It's been five years since Recep Tayyip Erdogan managed to overcome the coup attempt in Turkey on July 15, 2016 allegedly organized by his old friend, the eccentric cleric in exile, Fethullah Gulen.
Under a two-year emergency rule, Erdogan used all means at his disposal to attempt to wipe away potential hurdles to his ultimate reign. Yet at this moment, Erdogan is more worried than ever about losing his grip on power.
Recent opinion polls suggest he could not win if a presidential race were to take place today. Behind that loss of support are some stubborn mistakes he has kept making over the last five years the kind of mistakes that tyrants make.
Following the coup attempt, under emergency rule, Erdogan started the widest purge in Turkish political history. Tens of thousands of people military officials, judges, prosecutors, bureaucrats, academics were expelled from their jobs without cause and replaced by inexperienced party loyalists.
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Journalists, authors and members of civil society were sent to prison without any prospect of release. Politicians, including his rivals, had been jailed already.
During these five years, Erdogan called anybody getting in the way terrorists or foreign agents. Torture and maltreatment in police custody became business as usual.
He also used the opportunity of emergency rule to shut down critical voices and media outlets, including the news channel where I was working.Such cruelty is hard to ignore, even for sympathizers of the Erdogan regime.
Erdogan overestimated his foreign policy powers and all of Turkey ended up facing the consequences. What was he thinking, imprisoning American pastor Andrew Brunson and accusing him of having links to the Gulenmovement?
In return for releasing the pastor, Erdogan asked former US President DonaldTrump to extradite Fethullah Gulen, who is still based in Pennsylvania. Instead, Turkey got trade tariff changes and sanctions. The Turkish lira plunged 40% against the dollar withina couple of days.
Erdogan chose his inner circle from relatives, friends or people who would only repeat what he liked to hear. So, nobody could tell him about his mistakes. Those who dared to speak were forced out. And the people who surrounded him built their own networks of nepotism.
The confessions of an ex-mafia boss revealed some of the shady business that has evolved around Erdogan's regime, including blackmailing businessmen by simply threatening to accuse them of being Gulenists.
Erdogan replaced three central bank directors within two years because they did not fully agree tohis monetary policies. Although the economy proved him wrong, Erdogan kept claiming that high interest rates were causing runaway inflation.
Appointing his son-in-law Berat Albayrak as finance minister wasn't a good move, either. Albayrak oversaw the central bank selling off $128 billion to prop up the Turkish lira,yet this could not prevent the currency's steep drop. In the end, Albayrak's resignation was welcomed by the financial markets. However, by that time, it was too late to revive the lira.
Like all tyrants, Erdogan's reaction to diversity is anger, violence or denial at best. Be it a differing political opinion, the pro-Kurdish party, a rainbow flag, students, feminists his police and judiciary were repeatedly ordered to brutally intervene.
Erdogan once called the failed coup attempt "a gift from God," thinking it gave him the opportunity to fully capture the state. Yet he has made another mistake all tyrants invariably make.
Tyrants at some point seem to think that they are invincible, until they face the inevitable: Tyranny is a desensitized, disconnected, terminal system, with its own gravity guaranteeing its destruction like a black hole that shrinks until it ultimately vanishes. Erdogan's attitude after the failed coup attempt has accelerated this process.
It seems as though the president has reached the event horizon the point of no return into the black hole of tyranny.
In 1990, Istanbul-based photographer Ergun Cagatay took thousands of photographs of people of Turkish origin in Hamburg, Cologne, Werl, Berlin and Duisburg. These will be on display from June 21 to October 31 at the Ruhr Museum as part of a special exhibition, "We are from here: Turkish-German Life in 1990." Here he's seen in a self-portrait in pit clothes at the Walsum Mine, Duisburg.
Two miners shortly before the end of their shift in an old-style passenger car at Walsum Mine, Duisburg. Due to a rapid economic upturn in the '50s, Germany faced a shortage of trained workers, especially in agriculture and mining. Following the 1961 recruitment agreement between Bonn and Ankara, more than 1 million "guest workers" from Turkey came to Germany until recruitment was stopped in 1973.
Shown here is the upholstery production at the Ford automobile plant in Cologne-Niehl. "Workers have been called, and people are coming," commented Swiss writer Max Frisch back then. Today, the Turkish community, with some immigrants' families now in their fourth generation, forms the largest ethnic minority group in Germany, with 2.5 million people.
During his three-month photo expedition through Germany, Cagatay experienced a country in transition. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, Germany was in the process of becoming a multicultural society. Here a demonstrator is seen at a rally against the draft of the new Aliens Act, in Hamburg on March 31, 1990.
The photos provide an insight into the diversity of Turkish-German life. Seen here is the eight-member family of Hasan Hseyin Gl in Hamburg. The exhibition is the most comprehensive coverage on Turkish immigration of the first and second generation of "guest workers."
Today, foodstuff like olives and sheep's cheese can be easily found in Germany. Previously, the guest workers loaded their cars with food from home during their trips back. Slowly, they set up their culinary infrastructure here in Germany, to the delight of all gourmets. Here we see the owners of the Mevsim fruit and vegetable store in Weidengasse, Cologne-Eigelstein.
Children with balloons at the Sudermanplatz in Cologne's Agnes neighborhood. On the wall in the background is a mural of a tree with an excerpt of a poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet: "To live! Like a tree alone and free. Like a forest in brotherhood. This yearning is ours." Hikmet himself lived in exile in Russia, where he died in 1963.
At the Quran school of the Fatih mosque in Werl, children learn Arabic characters to be able to read the Quran. It was the first newly built mosque with a minaret in Germany that was opened at that time. People no longer had to go to the backyard to pray.
Photographer Cagatay mingles with guests at a wedding at Oranienplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. In the Burcu event hall, guests pin money on the newlyweds, often with the wish "may you grow old with one pillow"; newlyweds traditionally share a single long pillow on the marital bed.
Traditions are maintained in the new homeland too. Here at a circumcision party in Berlin Kreuzberg, "Mashallah" in written on the boy's sash. It means "praise be" or "what God has willed." This exhibition is sponsored by the German Foreign Office, among others. In addition to Essen, Hamburg and Berlin, it is also being held in cooperation with the Goethe Institute in Izmir, Istanbul and Ankara.
Author: Ceyda Nurtsch
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Opinion: Turkey's Erdogan has reached the event horizon - DW (English)