Erdoǧan joins Putin as eternal rulers of their nations

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At the end of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st century two driven men left their cities which they had been ruling to enter national politics. Vladimir Putin left St Petersburg and Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan left Istanbul. Both began as prime ministers but moved on quickly to become presidents and supreme rulers of Russia and Turkey.

Both are now in their eighth decade, one year apart in age. Both want to stay in power but both now face the problem of legacy  and succession. Putin faces a problem with the stubborn resistance of the people of Ukraine and Erdoǧan faces a problem with the mass uprising of the people of Turkey against the Putin-style imprisonment of his successor as Mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoǧlu who would win a fair election to be president.

So far Donald Trump has not shown any interest in Turkey but Europe holds endless meetings and its leaders make proclamations about Putin but the EU has never come up with an answer to the Turkish question.

EU officials in Brussels have issued pro-forma demands for the release of Immamoglu but Erdoǧan regards the EU as a paper tiger. The British government despite the presence of big Turkish communities in UK cities is silent.

Erdoǧan has chosen his moment to smash up the opposition. Like the EU’s cosseting of Serbia’s autocratic president, Aleksandar Vučić, hoping to detach him from his role as Putin’s trouble-maker in the Balkans, EU leaders are a coalition of the unwilling or unable when it comes to democratic rights in Turkey.

20 years ago I patrolled the corridors of the European Council, the gathering of EU national leaders, which takes the big EU decisions, then executed by official of the European Commission, to try and persuade them that Turkey might be admitted as an EU member states.

It was a push Tony Blair supported strongly. After the failure of the Iraq intervention Blair wanted to show that Europe was not anti-Muslim and bringing in the nominally secular Muslim state of Turkey would be a good sign to European and Middle East Muslims that the EU was not just a private club for catholics and a few protestants.

There was a clear divide. Austria, the new Balkan members of the EU, France and Spain still had memories of Muslim armies, having taken over the European crusader states and conquered Constantinople, marching into the heart of Europe to be stopped at the gates of Vienna by a Polish army.

France had earlier memories of the Moors getting as far as Poitiers before being driven back across the Pyrenees to rule Spain until the end of the Middle Ages. France, moreover, was wedded to its lay, secular constitution - one of the prizes of the French revolution and saw Erdoǧan’s Muslim identity politics as unacceptable to Europe.

The Greeks too were horrified as already Greece was spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence  and even today maintains conscription in response to the endless claims by Turkish politicians on Greek islands. The last invasion of a European nation before Putin was Turkish paratroopers arriving in Cyprus in 1974 to dismember the island and drive hundreds of thousands of Greek Cypriots into exile.

Erdoǧan pretended to go along with UN plans to end the Turkish occupation of Cyprus but the UN failed to impose its settlement, the so-called Anan plan. Turkey  entered into a Customs Union with the EU but in truth Erdoǧan, a devout Islamist long suspected of being a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood drove forward his policy of a re-Islamisation of Turkey in place of the secular state bequeathed by the Ataturk revolution of the 1930s.

Erdoǧan, like Putin, fiddled the constitutional rules to stay in power. The main opposition party, the secular Republican Peoples Party – CHP in its Turkish acronym – was based in cities and big towns and had the vote of educated Turks but the majority of Turkey’s 85 million people lives in smaller cities and towns and are influenced by what their Imams tell them to think at Friday prayers.

Erdoǧan took control of the media so at the last presidential election Turkish state TV gave him 32 hours, 42 minutes of air time compared to 32 minutes for his CHP opponent, a mild-mannered, bookish, intellectual who was no match for the raw power politics Erdoǧan deploys.

He has said he will stand down in 2028 when the next presidential election takes place. Theoretically according to the constitution Erdoǧan has to step down then when he will be 74 – a youngster by Donald Trump norms. Given past experience many believe Erdoǧan will again fiddle the rules to stay in power.

But unlike previous CHP candidates the party’s presidential candidate choice this time is a young, dynamic Mayor of Istanbul who has widespread appeal.

Erdoǧan has always had the Turkish Army’s support as he has given them a free hand to try and eliminate the Turkish Kurd separatists and their armed wing, the PKK. Now the 75 year old PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, announced earlier in March that the PKK would lay down their arms.                

It was like the IRA giving up terrorism and the armed struggle and turning to the ballot box. Öcalan’s olive branch has thrown Erdoǧan off-balance and his imprisonment of the CHP’s social democratic presidential candidate Imamoǧlu is a response to try and portray the CHP as an extremist party.

This is nonsense and night after night hundreds of thousands of protestors have come out on the streets of Turkish cities especially Istanbul. They have braved armed security goons but no-one knows if the Turkish army will stand with their children or prop up the Rais – or Sultan - in his palace in Ankara.