Portrait of Prime Minister Erdogan
Red carpets and honor guards are for garden-variety visiting politicians and monarchs: for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Cairo put on the kind of reception usually reserved for rock stars. Turkey's Prime Minister was greeted at the airport by thousands of cheering fans, many holding aloft posters of their hero. Fusillades of flashbulbs turned night into day. Journalists thrust microphones into his face, but he was drowned out by the chanting throngs. "Erdogan! Erdogan! A real Muslim and not a coward," went one incantation. Another: "Turkey and Egypt are a single fist."
Totalitarian regimes routinely orchestrate massive, faux-spontaneous welcomes for visiting dignitaries, but the beleaguered interim administration in Cairo didn't need to rent a crowd for Erdogan: he is genuinely popular across the Arab world. He was ranked the most admired world leader in a 2010 poll of Arabs by the University of Maryland. His profile has soared higher still since the Arab Spring: Respondents to the 2011 version of the poll, conducted in the fall, rated Turkey as having played the most constructive role in Arab events. In countries where the people have risen against old tyrants, many cite Erdogan as the kind of leader they would like to have instead.
A good politician knows how to milk his moment: Cairo was the first leg of Erdogan's triumphant mid-September sweep through the newly liberated North African states. There were tumultuous welcomes, too, in Tunis and Tripoli. The trip culminated at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, where President Obama lauded him for showing "great leadership" in the region.
It's not every day that a U.S. President and the Arab street are of one mind. But like the throngs chanting Erdogan's name (not all of them aware it is pronounced Erd-waan; the g is silent) in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, Obama is hoping that the new governments emerging from the ashes of old dictatorships will look a lot like the one the Prime Minister has built over the past eight years. Erdogan has greatly enhanced Turkey's international reputation, reined in its once omnipotent military, pursued economic policies that have trebled per capita income and for the most part maintained a pro-West stance.
He has, it is true, also displayed an autocratic streak, running roughshod over political rivals, tossing enemies into jail and intimidating the media. Critics say Erdogan's government is censoring the Internet, muzzling regulators and interfering in academic institutions. But to his admirers, these failings pale against his successes. Democratic, economically ascendant and internationally admired: as political templates go, Turkey's is pretty irresistible to people shaking off decades of authoritarian, impoverishing rule--and to Westerners worried about what those people might do next.