If you are going to be a hypocrite, it's best to be so spectacularly hypocritical that you momentarily deprive your audience of the oxygen that would permit them to process the sheer absurdity of what you have just said. It works every time. Just ask the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the proud recipient of quite probably the last Muammar al-Gaddafi International prize for human rights.

Erdoğan has spent much of this week in Germany – if you believe his version of events – imparting well-meant advice to the locals. From the German perspective, Erdoğan did a Gaddafi by effectively accusing the Germans of being racists bent on repressing the country's 3 million Turks by forcing them to speak German and preventing them from practising their religion. "No one may ignore the rights of minorities … Nobody will be able to tear us away from our culture," Erdoğan told a gathering of 11,000 Turkish emigrés in Dusseldorf. "Our children must learn German, but they must learn Turkish first," he boomed, unwittingly lending support to Angela Merkel's highly dubious assertion that multiculturalism had "utterly failed" in Germany because immigrants refused to learn the language.

It's true that it has never been much fun being a Turkish immigrant in Germany. One need only spend a few hours in the company of Merkel's own party members to see how little some attitudes have changed since the first Gastarbeiter arrived there 50 years ago. Citizenship, when given, has been granted in a niggardly fashion almost designed to make life difficult.

Yet who would want to be one of Turkey's 15 million Kurds? The limits of Turkish tolerance will become apparent to anyone brave enough to attempt to school their children first in Kurdish and then in Turkish. As for religious freedom, the Alevis (who make up nearly a fifth of the Muslim population) suffer systematic discrimination, while even the religious brotherhoods that form the core of Erdoğan's own AK party are still officially banned. As for the Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Jewish and Syriac minorities, despite the fine words of recent years, it is hard not to see them as hostages from history that no one really wants.

The good thing about Erdoğan is that somewhere deep down in his barrel chest, this former professional footballer wants to right these wrongs, or some of them anyway. His AK party has done more to address this long line of injustices than any government since the foundation of the Turkish republic, even if that often has not amounted to much more than broaching what had been hitherto taboo subjects.

However, it's sometimes hard to know which Erdoğan you are dealing with. Is it the rabble-rousing populist we saw in Dusseldorf, cynically tapping the Turkish diaspora to fill his war chest for June's general election, or Erdoğan the religious Ataturk, refounder of Turkey, and herald of world peace, or Erdoğan the Karagoz, the accidental hero of the Arab street who lost his temper with Shimon Peres at Davos when Israel stitched him up as he tried to find a way to stop the attack on Gaza?

Somewhere in there, there is still an emotional, easily provoked, idealistic man from a poor migrant family in Istanbul, with all the complexes that that entails. (Abdullah Gul, now Turkey's president, used to kick him under the table to keep him in check during particularly delicate negotiations with the generals or visiting European delegations.) That is why despite his increasingly quixotic tendencies, and the rising corruption and clientelism of his own party, Erdoğan will almost certainly be elected for an unprecedented third term. By muzzling the military and freeing up the economy, he has changed Turkish politics to such a degree that Ataturk's old Republican party, which had flirted with an extreme nationalism, has elected an Alevi to run against him.

Like most Turks, Erdoğan has a very hazy notion of his country's history prior to what is called "independence", and tends to see the Ottoman empire as an uninterrupted 600-year Islamic period of progress and universal tolerance. Try telling that to the Arabs, Egyptians, Greeks and the peoples of the Balkans and the Caucasus. A lot of the naivety of Turkey's new neo-Ottoman foreign policy – a tactical turning away from Europe that is often seen as a kind of see-if-I-care huff – is in Erdoğan's own image. Turkey feels badly used by a Europe that is becoming more inward-looking and less attractive by the day, and can only manage a fraction of its own booming growth. On the basic economic criteria, it feels it has much as a right as a place at the table as Romania or Bulgaria. Yet only one of the 35 chapters of its membership negotiations have been completed since they began in 2004. Some of this is its own fault, much of it is not.

But even the most cursory reading of Turkish history will tell you its destiny is as European as Britain's. Europe is where the Ottomans raised the bulk of their taxes and their armies, and where the bulk of the Turkish elite historically came from. You only have to see the lorries full of Turkish TVs, fridges and computers queueing for miles at the Bulgarian and Greek borders to see in which direction its future lies. And Erdoğan, despite what Sarkozy, Le Pen or the pope, or even he himself occasionally says about it being an exclusive "Christian club", knows that.