Quoting TWA772LR (Reply 62): Quoting MD11Engineer (Reply 39):
Erdogan plays the same card Hitler, Stalin, Putin, the North Korean Kims and Mao played and play
And you see political cartoons about them all the way from their era to today. There's even people making fun of everyone else today, so Erdogan is no different. He is not divine, so he can sit down and shut up.
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Erdogan couldn't care less about how the Germans see him. His target audience are the Turkish working class people, many quite traditional and religious (remember, those with ukish nationality here are allowed to vote in Turkish elections). Going all the the way makes him look like a supermacho, the Alpha Male, who is never afraid of a fight. And that he thinks that he can put Merkel, mere woman, in her place as well and punish one of the EU countries, which has been obstructing Turkey's entry into he EU for so long (he doesn't matter that there were plenty of other reasons, e.g. Turkey's human rights recod both under the Kemalists and now under the AKP and Norther Cyprus).
Heck, I even know quite educated Turks, who support him because he modernised Turkey's economy during his first erms in office and got rid of the Western oriented Kemalist corrupt cronies. This lead for a while to an economic boom, especially in the provinces, where his vote base comes from. Much of this boom came from the construction industry, with which he has close contacts (some say that he and his family are acepting bribes but this is dangerous territory to discuss in Turkey, as a few years ago he has replaced most judges, prosecutors, heads of the police and heads of the military with his own men. In Turkey, since Kemal Atatürk, the military had a special role to defend the republican values introduced by Atatürk, which they did in regular coups, but Erdogan has practically emasculated them).
By now the economy has slowed down, especially tourism due to the danger of terrorist attacks but even educated Turks see Erdogan as something like a Turkish Margaret Thatcher, who brought the country out of economic stagnation. This was Erdogan's recipe: Free market economy plus social conservatism and religiosity.
What they don't want to accept that Erdogan just changed the corrupt crowd (but again, this is dangerous to publish in Turkey journalists have gone to jail for it).
Jan