With a sharp look and a smile on his face, Recep Tayyip Erdogan stubbornly scans the horizon like an endless future. On this building façade, where his giant portrait extends to the top floor, his eyes sweep the Bosphorus, caress mosques, futuristic towers and traffic jams while staring in the distance at Istanbul International Airport, one of the most recent of his megaprojects, erected on the shores of the Black Sea. On the eve of the May 14 elections, and then the polls give him neck and neck with his rival, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, is the Turkish president ready to give up this power that he took more than twenty years to establish? "For him, these elections are a matter of life and death," said Turkish-American journalist Aysegül Sert.
The story of this "child of the people" won by the madness of grandeur begins in a modest wooden building in Kasimpasa, a working-class district on the European side of Istanbul. He was born on a very cold day, February 26, 1954. The former Constantinople does not count...
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