IF our ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif has a role model, it would have to be Turkey’s powerful leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His laser-like focus on the infrastructure has seen a huge number of mega projects completed or under construction.

Close to completion is a brand new airport for Istanbul to the north of the city at a cost of $12.5 billion. Employing 35,000 workers, the airport is due to open in October when it will serve 90 million passengers a year. According to The Economist, capacity will increase to 150m in five years, making it the world’s biggest transport hub.

Erdogan’s snap polls: bold gambit or checkmate?

New roads and motorways criss-cross the country, and nearly 30 new airports connect smaller destinations by air.

Perhaps the most ambitious project on the anvil currently is the planned 45-kilometre, $10bn Kanal Istanbul that would bypass the Bosporus, relieving the ancient waterway of the congestion it currently suffers from.

But getting ships to pay for the use of the new channel won’t be easy, given they have free use of the existing waterway under an international treaty signed in 1936. This factor would make it almost impossible to obtain foreign financing.

But all these infrastructure projects have created jobs and boosted the Turkish economy to its current growth rate of 7.4 per cent.

More importantly for Erdogan, they have made him enormously popular with millions of Turks who have seen their standard of living rise steadily ever since Erdogan’s AK Party came to power in 2002.

Cashing in on his current popularity, Erdogan has called for presidential and parliamentary elections in June, 18 months before they are due. His legislators have recently voted a three-month extension in the country’s emergency laws that give the government enormous powers.

Erdogan’s ambition of converting the Turkish parliamentary system into an executive presidency was already achieved after a flawed referendum two years ago, but now he aims to win an overwhelming majority in parliament.

Already, Erdogan wields more power than any of his predecessors, and after the failed coup attempt of 2016 and the arrest of many senior military officers, he faces virtually no challenge.

The secular opposition is crushed. Most of the legislators from the Kurdish party are in jail. Scores of journalists have been arrested, and virtually all independent media houses have either been shut down, or bought by Erdogan supporters.

Observers see another motive in these snap elections: although Turkey plans to spend some $325bn on new infrastructure projects over the next five years, debt levels have risen fast.

The economy has been turbocharged with cheap debt and government stimulus but is in danger of overheating. The Turkish lira has lost around half its value against the Euro and the dollar, and at some point, corporate debt — currently 70pc of GDP — will drag the economy down. So perhaps Erdogan wants to hold elections before voters begin to feel the pain.

Apart from growth and tangible improvement in living standards, Erdogan’s use of the religion card has been a major factor behind his popularity.

Since he came to power in 2002, he has steadily chipped away at the country’s secular foundations put in place by modern Turkey’s architect Mustafa Kemal Pasha nearly a century ago.

Earlier marginalised by Istanbul’s westernised elites and the powerful military, the country’s conservative Anatolian majority now sees itself as heirs to a once-mighty Ottoman empire with Erdogan as the ruling Sultan.

One fallout of the massive building programme in and around Istanbul has been the chaotic traffic, and the mushroom growth of cheaply built apartments. Open spaces have been taken over by buildings, and Istanbul now has a mere 2pc of its area covered by parks and open spaces as against 33pc for London.

Abroad, there is much concern that Turkey, an important member of Nato and a key Western ally, should adopt this authoritarian path. Its application for membership to the EU, already in virtual cold storage, now seems to have no chance of success. For his part, Erdogan does not see this as a failure as full membership would curtail many of his powers.

Regionally, Turkey’s posture has moved far from its earlier foreign policy of ‘no problems with neighbours’. Now, it is heavily involved in the Syrian civil war, having sent its army across the border to crush the Kurds who had set up an autonomous region next door.

Although the YPG, the Kurdish militia that defeated the militant Islamic State group in Raqa, is supposed to be an American ally, it has been abandoned to its own fate. But this is nothing new for the Kurds who have been betrayed many times before in their sad history.

In a sense, Erdogan is cast in the mould of a strong leader who wishes to stay in power forever. The Chinese, Russian and Egyptian presidents all fall in this factory. They feel constrained by constitutional provisions and parliamentary oversight, and seek to break out of these confines by using populist rhetoric and popular measures to obtain support for their absolutist aims.

Above all, they think they are above criticism, and thus feel compelled to control the media. Turkey today is considered the most hostile country in the world in terms of freedom of expression. According to the Stockholm Centre for Freedom, 245 journalists are in jail in Turkey today for daring to be critical of the government and its leader.

So while Turkey has made much economic progress over the last two decades, it has lost many freedoms that its people once took for granted.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2018