Enigma of Erdoğan's Turkey - Going Nowhere Soon

Submitted by M Tovey (United States), Nov 28, 2021 at 17:53

In a follow up of Dr. Pipes assessment, he astutely notes:
[(r)egardless of the vote, Erdoğan will remain in power. Count the reasons he won't go: he has an unfinished agenda, he believes himself indispensable, and he and his team fear jail. I suggest ignoring the hoopla about forthcoming elections; poll numbers, party alliances, and messaging hardly matter because, as in Russia or Syria, we perfectly know the results in advance.]
Even as there may be several scenarios in which Turkey may figure to be a continuing part of the Middle East, make no mistake, he will sacrifice anything, including a perfected allegiance to Islam in order to perfect his own dream of fulfilling the ambition he started when abandoning the Atatürk model of a modern Turkey.
The brief and flirtatious courting of the west in allying with NATO brought with it a sense of independent power brokering, failing only when he could not convince the American administration at the time to share more of the technology that was available to NATO allies; then Erdoğan hedged his bet to become more diffident and looked to attempt the same with the Russians - a sort of best of both worlds. All he accomplished was isolation and loss of creditability.
As the Dr. notes, the elections are mere façade, there being no real desire to relinquish whatever dream of his ambitions to a potentially polar opposite dispensation of democratic power that he might be forced to concede his ambitions. As the Dr. further notes, incarceration for his crimes of empire may be his fear, but the greater fear is capitulation to a sector of politics that would look upon him for retribution coming from those he exacted a greater toll for opposing his ambitions of empire. This has a greater potential for regional conflicts of empire as the others rage in the same fashion and no one can foretell how this will get started.

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