At a summit in Tehran last summer, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan kept Vladimir Putin waiting. This wasn’t mere tardiness, some commentators speculated, but payback for having been left twiddling his thumbs by the Russian president two years earlier.
A new BBC documentary, Turkey: Empire of Erdoğan, begins with this curious case of unpresidential pettiness. The incident, the show argues, is not only illustrative of the longstanding ruler’s increased confidence on the world stage, but of a tenure that has been marked by grudges and a tendency to push back when slighted or challenged.
The documentary arrives days before the presidential election in Turkey where opinion polls indicate that Erdoğan might lose and experts fear that he could try to illegitimately cling to power if defeated. Over two parts, it offers a succinct and lucid — if conventionally formatted — survey of his rise from a poor Istanbul neighbourhood to mayor and populist national leader before his slide towards strongman authoritarianism.
The first episode compellingly places Erdoğan’s story within the context of modern Turkey’s uneasy relationship with religion, the military and the west. We hear, for instance, how he gained traction by pitching himself as a protector of “purity” and Islamic values against corrupt “secular elites”, and how he broke the “golden rule” of Turkish politics by squaring up to the army.
If the show doesn’t always give a profound sense of Erdoğan the man, it does at least acknowledge the intriguing complexity of someone seen as both a staunch conservative and a moderniser who improved infrastructure, boosted the economy and built ties with the EU and US. Later on, the documentary notes how this ostensible progress gave him “a free pass” to pursue more extreme measures of consolidating power: eroding rights, quashing protests, imprisoning opposition and censoring the press for well over a decade. That we see him do all this in the name of democracy impactfully underlines a point made in the documentary by the FT’s own Daniel Dombey: the former Turkey correspondent says that Erdoğan’s story affects “our understanding of the way this century is going”.
★★★★☆
On BBC2 on May 9 and 10 at 9pm
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