ISTANBUL // On the fringes of Kasimpasha, a working-class Istanbul district, and just opposite an old graveyard sits Yashar Hoca’s Place, a cafe and living shrine to the neighbourhood’s most famous son, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“He used to come around all the time,” says Hassan Camurluayak, enjoying an evening tea with his friends beneath rows of pictures, some framed, some glued to the cafe’s white tiles, of Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, of Mr Erdogan, its present-day leader, and of the Ottoman sultans.
“He was both serious and courteous, all prayer and mosque,” Mr Camurluayak, a pensioner, says of the young Mr Erdogan. “Me and the guys, we were religious too, but we sometimes played cards. He’d never join. We drank coffee. He’d never drink with us.”
On August 28, Mr Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister since 2003, will move across the capital Ankara to set up camp in the presidential residence. By the time his first term comes to an end, he will have ruled Turkey for nearly 17 years, longer than Ataturk, and will have arguably reshaped the country as much as the revered leader.
Under Ataturk, Turkey crawled out from the debris of the Ottoman Empire, embraced secularism, at least nominally, and tried to forge a new, entirely Western, identity, abandoning all pretensions to being a Muslim power.
Under Mr Erdogan, political Islam, paired with economic liberalism, has made a triumphant comeback.
The newly elected president, who turned 60 this year, was 43 when Turkey’s generals, the self-appointed guardians of Ataturk’s legacy, pressured his Islamist mentor Necmettin Erbakan into resigning as prime minister, the fourth such intervention since 1960.
Mr Erdogan was 45 when he sentenced to jail for four months, convicted of incitement to religious hatred. His offence was to have read a nationalist poem at a political rally. It was 1999.
By the time he came to power at the helm of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) three years later, the former Istanbul mayor had ditched the overtly Islamist rhetoric, embraced ties with the West, and successfully courted Turkish liberals.
In his third and last term as prime minister, many of these alliances crumbled. Mr Erdogan’s once lauded efforts to remove the army from politics increasingly resembled a vendetta. Democratic reforms stalled, prompting liberal allies to jump ship. As the economy took off and as Europe began to turn inward, the dream of EU accession, a one-time strategic goal, faded into irrelevance.
Starting with foreign policy and ending with soap operas centred on the lives of the sultans, Turkey embraced its Ottoman past, albeit with mixed results. Having lent almost unconditional backing to the rebels fighting Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria, Mr Erdogan’s government now finds itself bordering not one but two failed states. In Egypt, where it backed deposed president Mohammed Morsi, Turkey is left with precious few friends. Relations with Israel are at rock bottom.
The country is increasingly conservative. After new taxes, alcohol prices are among the highest in Europe. A ban on the Islamic headscarf in public places, including state universities, has been dismantled. Religious school graduates are free to enter the bureaucracy. Among secular Turks, but not only, statements like those made by deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc, who recently argued that women should avoid laughing in public, are met with a mix of ridicule and alarm.
In Kasimpasha, however, the range of superlatives used to describe Mr Erdogan grows with each day.
“They like to say he was a brawler when he was young,” says Eyup Guzel, a former printer. “It’s not true. He was always polite.”
“Now he’s become ever nicer, even more tolerant,” adds Mr Camurluayak.
Mr Erdogan himself has produced plenty of evidence to the contrary. In 2009, at a panel in Davos, he snapped after the moderator, a journalist, refused to allot him more time to condemn an ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza. “When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill,” he told Israeli president Shimon Peres, seated beside him, seconds before leaving the stage and vowing never to set foot in Davos again.
The episode, which won Mr Erdogan plaudits at home and in the Arab world, consolidated his reputation, cultivated carefully since, as a champion of oppressed Muslim peoples. In the run up to Sunday’s presidential election, Mr Erdogan had sprinkled his rhetoric with numerous references to the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Muslim Brothers in Egypt.
Mr Erdogan was born in Kasimpasha, but he spent part of his childhood in Rize, his father's hometown, on Turkey's rugged Black Sea coast. "He's like the people here," says Huseyin Akyol, an AKP party boss from Ordu, another town in the area. "When you're with him one on one, he's friendly and warm, but when necessary he turns aggressive."
Mr Erdogan's critics fear his aggression might be getting the better of him. Over the past week alone, he pledged to continue his crackdown on the Gulen community, an influential Islamic movement, which he accuses of having tried to topple his government in December by engineering a massive corruption scandal. He took exception to being called an Armenian, which he considered an insult. Finally, he lashed out at an Economist correspondent, the last of many journalists to end up in his crosshairs, calling her "shameless" and "militant".
Among opponents at home and allies abroad, unease about an Erdogan presidency has grown since last summer’s brutal crackdown against anti-government protesters, which left eight dead and the country split down the middle.
A recent cartoon featured Mr Erdogan addressing his electorate with the words, “I’ll discriminate and insult everyone until the elections, but I’ll be the president of all Turks thereafter.”
At Yashar’s Place, within eyeshot of a small roundabout festooned with flags bearing Mr Erdogan’s image and the words, “Man of the People,” there are few such qualms.
“He was the prefect prime minister, and he’ll be the prefect president,” says Mr Camurluayak.
Someone volunteers that Mr Erdogan might be to Turkey’s 21st century what Ataturk had been to its 20th. The comment falls on deaf ears. “He’s like Suleyman,” says Senol Yuras, a kitchen maker, comparing the new president instead to the 16th century sultan, whose drawing hangs in the back of the cafe. “Magnificent.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
