Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his political allies appear troubled by the ouster of Egyptian military’s ouster of President Mohammed Morsi.
Erdogan “lashes out against Egypt’s coup as if it had been aimed at his own Justice and Development Party [AKP],”
the Christian Science Monitor reported from Istanbul.
The military takeover in Egypt has stymied the AKP goal of creating “a Turkey-Egypt axis in the region,” according to Cengiz Candar, a Turkish columnist..
The “expectation was that as a consequence of Turkey’s largesse to Egypt, Morsi and his Brotherhood would decide to emulate the Erdogan AKP . . . to prove the theory that Islam and democracy can coexist,” Candar wrote. “The opposite, however, occurred, with Erdogan beginning to look a lot more like Morsi, and the AKP beginning to resemble the Muslim Brotherhood ideologically.”
Erdogan’s AKP has won three elections since 2002 with increasing percentages of public support.
But polls indicate that heavy-handed police action and roughing up protesters during recent demonstrations have eroded popular support for him — dropping below the 50 percent level of two years ago.
To Erdogan, slumping poll numbers show that Islam’s opponents are determined to marginalize believers and denigrate the faith.
“They want to subdue us by attacking our mosques, women wearing headscarves, religious people and our values,” he told supporters. “Do not worry. Turkey is no longer the country it once was.”
AKP officials who depict Morsi’s toppling as an assault on democracy, “make little mention of the fact that mammoth street protests against Morsi’s autocratic rule had been building for months,” according to the Monitor.
The paper described what it termed Turkish politicians’ and commentators’ “obsession” with “parallels to Turkey’s domestic protests against Erdogan’s us-vs. they style.”
Erdogan and the AKP “have spent much of the last couple of years branding Turkey as a model for Egypt and the Arab Spring countries; the reverse is now taking place,” Mohammad Pervez Bilgami wrote in a column in Hurriyet Daily News.