Erdoğan ‘fostering cult of personality’ as new bridge set to bear his name

Turkey is to name a major new bridge across the Euphrates river after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, according to reports.

According to the Hurriyet newspaper the spectacular cable bridge, which is expected to open in March this year, is one of the most ambitious engineering projects of modern Turkey and will be about a third of a mile long.

It said the bridge would be the most important structure that Erdoğan has given his name to, amid complaints from critics of a growing cult of personality around the leader.

“Our citizens have insistently expressed the wish for the bridge to be named after our respected president,” the transport minister, Lütfi Elvan, told the newspaper.

“We will pass this [idea] on to our respected president. We think it is suitable if he agrees to have the bridge named Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,” he added.

Erdoğan, who has dominated Turkey for more than a decade, first as prime minister and now as president, has been seeking to etch his name into Turkish history with landmark engineering projects.

The government is planning a huge third airport in Istanbul, and Elvan himself has previously suggested it could be named Recep Tayyip Erdoğan international airport.

The president has already given his name to several facilities in Turkey, including a university in the Black Sea city of Rize and a stadium in Istanbul. However, the new bridge would be by far the biggest project to bear his name so far.

The bridge crosses at a point where the river forms the Lake Atatürk dam, one of Turkey’s great engineering projects of the 1980s and named after the founder of the modern secular state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Critics have accused the Islamic-rooted Erdoğan of seeking to usurp Atatürk’s status as modern Turkey’s national leader.

The Euphrates bridge is seen as Turkey’s third great bridge of modern times after the two bridges that span the Bosphorus in Istanbul built in the last decades.