A bundle of banknotes that Recep Tayyip Erdogan he pulled from his pocket and handed out to voters lurking, eagerly waiting, outside a polling station. I don’t remember a similar icon in another western country at an election deadline.
It’s a snapshot that went around the world on all television screens, but which evidently did not produce enough indignation on average, governments and citizens. On the other hand, for those who observe politics and project it onto compliance with international laws and treaties, that scene should provoke nuisancedespite the awareness that at those latitudes it is a drama already seen.
The protagonist of that gesture clearly illegal (by the way, where were the attentive eyes of the OSCE?) has done nothing but confirm an attitude which, particularly in the last decade, has worsened exponentially. Arrests, abuses of power, elimination of rights and elementary freedoms, threats against neighbors, galloping anti-Semitism have become Bosphorus rules and not exceptions, since the bloody repression of the demonstrations of Park travelwhich fate wanted to have happened exactly ten years before last Sunday’s ballot that saw the victory of the outgoing president.
In between, the coup farlocco of 2016, another extraordinary opportunity for the Sultan to silence political opponents, non-aligned journalists, overzealous judges, with the parallel immobility of the EU which played no part. If not to buy the permanence of Syrian refugees on Turkish soil with 5 billion euros.
This is the overall picture in which, today, we are analytically questioning the next moves of Ankaraon the specific weight of its most urgent decisions, on the way in which it will continue to weave relations with the Gulf countries, with the Chinesewith the Russiawith the EU and the US, on how it will decide to continue its crusade against social networks, minorities or Kurdsinstead favoring other groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
Also stands out calm with which those banknotes were given away: as if the leader didn’t care much about being immortalized in that particular gesture. He wasn’t ashamed of it, he showed no reticence for the presence of the cameras. He pretended nothing happened. But he went straight on his way with arrogance impassivewell aware that no reporter would have caught him red-handed, that no magistrate would have indicted him, that no blogger would have stopped him.
Precisely in continuity with the assumption of Ataturk: “We recognize the claims of all nations. Our nationalism is in no way selfish and opinionated.”
@FDepalo