Ostern I witnessed a historic election victory. One might say: a resurrection of democracy in Turkey. On Good Friday I landed at the airport in Ankara with my nine-year-old son; he wanted to visit his cousin. First, the usual picture: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan everywhere, on posters, on all television screens, even along the highway into the city, one Erdoğan election poster following another: You see him with sunglasses and a jacket like Tom Cruise in “Top Gun as a fighter pilot. Millions of posters were made of Erdoğan in this pose, even though he wasn’t directly up for election this time – it was local elections.
On Easter Saturday, the day before the Resurrection, we climbed the steps to the Ataturk Mausoleum in Ankara. The country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is the forefather of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which has been defeated by Erdoğan’s Islamic conservative AKP in presidential elections for decades. Up in the main square of the mausoleum, soldiers drilled the changing of the guard with orders and shouts, which also sounded like Erdoğan. Thousands ran with the soldiers, filmed, waved and saluted. Some stood in the mausoleum’s hall of honor and cried. Others rushed to place their relatives in front of the symbolic red marble sarcophagus and take photos, only to cry followingwards. Could one imagine something like this at the grave of Konrad Adenauer or Theodor Heus, the founding fathers of the Federal Republic?
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