[ad_1]
Paris ambassador to Ankara remembered after Turkish president questioned Macron’s sanity
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s comments questioning the French president’s mental health are part of an attempt to increase his influence among Muslims globally, analysts told The Media Line.
Paris recalled Ambassador Hervé Magro of Ankara on Saturday for Erdogan’s remarks, who spoke a day after President Emmanuel Macron pledged to fight “Islamist separatism” that he said threatened to take over some Muslim communities in France.
After a Chechen extremist beheaded a high school teacher near Paris this month for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class on freedom of expression, authorities raided Islamist organizations.
This is him trying to take advantage of a terrorist incident and the French reaction to it to allow him to regain a position as leader of the world Muslim community.
Speaking out against Macron plays on Erdogan’s ambition to appear as an advocate for Sunni Muslims, according to Middle East and North Africa analyst Ryan Bohl of risk analysis firm Stratfor.
“This is him trying to take advantage of a terrorist incident and the French reaction to it to allow him to regain a position as leader of the world Muslim community,” Bohl told The Media Line.
Erdogan, who has increased the presence of Islam in Turkey’s public life, has repeatedly appealed to Muslims abroad, including the Turkish diaspora.
In 2017, Erdogan tried to organize demonstrations in Germany to ask for the votes of the Turkish community of 3 million people in the Federal Republic in a contentious referendum in Turkey to increase his powers, but local authorities prevented his party ministers from carrying out the demonstrations. . Erdogan compared the ban to “Nazi practices.”
Such stances are popular with leading supporters of his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been affected amid the pandemic and economic crisis.
Kristian Brakel, an Istanbul-based analyst and head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation office in Turkey, agrees that Erdogan’s actions will perform well domestically and abroad.
Erdogan can blame his rival Macron after the attack and, at the same time, it appears that he is defending Muslims around the world, Brakel said.
However, he added that Macron’s criticism of Muslims is also targeting a national audience at a time when his popularity is low.
“With Macron saying things like that about an entire religion, it gives Erdogan an excellent opportunity to act in this role again, saying out loud what perhaps many Muslims around the world think, which is probably, ‘Okay, just not. I want to be grouped together with this crazy Chechen who acted like he did in Paris, ‘”Brakel said.
Ties between Paris and Ankara are strained on several geopolitical fronts.
France came out strongly against Turkey regarding tensions between this country and its NATO ally Greece in the eastern Mediterranean, where the latter two nations are vying for influence.
Last November, Turkey announced that it had reached an agreement with Libya that said the two countries had economic rights over a section of the sea that crossed from the southern coast of Turkey to the northern coast of Libya.
Both Cyprus and Egypt called the agreement “illegal”. Greece considers it “empty” and “geographically absurd”. The desire to exploit the underwater natural gas deposits is at the core of the opposition to the Turkish-Libyan deal.
France also criticized Turkey for its foray into northern Syria to fight the US-allied Kurdish forces last October, calling the offensive “crazy.”
Last year, Macron said that NATO was experiencing “brain death”, in part due to Turkey’s relationship with the alliance.
In response, Erdogan said that Macron should check if he was “brain dead.” That prompted France to summon the Turkish ambassador in protest.
The two nations are also vying for influence in Lebanon, where Macron and Turkey’s vice president visited days after the August blast at the Beirut port, offering assistance.
Bohl said France views Turkey as a destabilizing force in the region, where it has increased its military presence by launching offensives and engaging in conflicts.
This runs the risk of weakening NATO by putting Ankara in opposition to the interests and members of the military alliance, he said.
“These actions that Turkey is taking, in which it is trying to rewrite geopolitics [of the region] and reshaping these borders is something that France does not like to be done unilaterally, ”said Bohl.
France and Macron see Erdoğan as a representation of an emboldened Turkey that is overreaching and needs to be controlled in its power, and Turkey and Erdogan see Macron and France as a postcolonial power trying to curb Turkey’s ambition.
Brakel said there is a deeper underlying problem in how the two countries view each other, and that relations are likely to remain strained.
“France and Macron see Erdoğan as a representation of an emboldened Turkey that is overreaching and needs to be controlled in its power, and Turkey and Erdogan see Macron and France as a postcolonial power trying to curb Turkey’s ambition,” he said Brakel. .
“We will probably see other episodes in the future,” he said.
