"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 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 Hagia Sophia, recently converted into a mosque, that the strong man of the country, at the helm for twenty years, has already planned to pray. Double symbol in his 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 has given us visibility," said Mahmut Nedim, an entrepreneur from the conservative Fatih district and a loyal voter in Erdogan's AKP party.
Obsession with revenge
Yet sensitive to the economic crisis as well as to the mess in the management of the earthquake of February 6, he nevertheless remains a "faithful servant" of the reis. "Opposite, the opposition has nothing to offer us, except the risk of plunging back into the same instability and insecurity of the 1990s," he justifies, assuming without blushing the choice of "order" against the "chaos" evoked on television channels.
In a country where 90% of the media is in tune with power, Erdogan's narrative has turned for many into a success story, where nationalist and religious fibers are constantly titillated. "Erdogan's whole narrative is based on the idea that the state is going to be refounded, but this time as a state that reappropriates the values of the Ottoman Empire while reconciling them with the values of modernity and technology," said political scientist Zeynep Gambetti, citing major infrastructure projects and military developments in recent years.
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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 greatness of his projects, or Abdülhamid II for his pan-Muslim and Arab policy. "If Erdogan were to write a book, he could call it 'History of a Nation Rejected, History of a Revived Nation,'" notes American historian and Turkey scholar Howard Eissenstat. Able to perfectly don his victim fabric, Erdogan "knows perfectly," he says, "how to play on the strings of an emotional harp like any good populist."
At the risk of usurping the past. On 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, while the sultan was simply dethroned: slip of the tongue revealing an obsession with death, and revenge, as he could live it during and after the failed coup of 2016, Starting point of an acceleration of its authoritarian drift.
If Erdogan were to write a book, he could call it "History of a Nation Reshuffled, History of a Revived Nation."
Howard Eissenstat, American historian and specialist on Turkey
In the summary of his referential eclecticism, a "martyr" of the twentieth century is regularly evoked: Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, overthrown by the military in 1960, then executed. The politician, known for his liberal stance towards Islam, had come to power a... May 14, 1950: a particular day in Erdogan's symbolic calendar and which he chose, not without calculation, as the date of the first round of the 2023 presidential election.
Overtaking Atatürk
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 ruins of the earthquake. "We continue," announces a billboard that parades on Taksim, projecting its voters into the "new century" to come - allusion to the centenary of the Republic. In a Turkey more polarized than ever, where uncertainty about the future predisposes to give in easily 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, scene just ten years ago of the repression of large demonstrations of the same name, that the reis recently erected a huge mosque ... just in front of a very Kemalist symbol, the Monument of the Republic. The message, highly symbolic, consists not in erasing the "one man" (tek adam), as Atatürk was sometimes called, but in going beyond him: a perfectly metaphorical synthesis of Islamo-nationalism marching on the buds of an unfinished spring.
