New signals come to illustrate this week the conservative and religious turn that President Erdogan intends to give to Turkey.
The first sign of this hardening of the Turkish authorities: the trial against the pop singer Gülsen, prosecuted for incitement to hatred. During a concert, she dared to make fun of the imam hatip, these religious schools which flourished so much under Erdogan. It is also from it. We don’t mess with religion. For the twenty years that he has ruled Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also continued to build mosques, including the huge one in Taksim Square in Istanbul, symbol of the republic. In each of his speeches, the president promotes a godly society. He abhors LGBT movements, “a threat to the family and the values of Turkey”, he thunders.
He has also just submitted to Parliament amendments to the Constitution to protect the right to wear the veil and protect the family, understood as the union of a man and a woman. Gülsen, in addition to his bad joke, is precisely one of the muses of the LGBT movement and has the bad taste, according to his detractors, to wear light outfits on stage, which has earned him real harassment campaigns on social networks.
New Year’s festivities, “an attack on Turkish identity”
The directorate of religious affairs, the Diyanet, whose budget exceeds that of several sovereign ministries makes the opposition talk, denounces the New Year festivities in a sermon read Friday, December 23 in mosques. “An attack on Turkish culture and identity”, it is written. Under the influence of foreign cultures, Muslims would have moved away from their own beliefs.
This little music on a perverse and corrupting West, we hear it more and more, especially in presidential speeches. Again on Friday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan believed that the countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation were much better placed than Western countries in terms of democracy and rights… Taking to dreaming that one day “their old system would crumble so that emerges a world order more respectful of humanity.” It is true that Turkey regularly denounces Europe’s racism towards migrants. And with the approach of the elections scheduled for six months at the latest, the list of enemies inside or outside is likely to grow longer.