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him not for his perceived reformism
but for the conservative values he had
defended early in his career.
“In the heart o every Turkish citizen
lies the desire to become president,”
Suleyman Demirel, a poor shepherd
boy who ful¿lled that desire in 1993,
once said. Erdogan’s rise, like Demirel’s,
is an inspiring example o upward
mobility. Yet as with most good coming-
of-age stories, the hero in Erdogan’s
bildungsroman has another character
trait: vulnerability. In the tradition o
wronged conservative politicians before
him, Erdogan has presented himsel as
a precarious leader who needs to be
defended. In 2006, when he fainted
inside his car after his blood pressure
fell, panicked advisers rushed out for
help before the armored Mercedes
automatically locked its doors. Guards
had to break the windshield with
hammers to rescue him. The episode
only added to the myth o a wronged
man, betrayed by those closest to him.
Yet Erdogan has also changed his
self-presentation over time, from anti-
Western Islamist to conservative demo-
crat. As the Turkish journalist Rusen
Cakir has written, Erdogan, when he
moved from local to national politics in
the late 1990s, “wasn’t comfortable
with the ‘liberal’ moniker, which he
considered a swearword,” but because he
had been marginalized by the old guard,
liberals thought o him as a bridge
between the establishment and “the
organizational power and dynamic
voting-base o Islamists.” To realize its
vision o an Islamist movement compat-
ible with the global order, the ¦
joined the Alliance o Conservatives and
Reformists in Europe, a Europe-wide
political party aimed at reforming, ratherDemocrat Party in 1950, Justice in 1965,
and Motherland in 1983—but the
leaders o those movements fared poorly
once in power. Turkish generals hanged
one on the gallows, ousted another in a
coup, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to
keep the third away from power. Erdo-
gan was determined to avoid a similar
fate. In 2004, he pledged to curtail the
military’s long-standing dominance o
politics and demote the chie o the
Turkish general sta, once a demigod, to
a public servant. These promises won
him support from liberals. But Turkey’s
military tutelage wasn’t replaced by
democracy; rather, as the scholars Simon
Waldman and Emre Caliskan have
written, it gave way over the 2010s to
“¬¶ patrimony.” “Instead o consensus
politics and pluralism,” they point out,
“the Erdogan years... have often been
highly divisive and autocratic in style.”
Around this time, Erdogan parted ways
with liberals and started making moves
toward establishing a presidential
system, which would present fewer
obstacles to his exercise o power.
OUTSOURCING THE STATE
Erdogan, who is six feet tall, walks with a
con¿dent stride: his right shoulder faces
forward, while the left shoulder waits
in the back. The walk, known as “the
Kasimpasali march,” after his boyhood
neighborhood, sums up the man. Follow-
ing his imprisonment, Erdogan resisted
pleas to become a Turkish Nelson Man-
dela and instead cultivated the image o a
külhanbeyi, a roughneck who prowled the
streets o Istanbul during the Ottoman
period. By evoking that ¿gure, he was
able to emphasize his humble beginnings
and consolidate his pious base, the
disenfranchised Islamists who supported