ISTANBUL-Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dives Sunday into the final two-week stretch before a momentous election that has turned into a referendum on his two decades of divisive but transformative rule. The 69-year-old leader looked fighting fit as he strutted back on stage after a three-day illness and tossed flowers to rapturous crowds at an Istanbul aviation fest on Saturday.
It was the perfect venue for reminding Turks of all they had gained since his Islamic-rooted party ended years of secular rule and launched an era of economic revival and military might. He was flanked by the president of Azerbaijan and the Ankara-backed premier of Libya -- two countries where drones built by his son-in-law’s company helped swing the outcome of wars.
Istanbul itself has become a modern and chaotic megalopolis that has nearly doubled in size since Erdogan came to power in 2003.
But hiding beneath the surface are a more recent economic crisis and fierce social divisions that have given the May 14 parliamentary and presidential polls a powder keg feel.
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The nation of 85 million appears as splintered as ever about whether Erdogan has done more harm than good in the only Muslim-majority country of the NATO defence bloc.
Polls show him running neck-and-neck against secular opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and his alliance of six disparate parties. The entry of two minor candidates means that Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu will likely face each other again in a runoff on May 28. But some of Erdogan’s more hawkish ministers are sounding warnings about Washington leading Western efforts to undermine Turkey’s might through the polls.
Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu referred Friday to US President Joe Biden’s 2019 suggestion that Washington should embolden the opposition “to take on and defeat Erdogan”.
“July 15 was their actual coup attempt,” Soylu said of a failed 2016 military putsch that Erdogan blamed on a US-based Muslim preacher. “And May 14 is their political coup attempt.” Erdogan continues to be lionised across more conservative swathes of Turkey for unshackling religious restrictions and bringing modern homes and jobs to millions of people through construction and state investment.
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Turkey is now filled with hospitals and interconnected with airports and highways that stimulate trade and give the vast country a more inclusive feel.
He empowered conservative women by enabling them to stay veiled in school and in civil service -- a right that did not exist in the secular state created from the Ottoman Empire’s ashes in 1923. And he won early support from Turkey’s long-repressed Kurdish minority by seeking a political solution to their armed struggle for an independent state that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
But his equally passionate detractors point to a more authoritarian streak that emerged with the violent clampdown on protests in 2013 -- and became even more apparent with sweeping purges he unleashed after the failed 2016 coup attempt.