounds, to whom he believes he has restored “pride” and “visibility “, on the urban elites heirs of the secular Republic of 1923. “Atatürk wanted to erase us. Erdogan gave us visibility,” says Mahmut Nedim, entrepreneur from the conservative Fatih district and loyal voter of the AKP, Erdogan’s party.
Yet sensitive to the economic crisis as well as to the mess in the management of the earthquake of February 6, he remains a “faithful servant” of the reis. “Opposite, the opposition has nothing to offer us, apart from the risk of plunging back into the same instability and insecurity of the 1990s”, he justifies himself, assuming without blushing the choice of “order against the “chaos” evoked on television channels.
In a country where 90% of the media are in tune with power, Erdogan’s narrative has for many turned into a success story, where nationalist and religious fibers continue to be tickled. “Erdogan’s whole story is based on the idea that the state is going to be refounded, but this time as a state that reclaims the values of the Ottoman Empire while reconciling them with the values of the modernity and technology,” observes political scientist Zeynep Gambetti, citing the major infrastructure and military development projects of recent years.
But in Erdogan’s Turkey, neo-Ottomanism, like politics, is an exercise in variable geometry. Depending on the circumstances, his lengthy speeches are a clever mix of poetic quotations, verbal attacks against his rivals and references to the various sultans of yesteryear: Mehmet the Conqueror, Suleiman the Magnificent for the grandeur of his construction sites, or even Abdülhamid II for his pan-Muslim and Arab policy. “If Erdogan were to write a book, he could call it ‘History of a Rejected Nation, History of a Revived Nation’,” notes American historian and Turkey scholar Howard Eissenstat. Able to perfectly endorse his victim fabric, Erdogan “knows perfectly, he says, play on the strings of an emotional harp like any good populist”.
At the risk of usurping the past. In a video, available on YouTube and dating back several years, the Turkish president evokes, during a meeting, the “sadness” of the assassination of Abdülhamid II, when the sultan was simply dethroned: a slip revealing a obsession with death, and revenge, as he was able to experience it during and after the failed coup of 2016, the starting point for an acceleration of his authoritarian drift.
In summary of his referential eclecticism, a 20th century “martyr” is regularly mentioned: Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, overthrown by the military in 1960, then executed. The politician, known for his liberal positions towards Islam, had come to power on… May 14, 1950: a special day in Erdogan’s symbolic calendar and which he chose, not without calculation, as the date for the first round of the 2023 presidential election.
A follower of the past, Recep Tayyip Erdogan also wants to be the proud guarantor of continuity: promises of social aid, future constructions, new hospitals, like that of Defne, in the south-east of the country, freshly built in the middle of the earthquake ruins. “We continue”, announces a billboard that scrolls through Taksim, projecting its voters into the “new century” to come – an allusion to the centenary of the Republic. In a Turkey that is more polarized than ever, where uncertainty about the future predisposes it to easily give in to the reassuring sirens of propaganda, the slogan speaks to its base as well as to its far-right allies.
It is on this central square of Istanbul, adjoining Gezi Park, the scene just ten years ago of the repression of major demonstrations of the same name, that the reis recently erected an enormous mosque… just in front of a a very Kemalist symbol, the Monument to the Republic. The message, highly symbolic, consists not in erasing the “unique man” (tek adam), as Atatürk sometimes called himself, but in going beyond him: a perfectly metaphorical synthesis of Islamo-nationalism marching on the buds of an unfinished spring.