Erdoğan's Putin And Putin's Erdoğan

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian President Vladimir Putin are increasingly becoming soulmates. No one can understand them better than each other. For both, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is a pain in the neck. Journalists continue to talk and write despite being warned repeatedly through several channels.
Both have domestic ethnic problems to tackle, and Erdoğan may increasingly try to learn from Putin how to sort out the Kurdish problem, given the fact that he is moving towards a Turkish nationalist rhetoric to establish his Putinistic authoritarian rule without checks, balances or vetoes. Erdoğan has no friends in the European Union, and he does not want the EU anyway.
The EU process goes against the desires of his one-man presidential regime. He wants to be an Islamist version of Atatürk. The EU is not a comfortable place for such men, and Europe has seen enough of elected populist tyrants who disliked pluralism and human rights. They would not welcome a new one.
Erdoğan needs the EU process for the economic stability only. He might pretend to advance the process, but he will try to see if and to what extent he can have a smooth-running economy without the EU process.
As Professor Savaş Genç explains in his Aksiyon column, Putin offers Erdoğan a great opportunity. Both of them have tense relations with the West and would prefer to strengthen one another's economy. This is of course more difficult for them to do than it seems, but it is worth trying.
Erdoğan has never been able to challenge Putin's foreign policy decisions and his domestic decisions on Muslims from Chechnya to Crimea. He finds it very easy to shout at the West and rightfully criticizes Israeli for its oppression of the Palestinians. However, when it comes to Putin, Erdoğan is a pure opportunist who does not care what happens to Muslims. He is not even a proper Islamist.
An Islamist would not differentiate between Muslims mistreated in Chechnya, China or Palestine. Anyway. It seems that Putin and Erdoğan have only one problem in terms of foreign policy: the Assad regime. Putin wants to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's power intact, and Erdoğan has been emotionally trying to get rid of him. Being a very skillful and crafty politician with no known moral principles, Erdoğan could easily change his position towards Syria if he sees an opportunity to get economic help from Putin to run the Turkish economy smoothly.
None of this is easy, but we must be ready for any kind of strange scenario. At the end of the day Erdoğan loves crazy projects, does he not? He of course needs to convince the military generals, who would prefer to stay in NATO, but the generals may allow him to move closer to Putin to forget real democracy in the hope that, in a non-democratic Turkey with no proper ties to the EU, it would be easier to stage a military coup against the Erdoğan regime.
They may be thinking that after a coup they can always go back to the strong relations with the West, which would embrace them as they embraced General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt. Nevertheless, neither “Atatürk the Second” (if Erdoğan achieves such a title after severing ties with the EU and moving closer to Putin) nor the military generals can solve the Kurdish problem peacefully.
They will either have to succumb to domestic and international pressure to give political autonomy to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) or face a civil war from Edirne to Hakkari, from Samsun to Mersin. Erdoğan has increased the expectations of the Kurds immensely but has so far denied them proper rights. On the other hand, even the practicing Muslim Kurds have been ethnically politicized and have become Kurdish nationalists.
Only the EU process can offer a peaceful chance to settle this problem, and neither a “Putinized” Erdoğan nor the coup-making army can solve it peacefully.
The Kurdish issue is only one problem. Both Atatürk the Second and the military generals will face enormous pressure from people in the diverse sections of the middle class who have cherished freedoms and prosperity for a long time.
Erdoğan can establish his one-man regime and remain in power with his 40 percent of voters, who are generally poor and uneducated. The army can capture and remain in power by force, but ruling such a diverse society is not easy. New, Gezi-type protests of all sorts of varieties will emerge and explode in the country. All in all, Erdoğan must stop getting “Putinized” for his own sake and for the country's sake!

İHSAN YILMAZ (Cihan/Today's Zaman)