EMEP: Erdoğan is not an anti-imperialist, he is a collaborator trying to establish a fascist dictatorship

This was sent out on or before June 8th; I made a few minor edits.

Erdoğan is not an anti-imperialist, he is a collaborator trying to establish a fascist dictatorship in Turkey.

As is known, in the first round of the presidential elections held in Turkey on May 14, no candidate won a majority of the votes and the result was left for the second round. On May 28, the second round of elections was held and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won, standing for the third time despite the explicit provision of the Constitution. Erdoğan won 52% of the vote, while his rival, the leader of the main opposition CHP party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who had managed to build a broad center-right alliance, won 48%.

During the electoral process, Erdoğan, his party, his government and their allies used all the resources of the state recklessly. Famous for having banned more than twenty strikes during his tenure, Erdoğan has banned almost all opposition events in the past year, including concerts by famous singers. Among them, the social media posts of his rival Kılıçdaroğlu before the second round of the elections.

During his more than 20 years in power, Erdoğan has done everything that local and foreign monopolies have asked of him and has satisfied all their demands with investment incentives, tax cuts and tax debt forgiveness. He honored the monopolies with state tenders and gave the operation of the airports and bridges they built to the same monopolies with state subsidies with guarantees to the customer. Most of all this income flowed to Erdoğan. Erdoğan's government was a dictatorship of local and foreign monopolies.

Erdoğan exploited religion without limits and intertwined religion and state affairs, relying on religious sects. In addition, he used nationalism in an unbridled manner as a tool of government. Not only did he discriminate against non-Turkish nationalities, especially Kurds, but he carried out a rampant attack. He dismissed and imprisoned dozens of elected Kurdish mayors and deputies. Outside the country, in Iraq and Syria, he again attacked the Kurds with weapons and occupied northern Syria. He sent troops to Afghanistan, Bosnia and now Kosovo on NATO mission and has troops in Libya and Somalia.

Erdoğan's electoral victory was greeted with jubilation by the most reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie inside and outside the country. The first to congratulate Erdoğan were [Hungarian prime minister] Orban, Putin, Aliyev and the Emir of Qatar, famous for their reactionary fascist behavior. Biden, [French president] Macron and [German chancellor] Scholz also sent congratulatory messages, while Latin America's Evo Morales, Lula and Maduro were among the congratulators. Morales [the former president of Bolivia, overthrown in 2019; by the way it was July 1st in 2013 when EU countries and the USA conspired to force Morales' presidential flight to land in Austria, hoping that they would find Edward Snowden onboard] described Erdoğan's election victory as "a party for democracy," [Venezuelan president] Maduro said the election "confirms the strength of democracy" and traveled to Turkey to attend Erdoğan's ceremony, while Lula offered Erdoğan global cooperation and asked him to "count on Brazil's alliance in the fight against poverty."

Morales also considered "Erdoğan's electoral victory" in the context of the process of "gradual construction of the world in a multipolar structure." In other words, he considered Erdoğan to be fighting against US imperialism, the ruler of the "unipolar world"!

The Trotskyist party [Workers' Cause Party – Partido da Causa Operária] led by Rui Costa Pimenta of Brazil went even further. "Erdoğan won the elections in Turkey defeating imperialism", according to this party, "imperialism was losing its control in the Middle East"!

Erdoğan is not only the representative and spokesman of national monopolies. Turkish finance capital is an extension and part of international finance capital. The Turkish monopoly bourgeoisie is a detachment of the international bourgeoisie and a collaborator of the imperialist monopoly bourgeoisie. Turkish capitalism is therefore an integrated element of international monopoly capitalism. And one cannot speak of anti-imperialism of a person and his government that has been pulling the strings of the domination of its monopolies for 20 years. Neither Lula nor Erdoğan is fighting imperialism. Erdoğan is not a patriot fighting imperialism, but a collaborator backing imperialism. Turkey is already a member of NATO and has sent troops to several countries on its behalf.

As a collaborator of imperialism, what Erdoğan does is to take advantage of the contradictions between the US and Russian imperialism, behind which is China, in the Middle East, which is the field of the imperialists' struggle for hegemony. Erdoğan tries to realize the "special interests" of the Turkish monopolies by using one against the other. The "particular interests" of the collaborators of imperialism, even if they involve using one imperialist against the other, are not a question of struggle with imperialism, but can be realized by uniting and compromising with imperialism. In fact, this is what is happening.

The imperialist collaborator Erdoğan, with his prohibitive and aggressive imposing policies and attitudes towards the working class and people of Turkey, is not a representative of democracy. The elections he won will not pave the way for democracy in Turkey. Erdoğan is attempting to establish a fascist dictatorship in Turkey, as Bolsanaro tried to do in his time.

Labour Party (EMEP), Turkey

http://www.emep.org/ (English)