After defying all predictions about his possible end to his reign, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was re-elected on Sunday May 28 for a third five-year term, during which he is expected to enjoy virtually unlimited powers. At 69, he remains by far the most popular politician in the country since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, which he has surpassed in terms of prerogatives and longevity at the head of the State. Adored by his supporters who see him as a father, hated by his detractors who protest to see him cultivate the stature of a sultan, the personality dominant on the Turkish political scene leaves no one indifferent.
Renewed in the second round of the presidential election with 52% of the vote, he has until 2028 to redesign the country as he pleases, to build the second republic, which he imagines more religious, more autocratic, more oriented towards the Gulf, Russia and China as the first, born a hundred years ago on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
After twenty years of exercising power, nothing seems to be able to undermine his charisma, neither his frenzied authoritarianism (200,000 legal inquiries have been opened for insulting the president) nor inflation (44% on average annually) which is hitting the population, barely recovered from the devastating earthquake of February 6, which was aggravated by the reaction deemed too slow by the government he leads. Paradoxically, the conservative and pious masses of Türkiye – ” my people “ as he says – did not hold it against him.
In the May 14 legislative elections, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which he also leads, won ten of the eleven provinces in the vast area affected by the earthquake, despite initial criticism from the victims. , many of whom finally voted for his camp, seduced by his promises of reconstruction, his reinforced social assistance, his assurances of stability.
Populist leader with strong authoritarian roots
His re-election for a third term, while the Constitution authorizes two, confirms his status as an unsinkable president, a past master in the art of bouncing back. In twenty years, we have seen him overcome everything: political crises, mass protests, corruption scandals, attempted military coup, letting go of his former traveling companions. “The king is naked”said of him last year Bülent Arinç, the former president of the Parliament with which he founded the AKP.
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