At his weakest moment, Erdogan to meet Biden
The forthcoming Erdogan-Biden meeting on June 14 comes at a time when Erdogan is experiencing his weakest term in his very long reign.
For a long period of time, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looked mighty, especially from within Turkey. He was charismatic, a great orator, a shrewd tactician, imposing and even bullish. He mesmerized many of his countrymen. His numerous sycophants called him “Reis” in Turkish, without pronouncing any official title or his name. The connotation of Reis in Turkish is "leader," and nobody needed to inquire who the Reis might be. Nobody could be other than Erdogan. His cronies went that far to glorify him as the “global leader.” His charm and strength could not be confined to Turkey; it had to go much beyond that, to the global level.
Those were the days. Erdogan will be meeting with the president of the United States, Joseph Biden, in the weakest moment of his almost two-decade-old reign in Turkey. He is not coping well with the mounting problems he faces in the economy, further aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation is soaring by double digits, and unemployment is increasing. At the same time, the small businesses that provided solid support to him for years have become the sources of discontent, accelerating erosion of his approval ratings.
The polls indicate his popularity is dwindling every passing day. The elections are scheduled for the year 2023. If the current adverse trends cannot be controlled, it looks more and more difficult for Erdogan to survive politically in the electoral processes, as the local elections in 2019 aptly demonstrated. He lost all the important metropolitan centers that produce two-thirds of Turkey’s gross national product.
His ever-weakening posture inside the country is taking mortal blows from the revelations of a mobster. Once an ardent Erdogan supporter, Sedat Peker, a well-known underworld personality, started to publish video recordings from his self-imposed exile in the United Arab Emirates, revealing the rampant allegations of corruption under the Erdogan regime.
