A picture on a wall, the cancellation of a university diploma and the dismissal of an intelligence chief and a general prosecutor. In the same handful of days, but in different countries, different events are signs of the same in three ultraconservative rulers.
The picture of a nineteenth -century president hung in the Oval Office of the White Housethe repeal of a degree awarded in 1994 by the University of Istanbul and the attempt to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet and the Attorney General of Israel are signs of authoritarianism in Trump, Erdogán and Netanyahu.
That the American president modified the decoration could be something anecdotal. The decoration is in the dimension of the purely aesthetic, unless it includes revealing elements of drives or convictions that do not have to do with personal taste.
In general, US leaders make minimum changes, in addition to replacing the carriers behind the presidential desk. Trump went further, filling the oval office with the strand of the gold, as in the halls of the Baroque and the Rococó, when the bronzes were crowded in the furniture and decorations.
It was the last aesthetic expression of the ampulosity of the absolutist Luises. And in the White House expresses the ampulosity that Trump also exhibits in his mansions and skyscrapers. Something significant, because the amount of gold in a room is inversely proportional to the humility of the spirit of who lives it.
But that is not the most revealing detail in the new decoration. The Ego Ego of the New York tycoon was already well -known. The revealing thing is that it hung a picture of James Polk, The president whose expansionist policies increased the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.
After being governor of Tennessee, Polk held the presidency in the prelude to the secession war, winning the election with the promise of annexing Texas, recently split from Mexico. In a row, by invasions incorporated California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, in addition to the territory of Oregon, which bought the British.
A picture of James Polk in the president’s office that promises annexations that would triple the territory confirms that he plans an expansionist era. That detail in the Oval office proves that it is not a negotiation modality, but that Trump is serious, and explicitly, repeating that Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal will be from the United States.
That is why it is as comprehensive with the addiction to the expansionist war that the Russian president exhibits, with which he also shares a hard nationalist conservatism, although not as religious as that of Recep Erdogánwho also once again issued dark signs.
Worsening the “Sultanization” process that began when it reached the presidency of Türkiye, the image of the popular mayor of Istanbul was destroyed, outlaw and imprison it. The social democrat Ekrem Imamoglu It is the most powerful figure of the secular opposition. That is why an avalanche of accusations and complaints fell as soon as he appeared leading the surveys.
Erdogán is doing to his challenging what the Ataturkista government did to him in 1997, when he was mayor of Istanbul and his popularity was projected throughout Turkey: to read in an act an Islamist poem of Ziya Gokalp They made him resign and imprisoned him.
At that time he militated in the Refah Partisi (Welfare party) led by the moderate Islamist Necmetin Erbakan. Ataturkist governments were not as democratic as they said to be and, when some Islamist leader or Kurdish parties grew too much, they attacked it with manufactured complaints.
Upon leaving prison, Erdogán founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and since he reached the Summit of Power began the authoritarian drift that included conspiracies and proscriptions to those who questioned or represent an electoral threat.
If he did not forgive Fetullah gülen, The influential theologian who had to exile despite having sponsored Erdogán and financed the AKP campaign, why should he surprise that the university where Imamoglu graduated three decades ago now took his degree, without which he cannot be a candidate because the Turkish Constitution requires university degree to access the presidency?
Erdogán’s “sultanization” faces him with the Judiciary, while in Israel, against a more vigorous democracy offering hard resistance, Netanyahu tries to put everything under his control. To the massive protests that caused their progress on the independence of the judges, the protests were added against their attempt to control the Shin Bet dismissing Ronen Bar, the director of that intelligence apparatus that is autonomous with respect to governments. And as if that were not enough, Netanyahu envied against the Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, an official who must legally advise the government objectively, without submitting to him, and has long been colliding with the prime minister and his cabinet.
The rulers cannot remove general prosecutors or intelligence bosses, because among their functions they have precisely to monitor power. In fact, never a Shin Bet chief was dismissed by a prime minister.
RONEN Bar He had not defended himself with alibis about the bloodthirsty pogrome of 2023. On the contrary, he claimed independent investigations and ordered the internal investigation that showed his own failures that allowed him. These investigations also justify suspicions about Netanyahu. As little, having discouraged the recommendations to eliminate Hamas leaders with selective murders, starting with Yahya Sinwar, head of the attack in southern Israel. Apparently, before the pogrome, Sinwar was several times in the sight of the Shin Bet, but the order to shoot never came.
The boss that Netanyahu dismissed and the judges replaced in his position, also promotes the investigation into the bribes of Qatar to two prime minister advisors.
In that battle that began with Netanyahu, trying to submit to the judicial system, is faced with Israeli democracy while his government tries to survive entangling himself in another war.
Image gallery
