Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Is ‘Papa’ still a father figure to Turks?

Six months ago, an odd falling out occurred between Turkey‘s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who is standing for re-election next Sunday – and one of his allies in the country’s media, Ahmet Altan, editor of the newspaper Taraf.

Peculiar because Altan, via his paper’s pages, has produced a steady stream of alarming stories that had handily bolstered Erdogan’s view of the threat posed to his government by some members of Turkey’s coup-prone military.

How their friendship foundered in January was a little matter at first. Altan criticised the moderate Islamist Erdogan in print, accusing the prime minister of having “no taste”. Insults followed from both sides until Altan snapped. “People supported you because you were honest and brave,” he seethed angrily. “Your party was making Turkey a freer and more developed country. We will miss your former bravery and honesty. You will one day miss your old self too, as the policies you follow take you away from the side of the oppressed.”

Ahead of polls which will almost certainly see Erdogan returned easily for another term in office, the exchange is a deeply instructive one. In a Turkey more important than it has been in decades, whose influence threatens to eclipse that of the US in the Middle East, the question of the character and ambitions of the man at its helm has been thrust increasingly into the open.

Turkey now has the world’s 17th largest economy. Turkish companies, as the Economist wrote recently, have a global reach and influence. It sits at a crossroads between Europe and the east, in terms of geopolitics and as a key energy pipeline.

These days, who leads Turkey is a matter of importance. Altan’s bitter comments reflect not only how Erdogan is regarded as the man who has steered Turkey’s remarkable transformation from basket case into a vibrant and confident international player with a economy second only to China and India last year in terms of growth, but also the suspicion of how, in his desire to cement his own and his party’s power, some are becoming nervous of him.

Explaining why “Papa Tayyip” – as Erdogan is known to his supporters – is so popular is not hard to fathom. He has attracted a huge following through a clever synthesis of nationalism, populism and a middling conservative morality that goes down well with Turkey’s majority, where 95% of the country is Muslim but the state is secular.

His Justice and Development party – the AK – has ruled since November 2002 and has overseen a steady rise in living standards after the succession of economic crises that marked the 1990s in Turkey. Indeed, Erdogan has boasted that Turkey will become Europe’s second largest economy by 2050 after Germany, which plays both to the optimism he is so keen to engender and a newfound sense of national pride. All this from a man representing a brand of politics not so long ago banned by the Turkish state.

Erdogan has overseen the opening of EU accession talks since 2005 and brought about a period of political stability, with the army pushed to the sidelines. And it is also fair to say that in a party where half of all votes, according to a recent survey, are delivered by the figure of Erdogan himself, rather than the AK, party and prime minister are increasingly synonymous.

Elsewhere, Erdogan also has forged an independent foreign policy that has moved closer to Iran, even as Turkey has turned its back on its once closest ally in the region, Israel, following that country’s deadly commando assault on a Turkish-flagged ship full of peace activists heading for Gaza, the MV Marmara. Earlier, he had stormed out of a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which included Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, over Israel’s war in Gaza in January 2009, returning home to a hero’s welcome.

If Erdogan has a problem, however, it is not in alienating ever further those Kemalite secularists who have always opposed him, regarding him as kabadayi (a ruffian). Instead, it lies with an increasing number of liberal intellectuals who once supported him but now regard him as being too thin-skinned, overbearing and – they fear – increasingly authoritarian.

For in a country whose politics for decades was dominated by a secular elite backed by an army that launched four coups in as many decades, it has been the efforts by Erdogan and his AK party to roll back the power of these same secularists that has been responsible for growing alarm about the direction he is taking.

Last February, Erdogan announced the arrest of more than 40 military officers for allegedly being part of a 2003 coup plot called Operation Sledgehammer to bring down his government. Since then, the number of military figures in detention has swelled to 200. Among them were five serving generals brought to court conveniently only two weeks before the country votes.

Erdogan has been lucky in other ways in the timing of events in this election. Last month, a series of sex tapes emerged, featuring members of one of the main opposition parties, the MHP, forcing 10 senior figures to resign. Some, indeed, have claimed that the sex tapes were leaked by Erdogan’s party.

In a country with a high threshold for winning seats in parliament, a poor performance by the MHP could see them fail to reach the 10% threshold to win any seats in the assembly. And that could just deliver to Erdogan the seats he requires to fulfil his plans to rewrite the country’s outdated 1982 constitution, written by the generals after the coup in Turkey in 1980.

Erdogan has made no bones about his desire to become an executive-style president in the future under what has been described as a French-style constitution, which would allow him to continue to dominate Turkey’s political scene beyond 2015, when he is barred from serving as prime minister again.

It is all a very long way from his humble roots as the son of a coastguard in Kasimpasa, where he was born in 1954. It was while attending an Islamic high school there that Erdogan got his first taste for politics, being elected chairman of the Istanbul youth wing of the National Salvation party.

Politics would be one of two passions he would pursue in parallel with playing semi-professional football until the 1980s for Istanbul’s transport authority team, where he was scouted for the team he had followed since a child – Fenerbahçe – an offer he would turn down because of his father’s disapproval. Erdogan has, however, remained such an ardent fan of the club that when Fenerbahçe won the Super Lig this year, rival fans from Trabzonspor accused him, obliquely, of using his power to secure his club’s victory.

After the coup of 1980, he joined the Islamist Welfare party, for whom he was elected to parliament in 1991, but prevented from taking his seat. Three years later, he was elected mayor of Istanbul, where he antagonised the still powerful secularists with his decision to ban alcohol in the city’s cafes.

In 1997, he came into conflict with the secular authorities again, this time for reading a poem with Islamist sentiments in Siirt, which included the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” For that, he was sentenced to 10 months in jail.

All of which, his secular critics allege, was the first evidence that Erdogan harboured a secret plan to turn Turkey into a fully fledged Islamic state, more proof of which, they say, has been provided by his failed efforts to make adultery illegal and his attempts to introduce “alcohol-free zones”.

Erdogan, whose party was first elected in 2002 at a time he was barred from standing from office under a law that was quickly changed, has insisted that he is committed to secularism, arguing only that secularism has for too long prevented religious Turks from expressing their religious convictions freely.

That issue came to a head over the issue of whether women should be able to wear headscarves in state buildings and educational establishments, long banned by the constitution. Although Turkey’s parliament voted to lift the ban, their constitutional amendment was overturned by the country’s constitutional court in 2008.

For his part, Erdogan has explained his moderation in comparison to some of the activists he grew up with in terms of where he grew up.

While he lived in the rough-and-ready neighbourhood of Kasimpasa, he would walk each day through Pera, Istanbul’s old European neighbourhood, where the nightclubs were and young women could be seen wearing miniskirts. “Of course, I did not live the life of Pera,” he told the Wall Street Journal last year, “but I knew Pera.”

The question is whether after his third win in succession, with his opponents in retreat, he will still be inclined to remember it. Or remember “his old self” once so admired by his former loyal lieutenant, Ahmet Altan.