The street-wise but pious kid from Istanbul’s harbour district is both a victim and a fighter. According to the film The Chief, the young Tayyip Erdogan was a frequent mosque-goer, protested when a referee refused to interrupt a football game for prayers and was chucked into jail for reciting a poem that goes: “the minarets are our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers”.
Across Europe’s Turkish communities, where the film is being shown this week, audiences may well be dabbing their eyes and declaring: “That’s our boy!” President Erdogan’s spin doctors certainly hope so. There are four million registered voters outside Turkey and the referendum on April 16 — over boosting the president’s powers to near-Putin levels — is looking as if it could be a near-run thing.
If he wins approval, the Turkish constitution will be changed, handing executive powers to the president. Mr Erdogan will be able to hire and fire ministers, rule by edict and curb parliament. In theory he will be able to rule until 2029, giving him the chance to enter the 1,100 rooms of his long-awaited new palace and inspect the silk wallpaper. That sounds like a further, decisive lurch towards autocratic rule, and it is. One of many concerns is that he will use his extended powers to declare all-out war on the Kurds, thus sprinkling kerosene on the Middle East bonfire.
Mr Erdogan’s supporters say he is creating a strong state and correcting the 1982 constitution. Drawn up at a time when the Turkish general staff thought itself better placed than any civilian government to define the country’s interests, the constitution gave a crucial role to a national security council half-filled by army officers. Mr Erdogan believed he had tamed the army — but then came last July’s botched coup.
The past few months have seen him unleash an extraordinary purge. Critical academics have been sacked, newspapers closed down, journalists jailed; it has become a society of snitches who denounce those with suspect loyalties. There is a hysterical undercurrent to today’s Turkey, a touch of King Lear about Mr Erdogan himself and a lick of black Dario Fo-style farce about the behaviour of his followers. A Turkish farmers’ association said it would respond to the recent Dutch deportation of one of Ankara’s cabinet ministers by expelling 40 Holstein Friesian cows. One farmer even chose to slaughter his Dutch cow in protest at the Hague’s supposed neo-Nazi high-handedness.
The Chief may be crude propaganda but it does at least recall why Mr Erdogan was once rated by the West: he was a moderniser, someone who wanted to redress the balance between Islam and Kemalist secularism. We were so sure that Mr Erdogan had got that balance right that we held up his brand of political Islam as being a desirable destination for the rebels of the Arab Spring.
That has vanished now and the big question is: who lost Turkey? People still ask the same question about Russia. When Vladimir Putin appeared in 1999-2000 it was all about engagement: getting him involved in the G8, signing him up for the Nato-Russia strategic council.
It seemed to be going that way with Turkey at the beginning. Turkey signed an association agreement with the EEC in 1963 and became a formal candidate for the EU in 1999. By the time Erdogan became prime minister in 2003 it seemed as if he was going to be the man to make it happen: he agreed to scrap the death penalty, to move towards an independent judiciary, to protect Kurdish rights.
And yet we never really wanted Turkey in the club. Turkey’s swelling population, its Muslim identity, its proximity to troublespots, made it a difficult proposition. Then came the terror attacks in Madrid and London. Centre-right parties discovered Europe’s Christian identity and failed to break the bad news to Mr Erdogan. Instead he was offered weasel words such as “privileged partnership”— by which point it was clear to the Turks that they were destined to remain, as they had always been for Europeans, The Other. The more dependent the EU becomes on Mr Erdogan to act as a holding pen for refugees, the more uncomfortable this Otherness becomes. Last week he was campaigning against the European Court of Justice ruling against the wearing of headscarves and religious symbols in the workplace. Christian Europe, he said, has “started a struggle between the cross and the crescent”. Mevlut Cavusoglu, his foreign minister, recently barred from the Netherlands, warned: “You have begun to collapse, Europe . . . holy wars will soon begin in Europe.”
It is the migrant deal with the EU that allows Mr Cavusoglu to declare: “Turkey is in command.” That flawed bargain, sealed in a moment of desperation, is about to fall apart. If he wins the referendum in April, the Turkish president will see himself at the pinnacle of his power. He will be tempted to take one of two options: to abandon the deal altogether and watch the EU struggle with 15,000 more refugees washing up every day, or to release migrants in controlled doses that end up crippling Greece and Bulgaria, piling pressure on Brussels to give Turks visa-free access to Europe.
The Mediterranean is getting calmer; drought and famine in Africa is driving people towards the sea and the German general election is approaching fast. Forget Russian cyberhacking, Mr Erdogan has in his hands the most disruptive weapon of all: the ability to demonstrate that European governments cannot control their borders. Prepare for a summer of chaos.
Roger Boyes is a British journalist and autor.