Erdogan’s game: why Turkey has turned against the West

Six years ago, at the celebratory opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely football star emerged. The red team’s ageing, six-foot tall centre-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal; a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the run-up to an election in which he expected to become his country’s 12th president.

For Erdogan, a former semi-professional footballer, it was brilliant self-promotion. Like Fidel Castro’s baseball pitching or Chairman Mao’s ‘world record’ Yangtze River swim at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Erdogan’s contrived sporting prowess helped make him as much a cult as a politician.

In the 18 years since his election victory as head of the Justice and Development party (AKP), he has used his cult of personality to overturn the institutional domination of the secular, pro-western followers of the Turkish Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Elections have been won by appealing over the heads of the educated urban elites to the conservative rural population and those left behind by the country’s economic success. Turkey has morphed from a determinedly secular pro-European country to an authoritarian anti-European Islamic state.

Three current events – which all put President Erdogan at odds with the EU and the US – show the extent of Turkey’s transformation. In the eastern Mediterranean, in search of oil and gas, Turkey is seeking to carve up the area for its own benefit at the expense of Nato ‘allies’ Greece and Cyprus. As Erdogan’s deputy warned in June: ‘We are tearing up and throwing away maps of the Eastern Mediterranean that imprison us on the mainland.’ Meanwhile Erdogan is openly giving military support for his Muslim Azerbaijani confederate’s attempt to regain their Nagorno-Karabakh region from Christian Armenia.