Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is stepping up his rhetoric to convince his Justice and Development Party (AKP) voters that their leader is closer to God than they are.

During his term as prime minister, Erdogan used to make long speeches at weekly AKP parliamentary meetings, which most television channels broadcast live. After he ascended to the presidency, his audience of AKP lawmakers was replaced by mukhtars, elected leaders of villages and neighborhoods, of which there are 53,000 in Turkey. At certain intervals now, he invites several hundred selected mukhtars to the presidential palace for his speeches, again, broadcast live by almost all television channels.

In one of these speeches earlier this year, Erdogan defied his state of besiegement, the result of his own dead-end foreign policy, assuring the mukhtars that help would come from above. "This or that country may be against us, opposing us — none of this matters,” he said.

"What does the commandment say? Allah is sufficient for us, and he is the best disposer of affairs. Without this faith of ours, we could have never confronted the Byzantine army, the world’s greatest military power at the time, in the Battle of Manzikert with a force of 20,000 or 30,000 people. Without this faith of ours, we could have never established the most powerful state in history and kept it alive for 600 years.”