By Athena Papakosta

“I used to play football (…) The ultimate goal is to win the game.” It was April 2017 when Mr Turkish president he was giving an interview to the correspondent of the American CNN network, Becky Anderson and citing his own football experience, he once again played ball admitting that victory is the ultimate goal.

Nine months ago, on July 15, 2016, a bloody (failed) coup attempt shakes Turkey and while the country eats its flesh, its president attempts through a referendum to change the terms of the political game in his favor by transforming the Turkish state from a presidential parliamentary democracy to presidential by concentrating all the powers in his hands.

In the same interview, Tayyip Erdogan declares “I am mortal. I could die at any moment” to clarify that the new system of presidential superpowers is not about him but “represents a change, a transformation in Turkey’s democratic history”. He adds that he is not a dictator, explaining that “where there is a dictatorship, there is no presidential system. There are polls here’, with his critics then asking ‘what democratic leader needs to say he is not a dictator?’ and today to wait to see if the election result will be respected in case he is defeated.

The early years

He was born in 1954 in the Kasimbasa suburb of Istanbul. At a very young age he sold lemonade and pretzels to passers-by trying to help his family financially. He studied at an Islamic school, the so-called “Imam-Hatip”, started playing football professionally and reportedly studied at the School of Commercial Sciences of the University of Marmara as the Turkish president has not presented, to date, a copy of his degree.

Already in his teens he had joined the youth of Necemdin Erbakan’s Islamic party, “National Salvation” and with him he walked politically following him over the years and in the “Prosperity Party” under whose support he was elected mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998 when he was sentenced to ten months in prison for inciting religious hatred. The reason was the recitation of a poem to his followers at a political event. “Mosques are our barracks, domes (of mosques) our helmets, minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” He remained in prison for four months and those who hoped to have put an end to his political journey were defeated as Tayyip Erdoğan now had allies who felt silenced and oppressed by the Turkish state and in his person had found the voice they had lost.

The liberator

In 2001 he founded his own party. He calls it the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and within a year he is elected prime minister of Turkey, which in the first years of Erdogan’s power is transformed.

He himself seems to be liberating it from the burdens of the past by promoting democracy and human rights, extending a helping hand to the Kurdish population, taking off the country’s economy, tripling the GDP per capita, activating its European trajectory while simultaneously opening up to the international community while he seems to reconcile with the army as well. With him he has an ally – guide, the imam Fethullah Gülen, but in a few years he will be baptized his enemy.

The authoritarian

For eleven years he remained the prime minister of Turkey until he became its president, in 2014, and closed the door on everything he had already begun to turn his back on in recent years.

A turning point was the protests against the plans to develop Gezi Park, around Taksim Square. Protests against the destruction of a green space to build a shopping center have turned into the biggest wave of protests Turkey has seen in years. The violent repression and Erdogan’s “stubbornness” turned the protest into a nationwide mobilization. Officially five people lost their lives while at least 8,000 were injured.

Since 2013, Erdoğan has been baptized by his people as “Sultan”. Now living in a palace in Ankara, he begins to expose the Kemalist character of the Turkish state starting with the lifting of the headscarf ban, condemns feminism, stigmatizes the LGBTI community, empowers Islam over secularism, assumes the role of his “father” of the Muslim world, is involved in the Syrian civil war, hunts the Kurds, plays with anti-Westernism in the minds of the people, hunts down or even imprisons opponents and journalists and starts a war with Gülen. At the same time, in the field of foreign policy, his games follow each other as long as they serve his respective purpose.

His political starting point is now a thing of the past. And when the failed coup attempt arrives, in July 2016, the way to the establishment of a shadowy regime is opened since, by order of Erdoğan, a sweep operation begins in the Turkish state machine and beyond. Judicial, military, police, government officials, businessmen, media, journalists, academics, all those who do not support him automatically become enemies of him and his party. In 2018 with the constitutional revision he now dominates the game with Turkey now slipping into authoritarianism.

Once again a candidate

Today, 21 years later, Recep Tayyip Erdogan doubts his victory in this election. He seeks to stay in power and like a tough player, which he has proven to be, enriches his populist sloganeering, sings at every election rally “to those who listen and those who don’t listen. To those who ask and to those who don’t, we love him very much…” while he dreams of “losing”, further polarizing the climate and hoping, in the end, to consolidate his hegemonic presence in the country that this year completes 100 years since the establishment of the modern Turkish state.