Politics & Power Quote by Recep Tayyip Erdogan

A “basic requisite” is doing a lot of political work here. Erdogan frames democratization not as a universal checklist delivered by outsiders, but as a project that must be co-signed by “the parties in the region” and tailored through a “method” that can vary country to country. On paper, it’s procedural humility: democracy can’t be air-dropped; it has to be locally owned. In practice, it’s a strategic claim to gatekeeping power.

The intent is twofold. First, it pushes back against Western interventionism and the post-9/11 habit of treating the Middle East as a democratization laboratory. By insisting on regional endorsement, Erdogan positions legitimacy as something generated inside the neighborhood, not conferred by Washington or Brussels. Second, it quietly sets a permission structure: if democratization requires endorsement by local parties, then those same parties can slow-walk, redefine, or indefinitely postpone it. Consent becomes both the moral foundation and the built-in veto.

The subtext is a familiar diplomatic move: champion the “objective” (democracy) while widening the funnel of acceptable “methods” until the word can accommodate almost anything. That flexibility can read as cultural sensitivity, but it also offers cover for managed pluralism, majoritarianism without guardrails, or elections without the institutions that make results meaningful.

Context matters: Erdogan’s Turkey once marketed itself as proof that a Muslim-majority country could pair elections with growth and global integration. This line echoes that era’s soft-power pitch, while also foreshadowing a regional order where “democratization” is acceptable so long as it doesn’t threaten incumbents—or the ideological direction of the state.