Erdogan: the most anticipated Afandina in the Arab world

Written by Malik Al-Athamneh /

There are many Turks in Europe, many to the extent that they form integrated ‘minority’ societies which intelligently weave their relationship with their European environment with greater integration, and maintain their privacy in residential areas known to be in the majority there.

Months ago I was the passenger who wanted his fate to be the taxi driver Turkey takes from Istanbul, a strikingly elegant man in his fifties, who speaks English with a broken accent, masters the Dutch as his people and loves life as it has come. as part of our long conversation on the long way down the road.

The man, after we got to know each other and understood that I am an “Arab” journalist immigrating to Europe, asked me his question, which I immediately expected, “What do you think? ‘Erdogan? “

I tried with all diplomacy to explain my personal “opinion” of the Turkish president, “maliciously” trying to grope the man’s positions in order to reduce my intensity if it increased. At the end of the day, we’re on the road, and the relationship is based on the premise that I’m just a passenger under his direction.

My diplomatic escape was not successful, because the man interrupted me to tell me first about him, whom he had immigrated to Belgium since the age of twenty (that’s at least three decades of immigration), and that he was not an Islamist either. , but he was not primarily engaged in religion: for him, faith is a personal affair between man and God! He added that he was a partner at a nearby nightclub and was a Latin dance teacher himself!

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It was a clever introduction on his part to get into the reasons for his support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which are many of the reasons the man mentioned, none of them related to the Islamic religion, and the man did not mention a single reference to Erdogan as a religious leader!

All the reasons mentioned by the taxi driver in his fifties were economic. Ultimately, according to him, Erdogan made him proud of his Turkish nationalism after being ashamed of it. listen and I speak now honestly.

Meaning: Erdogan raised the level of Turkish nationalism sentiment, which is the same nationalism that brought down the Ottoman Caliphate, but with all of this, the Arabs see him as bare bread and religious hashish, the successor of Islam and the renewal of the glories of the Sublime Porte that the Arabs dreamed of standing at its door and begging for!

An Arab who falls under the “Erdogan” syndrome cannot see him as a secular president of a secular state, even though a channel like Al-Arabiya came out with an interview with Erdogan himself to confirm that he is with secularism and that Turkey is a secular state.

In 2010, Erdogan canceled a visit to Argentina because the authorities banned the exhibition of a statue of the founder of the secular republic Atatürk, under pressure from the Armenian communities.

Erdogan, an intelligent politician, picks up the signals, and like any professional politician who plays on those strings with words, he praises the founder of the republic on the anniversary of his death, but he gives words that have no real meaning about Turkey. ““ Emotional boundaries. ”It’s a clever game similar to injecting morphine that drug addicts must create.

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In the summer of 2008, I was a media advisor in the Jordanian government and I had the chance “maybe” to participate for the first time in one of these official visits as part of an official delegation. government, and for the first time I witnessed what Like others, I heard in “official” newsletters these words: The two sides discussed means of joint cooperation!

In fact, we did not discuss with the Turks that day any means of joint cooperation during our meeting with one of Erdogan’s strongest ministers in his Justice and Development Party, Minister of International trade at the time of Kurshad Tuzman, but we were more of a Jordanian delegation. led by an incumbent minister in government at the time, we received behind the doors a firmly, closed-worded report from the Turkish government to “disrupt us” the free trade agreement with Turkey! The minister “Erdogan” par excellence, was decisive in his conversation with us on the relations that should be with Damascus and that Ankara sees Damascus as an important ally for us and for them! He highlighted Turkey’s close relations with Israel, which his arguments will add value to our free trade agreement with Ankara (the agreement, as I heard, was canceled by the late government Hani Al-Mulki!).

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I came back from this visit with many repercussions, the first being that Ankara practiced the art of the possible to the maximum of contact with the impossible to achieve his interests and interests only, and that’s good .. but very good for Turks, and Turks only.

The saying is short and short;

In the recent Turkish elections, which Erdogan won at an acceptable rate, and with all the art of the possible means at his disposal as president, many Arabs confined between the Gulf and what he has changed in the region surrounding people saw in him their “awaited Mahdi”. “as part of an unbroken knot of disappointment.

The Turks elected their president with “broad presidential powers” in a purely secular constitutional system, and illusions still celebrate the caliphate they love in a professional Turkish politician who picked up the signal and played it all out. he wanted.

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The opinions and views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the official opinions, views or policies of the Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN).