WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY TURKEY News Journal Update - (en) Italy,Turkey, UCADI #171: Erdogan, the man who knows how to win (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Everything has been said and everything can be said about Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

but what we didn't know up to now is how skilled a dissembler he was, to the
point of having artfully given his hypothetical defeat in the first round to the
domestic and international media , while preparing his umpteenth victory. Its
current strategy starts from afar and has an essential turning point in the
earthquake in Anatolia, which cost the country immense destruction and more than
50,000 deaths, so much so that on reading its effects we measure the distance of
how little the opinion international public and the educated classes of Turkey
know the country are able to perceive the difference between city and
countryside, the imagination of the Muslim brothers. The event makes the Turkish
premier understand that this time to win a multifaceted strategy is needed,
capable of containing the many reasons for growing dissent, soliciting in his
electorate the memory of what has been achieved and built by his regime now in
its twentieth year.
After training and influencing generations of young Turks, Turkey's strongman
realizes that the wounds he inflicted on his opponents in the failed 2016 coup
d'état by Turkish preacher and political scientist Fethullah Gülen are still
alive . Soldiers, politicians, intellectuals are still in prison paying for
having been involved in an event born as a preventive action to disarm the
opposition which then degenerated into yet another harsh repression, but the
women who wear the veil still thank him for having cleared them and these are the
majority of the country's suburban electorate.

The earthquake and its effects

Erdogan knows well that this time the danger is great: the ruins caused by his
policy of laissez feire in building matters are immense , with the systematic
violation of the anti-seismic laws also approved, but in reality never applied.
Inefficient aid and support for the populations affected by the earthquake; the
bewilderment aroused by the unpreparedness of the country to respond to such a
catastrophic event was great; the opposition is ready to fan the flames of
responsibility, it would be reasonable to expect a drop in support in an area of
its traditional voters. Instead, none of this: Anatolia's vote came together
because pro-government clientelism withstood the test, in spite of what the media
claimed: a phenomenon cannot be evaluated with the parameters of a Western-type
society, while the The event
takes place in an environment strongly conditioned by patronage ties that prevail
over indignation and take advantage of consolidated power relations.
Contrary to what is believed by the media and by the West, the earthquake has
strengthened his control over Anatolia, a place of support for his policy,
stimulating the surviving victims to ask for and take advantage of state aid,
thanks to patronage relationships from time established with the populations by
its trustees in the area. From the scarcity of aid and support received, the
people affected by the earthquake understood that the only hope was to remain
anchored to the local powers and to the government in order to receive support
for a living, so much so that it can reasonably be argued that its power
structure is exit strengthened in many cases by events. He was able to do so,
knowing full well that he had carefully cultivated the relationship with his
electorate,
Even before the earthquake, the opposition was preparing to face it in a new way:
its main opponent in these elections, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, leader of the
Republican People's Party (CHP), the party founded by the father of Turkey,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, rallied around to itself an alliance of 6 parties,
constituting the "Table of Six", an extremely heterogeneous team, and obtained
the abstention of the Kurdish component of the country (about 20 million), in
particular from the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) which chose not to present
its own candidate. He therefore knew that the internal and external media put him
in danger, which indeed he was, given that in the first round of the elections on
May 14th his opponent obtained about 45% of the votes and, despite this, he
prepared the coup,
This was possible for Erdogan by dedicating great care to cultivating relations
with his electorate, thanks to an efficient and pervasive diplomatic network, he
also maintained his relations with the 5 million Turks who emigrated to Europe
and the world, so much so as to obtain most cases their support.
Furthermore, Erdogan has made important economic concessions in terms of wages at
a time when inflation at 44% is biting into the most basic living standards of
the population, making it clear that the consistency and extent of aid and the
economic well-being of the country depend on the stability of the government
country, strengthened by the fact that only the government possesses the levers
to operate the cumbersome machinery of the state in the territories. He cleverly
exploited the presence of Syrian refugees, many of whom do not see him as the
worst dictator, even though they know very well who they are dealing with, while
on this point the opposition was first divided and then opted for the expulsion
of people who, despite living in refugee exchanges and in precarious situations,
bordering on the most absolute poverty, knows well that returning to Assad's
hands would be even worse.

The role of power politics

Therefore he exploited the thirst of part of the Turkish people for the
reconstruction of the empire, expressed both by the military campaign against the
Kurds and by the presence of Turkish troops on the international scene, in Libya
as in Sudan, in the countries of Central Asia; the ambiguous report opposing him
to the Russian bear in Armenia, Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan to ask the Turks to
continue to support him. He skilfully used his ambiguous mediation skills between
Ukraine and Russia, manifested in the agreement for the sale of Ukrainian grain,
to gain credit at the
international as a man of peace; he exploited his veto power within NATO,
conditioning its enlargement. Aware of a lot of diplomatic work abroad and of his
commitment to the internal situation, he cleverly used the candidacy of the
ultranationalist Sinan Ogan, leader of the ultranationalist party MHP, to steal
at least some support from the great alliance built by his main opponent. The
result was seen in the vote, managing to recover many positions with respect to
the polls which, artfully fed by the services under his control, presented him as
a probable loser.
Erdogan was well aware and knows that the opponent's difficulties, on the
contrary, are many, above all in terms of maintaining opposition unity. You are
well aware that in order to abstain, the Kurds had to use force and violence on
themselves and forget that the party of their current ally, in the past, has
implemented progroms against them, as against the Armenians, in the name of
territorial continuity of the Turkish empire, of its greatness, of the guarantee
of maintaining the territorial unity of the Turkish populations, starting from
the Anatolian peninsula and projecting towards central Asia.[1]
So even if the southeast of the country, with a Kurdish majority. for the first
time, it gave its support to a member of the CHP, the party founded by the father
of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and in Diyarbakir, the most important center
with a Kurdish majority in Turkey, Kiliçdaroglu obtained over 70% of non- that
was enough. However, this shows how much the Kurdish component left Erdogan, who
voted because he was not responsible for those massacres, backing a candidate
from the Republican People's Party for the first time.

Erdogan's political calculation

This political calculation by Erdogan paid off and the electoral result of the
second round was significantly anticipated by the pronouncement of the
ultra-nationalist party which proposed to its electors to support Erdogan as the
only possible barrier to the return of even moderate secular positions in the
country, which moreover , it should be remembered, unanimously welcomed the
restoration of worship in Hagia Sophia, once again transformed into a mosque.
The victims of all this are above all the young people of the country and the
entire Turkish people who remain in the hands of a dictator who is not unwelcome
to most of the country. In fact, it should be remembered that under his
government, Turkey has maintained an international position of pre-eminence and,
more importantly, has seen growth for a long time the country's economy which has
managed to cast its shadow both on Africa and on the Middle East and Central
Asia, while thanks to the international relations maintained with Israel - albeit
ambiguous or precisely because of this - it has managed to maintain partial
control over waters of the great rivers (Tigris and Euphrates), to establish that
a slice of the rich deposits of gas and oil present in the Mediterranean Sea
remain in the sphere of expansion of Turkey, containing the claims of both Cyprus
and Greece and Egypt on this stretch of sea.
Furthermore, Erdogan, thanks to his migration policy towards Europe, managed to
obtain a substantial payment from the EU (6 billion euros) in his activity as a
jailer and border guard; moreover, by keeping Syrian refugees and not only in
their own country, it has placed at the disposal of the Turkish economy an
immense and limitless reserve industrial army, available to work in the most
bestial conditions of exploitation and has therefore allowed for a high
competitiveness of goods produced on Turkish territory.
Of course, if Turkey wants to maintain a leadership role within the Islamic
world, it must counter the growing growth of unity in the Arab world, offsetting
the effects of reconciliation between Sunnis, Shiites and Aleuis, but precisely
for this reason the country and its ruling classes who have always supported
Erdogan and the idea of a great Turkey need a strong and prestigious leader who
can lead the country and who is capable of influencing the Atlantic Alliance of
which Turkey is well aware that it is an indispensable component, both for its
strategic position and for the strength of its army, certainly one of the
strongest in the entire Alliance, a position that allows the country to play the
ambiguous role of collector of Russian-Ukrainian relations and ultimately of a
great power.

A country split in two

With a narrow victory in the runoff (52% to 47%) and an uncertain majority in
Parliament, it will be difficult for Erdogan to manage the country once the party
is over. From him he has the heterogeneity of the opposition, its internal
contradictions that have prevented its success, but on a social level he knows
that he does not control the cities and the advanced fabric of Turkish society. A
period of strong social tensions will be inevitable, also because the
difficulties associated with very high inflation and a disastrous economic
policy, the absence of political freedom will produce their effects. It will be
difficult for the Turkish premier to reform the institutions, as he had hoped, to
perpetuate his power and power politics.

[1]The genocides of the Turks against the Kurds begin in recent times between
1915 and 1919, simultaneously with that of the Armenians and continue in recent
times and also currently with the Turkish military actions along the border with
Syria and with a strong repression within Turkey where about 20 million Kurds
live out of a total population of 85 million. See also: GL, The Kurdish people
for the social revolution , published on 21 February 2022 , Ucadi in Newsletter ,
Number 156 - Year 2022 .

Gianni Cimbalo

http://www.ucadi.org/2023/05/29/erdogan-luomo-che-sa-vincere/
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