Ece Temelkuran on Erdogan, NATO and Sweden

Arguing with the boss is like playing chess with the city pigeon

This is a cultural article It is part of Aftonbladet Opinion Press.

full screen

The idea was that Erdogan Become a football player.

If his father hadn’t actually whipped all these dreams out of his body, he would’ve become one of them Turkish language The most accurate striker. In a world better than this, today he would use his natural charisma to sit on sports TV broadcasts and chat with other aging soccer champions.

However, in such a wonderful world, there would be neither ruthless fathers nor NATO, and there was certainly no Sweden’s sudden yearning to become part of that alliance. But since today we have to deal with all these concerns, Erdogan is using the massive political ball of his veto power to alienate the Swedes. His loyal fans adore him, his teammates are at his best and the Swedes don’t seem to have at all understood that the referee started the match. They are definitely not prepared for the game’s tactical prowess.

The next day Erdogan unexpectedly announced that he intends to use the Turkish veto to end Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO, the treaty’s foreign ministers met in Berlin to start negotiations. According to an anonymous diplomat, quoted by Reuters news agency, the meeting was an outright scandal.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mouloud Cavusoglu Wasted in the face of his Swedish colleague Ann Lind He was annoyed by her “feminism” and her “playing too much”. Since I came myself from Turkey, I am not as surprised as a European woman would have to act as a prominent government official in this way. But what is interesting in the whole story is how the ministers during the meeting, as previously reported by a NATO diplomat, chose to respond with awkward silence. Let’s take a moment to immerse ourselves in this silence.

Suddenly you may realize that you are trying to drop the pieces and disperse them more subtly than the pigeon.

“Discussing with the populist right is like playing chess with a city pigeonIn recent years, I have been preaching to my Western friends. I tried to prepare them for the right-wing populist movements that were getting stronger in their countries, so that they would not be paralyzed as we Turks were when Erdogan began to rise to power.

No matter how skilled you are at playing it, pigeons will fall, scatter the pieces and fly from there with their head held high.. Anyone who intends to negotiate with a right-wing populist regime must be prepared for the rules of the game to suddenly change and no accepted principles apply. The shock of such behavior will obviously create moments of awkward silence as happened in Berlin last week, but as these moments get longer and longer, the new rules will apply without return.

Suddenly maybe you Realize that you are trying to drop and disperse the pieces more subtly than the pigeon. I know what I’m talking about because that’s exactly how the Erdogan regime stopped the political mechanisms in Turkey for 20 years.

At the same time, we must have an understanding with the Turkish Foreign Minister. As for many government advisers and ministers, his job was to pull the ball off his chest and lock it in when Erdogan makes a pointless pass in a totally unexpected direction. At home, this happens a lot in politics, but in the rest of the world it is only noticeable when Erdogan plays international matches.

“What is he looking for?” Many journalists are asking and are now trying to get the right answer from prominent Turkish diplomatic experts and experts. Erdogan’s demands are the extradition of PKK members and sympathizers to Turkey, guarantees against supporting the YPG and the abolition of sanctions on arms exports since 2019, when the Turkish military entered Syria.

Given that the Turkish Penal Code has a different definition of terrorism, a definition that today involves far-reaching restrictions on freedom of expression, it will be nearly impossible for Sweden to comply with Turkey’s demands.

agree on Ending the arms embargo is not only related to Swedish policy but also depends on the approval of the US Congress. What’s Next? For the past twenty years, analysts accustomed to Erdogan’s methods have used the word “work”.

One must realize that Erdogan started his career in our hyper-deficient world as a cookie seller. He was a sugar bakery before he finally reached his miserable mansion in Ankara. In addition to being a frustrated footballer, he is also a retailer. We have already noticed that he imagines my hometown in Turkey as a mega store, and he is the only legitimate owner of it.

Therefore, everyone who sits at the negotiating table with Erdogan must remember that the person he is dealing with is a selfish attacking player with the ability of a peddler and the confidence of a city pigeon.

Ece Temelkoran is a Turkish journalist and author. In 2012, she was fired from the Habertürk newspaper after a series of articles critical of the government.