TURKISH President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday compared his quest for absolute power to that of Adolf Hitler.

 

Mr Erdogan, having cut short a visit to Saudi Arabia to discuss the Syrian conflict, was speaking at a press conference after the death of prominent pro-government journalist Hasan Karakaya.

 

He was asked whether his plans to add executive powers to the office of president — still a nominally neutral head-of-state role — was compatible with a unitary state.

 

“Yes,” he replied. “There is nothing to say that you can’t have a presidential system in a unitary state.

 

“There are already some examples in the world today and also some from the past. You see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany. Later you see the example again in various other counties.”

 

A senior Turkish official latter tried to play down the would-be sultan’s comments, telling the Independent newspaper: “There are good and poor examples of presidential systems and the important thing is to put checks and balances in place.”

 

“Nazi Germany, lacking proper institutional arrangements, was obviously one of the most disgraceful examples in history. That’s his point.”

 

But other analogies can be made between Mr Erdogan and the nazi fuehrer.

 

He has made aggressive claims to represent all Turkic peoples — from Europe and the Middle East to China and Siberia — and has been accused of seeking to annex swathes of northern Syria to Turkey.

 

His ruling AKP party has also cracked down on dissent, jailing journalists who exposed covert aid to Islamic State in Syria, and ruthlessly suppressed the country’s Kurdish minority.

 

In April last year Mr Erdogan hit out at nations which acknowledged the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks during the first world war.

 

Earlier this week, the head of Russia’s Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov said Mr Erdogan’s personal ambitions were blocking a peace deal for Syria.

 

“Erdogan and America are saying that until Assad retires they are not even going to raise the question about stabilising the situation,” he said.

 

“So many people are suffering because of their personal ambitions, a whole country has been destroyed because of them.”