Al Arabiya
I spent one day in Istanbul on my way from Dubai to Morocco last month. I stayed in a two-floor house converted into a pension located on a charming, cobblestoned street in a quiet area of Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district. The owner, Orhan, greeted me with a Turkish cup of tea, and then we began talking about the change taking place in the Arab world.
As we spoke, an election campaign van passed by. The van bore the slogan of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) “İstikrar sürsün” (let the stability continue). I asked Mr. Orhan if Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would be re-elected. He replied: “Oh yeah, there is no doubt about this. With Erdoğan, Turkey will be great again.”
For the ordinary man, Orhan, elections in Turkey were not merely about improving economic conditions or creating more jobs but more about restoring to the nation the greatness it had once enjoyed during the Ottoman Empire.
Mr. Orhan’s remarks made me reflect on the history of the power struggle in Turkey and how differing parties all unite around the common goal of building a great state.
Modern Turkey came to being following a war of liberation fought by Turkish nationalists against the Allies. Turkey was partitioned by the Allies following the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I.
The Ottoman Sultanate was overthrown and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk came to power seeking to build a great state. Most successive leaders followed Mr. Kemal’s quest and ambition to build a great state but none was ever compared to him as Mr. Erdoğan has been.
Suzy Hansen, an American journalist based in Istanbul recently wrote of Mr. Erdoğan: “By now, Erdoğan is more than merely popular. He is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, with all the political genius of a Bill Clinton and none of the personal excess […] If the AKP wins the June 12 elections, as is widely expected, Erdoğan will become the most powerful Turkish leader since Kemal Atatürk.”
(Mustapha Ajbaili, a senior editor at Al Arabiya English, can be reached at Mustapha.ajbaili@mbc.net)
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