I love Istanbul, as being the most beautiful city in the world. Complementary I love Turkey as a whole, and even if in the past I have projected a Dogville vision on her, I felt justified at the time, otherwise nothing budged my really deep good feelings. They are logical, subjective, and objective, based on my own experience and research, both locally and outside. I consider my views to be broader than the official version the Turks are subjected to. I met a lot of people, I dealt with a lot of them. I made a lot of friends, and also some unavoidable enemies. Until I learned their ways, I have been cheated and ill-treated with smiling faces. It wasn’t for long. When I started to speak the language, I commenced detecting slight traces of respect and even envy. I knew that because I began to have my own ways with them.
President of Turkey and leader of Justice and Development (AK) Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during the party’s group meeting at Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara, on February 12, 2020. (Photo by Adem ALTAN / AFP)
[source of all pics: AFP]
A few years ago, I planned to write a piece about Recep Tayipp Erdoğan, to express Turkish intellectuals’ opinion, along with my own, of course.
Erdoğan’s rise to power was pretty harsh, and members of the secularist elite tried to block him every step. When I arrived in Istanbul, in March 2017, he was the acting mayor. Unfortunately for him, in 1998, he was forced to step down from this function and sent ten months to jail for reciting a poem that secular judges concluded incited religious hatred. Although he served only four months and ten days, his imprisonment resulted in a ban from politics. Ironically, the attempts of Turkey’s secularist system to undermine him helped him in the end, because he was projected in the peasants’ minds as a martyr.
The Turkish constitution at the time stipulates that the prime minister be a member of parliament, and Erdoğan, could not take office as prime minister even though his party had won in the polls. In March 2003, his main man in the Party, Abdullah Gül, who stepped in as PM, ordered a by-election in which he was allowed to run and win, so he was able to enter the legislature, finally taking office as Turkey’s prime minister.
After 2003, Erdoğan ran Turkey for three terms as prime minister, winning two more general elections, in 2007 and 2011. In 2014, he won yet another one, becoming president of the republic, thereby occupying a position once held by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s first president. Even more, he was re-elected president in 2018, following the approval of constitutional changes in a referendum held in 2017, after which the elected president will be both the head of state and head of government of Turkey, the PM’s office is abolished.
Two “in-laws” in similar positions
Especially in his first years, his administration delivered real economic growth which improved the living standards. Under Erdoğan, the country even escaped the global recession of 2008 relatively unscathed. But that was mostly on paper because their media successfully worked at the citizens’ alienation. A lot of small businesses crashed, and new holdings grew like mushrooms after rain, with state supplies. Not everyone knew, and not everyone had access to such stipends, only AKP’s supporters. Many guys tried to shoot themselves on live television. I was sure that they were only part of media misdirection, but it wasn’t always the case. In the news, one could hear only about the crisis as it was happening only in Turkey, primed by Turkey’s enemies, especially the Kurds with their international lobby.
When Erdoğan’s party, AKP, came to power in 2002, Turkey was a country of mostly poor people. Now it is a country of mostly middle-income people. If Turks used to live like Syrians, now they live like Spaniards. The irony is that the Spaniards don’t think they live very well right now.
Two guys, two friends before spoiling my beautiful Turkey
The problem with the actual president is that he is winning elections just because he doesn’t have a viable contender. He arrests his adversaries, he projects around many conspiracy theories in which everybody opposing him personally is actually an enemy of Turkey. Since 2016, these enemies increased their numbers with his former allies, Fethullah Gülen‘s followers. Not only the reluctant European Union and its predecessor (EEC) which refused Turkey’s membership since 1987, but all the Kurds with their terrorist organizations, all their neighbors (Greece, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Georgia, and Armenia), the Russians, the Jews (both from Israel and diaspora), the rest of the world Armenians, the Pope, all are actually Turkey’s enemies. He doesn’t quite dare to declare in public that almost all rational people are against him, but he keeps arresting them one by one if they’re reported as “saboteurs”, meaning when they comment on his every step of achieving discretionary power.
It’s not that they’re not right, the real problem is that they aren’t many, and most of them don’t officially express their criticism. If he will manage to not arrest all the bitching intellectuals and to not crash the whole economy until 2023, when they celebrate 100 years of Republic, he will stay indefinitely in politics.
I love my beautiful Turkey no matter what. It is more than a holiday resort, it is a place to live in, especially in Istanbul and its South-Western coast.
The EU Commission (whatever that means, the European Union’s executive) said in October 2020 that Turkey’s government was undermining its economy, eroding democracy, and destroying independent courts, leaving its bid to join the EU further away than ever. I have the feeling that the EU needs Turkey more than Turkey needs the EU. Anyway, with or without democracy “erosion”, the European Union relies on Turkey to house some 4 million Syrians fleeing civil war rather than let them proceed to Europe.
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Such a great snap of Fethullah and the biggest mother’fkr’.