Erdogan outburst: 'This is indecency!'

The phrase “never a dull moment” is probably meant to describe Turkey. Indeed, for Turkey’s observers, whether they are veteran political figures carefully monitoring the developments from outside or those foreign residents belonging to expatriate journalist community, “There is never a dull moment in Turkey” is a consensus motto.

The weekends are not exempt. They could even be more electrified in the political sense as Saturday, May 10, proved to be. The news bombshell fell to smart phones as text messages and those Turks who rushed to their TV screens witnessed an unprecedented drama unfolding: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was stalking out of the hall dragging President Abdullah Gul, who was sitting on his left, and four-star Chief of General Staff Necdet Ozel, sitting on his right, behind him while shouting "This is indecency!" to professor Metin Feyzioglu, chairman of the Union of Bar Associations of Turkey, who was then addressing the meeting.

The venue was a gathering of the highest level of Turkish officialdom to observe the 146th anniversary of the founding of the State Council. It would be an understatement to say that Feyzioglu’s nearly hourlong speech, laden with criticisms of the government, had angered Erdogan. He was in a raving mood. When he started to heckle the speaker from his seat, millions of Turks saw on their TV screens how Gul tried to quiet him down by tugging on his sleeve and how Erdogan’s irritation became enraged fury. Erdogan could not be stopped from jumping to his feet and continuing to yell at the chairman of the Union of Bar Associations, whose speech was supposed to take 20 minutes. People around Erdogan were worried that he might storm the rostrum.

Reuters reported, “It was an unusual outburst even for Erdogan, Turkey's most popular leader in a half-century, whose street-tough origins and hard talk are part of his appeal for many Turks.”