June 17, 2022 - 5:00pm
UnHerd’s Aris Roussinos has spent the past fortnight on the frontline in the Donbas, a region in the eastern part of Ukraine and the centre of the current phase of the war with Russia. He was embedded in the nationalist militia ‘Right Sector’, a collection of citizens-turned-soldiers now formally absorbed into the Ukrainian army.
To find out what he saw on the ground, Freddie Sayers spoke to Aris after he returned to the safety of his hotel in Dnipro.
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SubscribeHe will not leave without a fight. You forget that it wasn’t the middle classes that continued to vote for him. Poor people’s lives in Turkey changed dramatically for the better when Erdogan was initially voted in, people who have never been able to afford imported goods and don’t care about them.. They have applauded Erdogan’s “piousness”. Older poor people remember the past with all the coups and unrest, they don’t want it back. Many ordinary people were horrified at the last attempted coup. I personally think there will be more support than you think for him to hang on in there.
He doesn’t understand justice though and punishes the innocent. Many in opposition are still in prison, so there is no freedom of speech. Poor little Armenia are always getting it from Turkey. The massacres of the population in Armenia were horrific in 1914 but they still attack them. Is it because they are a Christian nation?. We do not need another Ottomon Empire with the slavery and cruelty again.
Erdogan was in the right place at the right time. There probably isn’t a single developing country that didn’t ride the wave of expanding globalisation to vastly increase the income levels of their populations during this period.
Erdogan is a menace to his people and a menace in the middle east. It would be great to see him go. Turkey has a lot to sort out from when he came to power.
It’s worth remembering that it was the (proto-)woke who helped bring Erdogan to power by non-stop complaining about the imperfect nature of Turkish democracy and how Erdogan was the necessary solution to fix it. The likes of NYT, FT, the Economist would publish editorial after editorial to support him.
Looking at what’s happening in US today going from crisis to crisis, I today judge Turkish democracy a lot less harshly than I might’ve back in 2003. The one big highlighted sin of Turkish democracy was about not allowing political Islam in government. We’ll see how that one unfolds in the west with many countries banning certain Islamic garb and outlawing some Islamic teaching already, not to mention Trump banning legal entries from Muslim countries.
As for Erdogan brining prosperity to Turkey, while Erdogan clearly is a capable leader and strategic thinker, there was probably more in that success about simply being in the right time and place. Turkey rode the wave of globalisation like any other developing country achieving comparable levels of income and wealth gains (e.g. see Brazil or China between 2003-now).
Any relation to Yunus? Just curious
Relation? Certainly.
How is Belarus making the migrant gamble toxic?
While Ataturk’s “laicisation” of Turkey was important, Erdogan’s bringing back of Islam into the political fold was an important corrective – Egypt could learn from him. Equally, Pakistan could do well to call them out. He has done the necessary – if he was truly wise, he would now step down. He probably won’t – as Acton said . . .