Visionary or Butcher, Depending on Who You Ask

Every sufficiently polarizing leader eventually becomes a Rorschach test—what you see in them reveals as much about you as it does about them. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of the more extreme examples of this, partly because the stakes are so high and partly because the argument follows his supporters into diaspora communities thousands of kilometers from Ankara.

After the attempted coup in July 2016, Erdoğan moved fast: mass purges, emergency rule, tens of thousands arrested—journalists, activists, academics, people who posted the wrong thing on social media. The Turkish opposition called it the end of democratic institutions. His supporters called it the only reasonable response to an existential threat. Both sides held rallies in German cities. The argument was not contained to Turkey.

Journalist Şirin Manolya Sak put two people in the same frame who rarely face each other across this divide. Kazim Akboga had drawn the fury of Erdoğan’s base after a YouTube video—a visceral illustration of how personal this political allegiance gets, how fast disagreement becomes threat. On the other side, Bilgili Üretmen delivers passionate YouTube defenses of Erdoğan’s legacy: the economic growth, the infrastructure, the narrative of a Turkey that stopped apologizing for its ambitions.

The visionary-or-dictator framing is almost too clean, of course. Leaders who consolidate power this aggressively tend to be neither pure pragmatists nor pure monsters—they’re opportunists who start believing their own myth at precisely the moment it becomes convenient. What’s harder to dismiss is the certainty on both sides. The people marching for him in Hamburg are not confused about what they’re marching for. Neither are the ones watching from across the street.