Man of the Year

This year is given extra poignancy given since, come midnight, we will be seeing the end of a decade. Although some sticklers insist that the noughties really end this time next year, it is only human nature to pause on the brink of 2010 to try to grasp the bigger picture. It seems only right and proper that this year’s recipient should have claim to prominence during the course of the previous 10. In previous years I have resisted bestowing the title on the obvious candidate, but it would be churlish to resist any more. Just as Turgut Özal lent his name to the post-1983 era of Turkish politics, the name of the current prime minister will be linked to the one that began when his Justice and Development Party (AK) party was elected in 2002. So Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gets the MotY statuette.

Mr. Erdoğan embodies much of what has gone well in recent years but has inadvertently defined the barrier which Turkey appears to have erected to impede its own progress. He embodies Turkey’s sense of confidence, but also its sense of bluster. He has spoken openly of the need for reform and has tried to shed light on problems which have festered in darkness. But he has also demonstrated why those reforms have been so slow in coming about. He has tried to dismantle the sense of privilege of Turkey’s secular elite at the risk of creating a new set of cronies to take their place. And he has tried to establish Turkey as a more dynamic actor on the world stage while sometimes giving the impression that he is only concerned with playing to a domestic gallery. In short, Tayyip Erdoğan is a politician and probably the best of his generation.

He first came to the fore as mayor of İstanbul in 1994, the harbinger of the Islamic-leaning Welfare Party’s (RP) ascent and as a threat to the right-of-center, left-of-center political machines. Governing İstanbul had proved a poison chalice for the Social Democratic People’s Party (SHP) whom he succeeded. Arguably it was Nürettin Sözen’s disastrous performance in that job which helped dismantle the Turkish left. Mr. Erdoğan got on with the job, stopped the water taps from hissing with air, proved that he could be trusted with running one of Europe’s largest cities -- and quietly built up a political base.

He was famously prosecuted and briefly imprisoned in 1998 for reciting a poem that appeared to give the impression that he was the advocate of a radical Islamic politic, yet he even more famously engineered a political party that occupied the political mainstream. His first years of office where characterized by a putsch to get Turkey seated at the European Union negotiating table and in implementing an economic recovery program designed in Washington by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was this sense of realpolitik which was his most potent ally in the fight in which he is still engaged, that of tipping the balance of power in Turkey from the military to civilian authorities. Mr. Erdoğan’s victories have been in resisting the attempts to defeat his political movement -- the public fiat of the chiefs of general staff, the justices of the Constitutional Court and what would now appear to be any number of back room conspirators.