Why does President Erdogan admire Belarus?
Erdogan prefers the self-styled “democracy” of Belarus and hails it against the failures and double standards of the West.
There was a time when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a frequent traveler to Western capitals, where he was welcomed as the leader of a rising and democratizing Turkey. Those days are long gone.
In the list of the Turkish president’s foreign visits in the past year, there were no Western destinations, with the exceptions of NATO or United Nations summits. Rather, the list includes countries like Qatar, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Peru, Uganda, Azerbaijan, Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Ecuador, Kenya and Somalia. Since the attempted coup in July, five countries have been added to this list, which are also unmistakably non-Western: Russia, China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus.
Could this mere map of Erdogan’s travels indicate that Turkey’s 2-century-old “Western orientation” is now being reoriented? Perhaps. But it is even more helpful to listen to Erdogan himself, who is often rightly proud of not mincing any words and making his views quite clear. It is helpful, for example, to look at the messages he gave after paying an official visit to Belarus on Nov 11.
For starters, Belarus, a republic of the former Soviet Union, is the only country fully placed in the European continent that is not often recognized as a democracy. Belarus itself, of course, defines itself as a democracy, but a democracy “significantly different from the Western concept.” The political system, according to an expert, is a “Soviet model of vertical public administration headed by the president.” There are no significant “NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], media, political parties, trade unions, social organizations,” and the ones that exist are “the state’s ideological pillars.” According to Freedom House, Belarus ranks as “not free,” as its political and civil liberties are on the level of China. It has been defined as the last Soviet Republic, and its leader, Alexander Lukashenko, has been banned from entering the United States and many European countries.
