Erdogan’s Most Faithful Followers Reconsider Loyalties as Turkey Election Looms

Selcan Hacaoglu and Firat Kozok
·8 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- For years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was politically untouchable in Turkey’s religious and largely rural southeast, winning two-thirds of the ballots cast here in the 2018 election. Drawing on his roots in an Islamic political movement, Erdogan gave voice — and cheap loans — to the region’s “pious generation,” an underclass of Islamic conservatives who offered him support in exchange for a path to prosperity.

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Then, on Feb. 6, two massive earthquakes devastated the southeast, killing more than 50,000 people and prompting an estimated 3.5 million more to flee. As scenes of leveled apartment buildings and people screaming for government help dominated screens, Erdogan’s government struggled to respond to the tragedy.

With less than three weeks to go before voters head to the polls for Turkey’s next national election, the absence of a strong disaster relief response — set against a backdrop of skyrocketing food and rental prices across the country — has left Erdogan facing the tightest electoral race in his three-decade-long career. For the first time, there’s a realistic chance he could lose the popular vote, or his majority in parliament.

Read More: Turkish Anger Turns to Erdogan Over Quake Delays, Weak Buildings

The Turkish leader has been running an aggressive campaign, which he said caused an upset stomach during a live TV interview late Tuesday. While the interview was cut short after Erdogan unexpectedly became ill on air, his spokesman later said the president is in good health. In a Twitter post, Erdogan said he would cancel his planned events on Wednesday and stay home on the advice of his doctors.

A three-day road trip along a 500-kilometer highway that traverses the quake zone found contempt brewing among even the president’s most faithful followers. As construction machines remove rubble from city centers, residents who lost loved ones, homes and businesses are still fuming about the government’s delay in addressing what Erdogan described as the “disaster of the century.”

Green wheat fields run along the road into the 1.2 million-person province of Kahramanmaras, a sleepy agricultural region best known for its chewy goat milk ice-cream. Since her home here was destroyed in the quakes, Yuksel Uzungunder has been living in a tent on the industrial outskirts of the city with her five children.

Despite being a longtime supporter of Erdogan and his AKP party, Uzungunder says she feels as if her president has abandoned her. Not only did the government struggle to collect and dispatch much-needed tents, blankets and heaters during icy winter weather, when the reinforcements did finally arrive, they were haphazardly distributed. Uzungunder received blankets and a stove after waiting for days, but she believes the Erdogan-aligned mayor played favorites in handing out aid.

“I will vote neither for Erdogan nor his AK Party” in the May 14 election, she asserted. “My entire family used to support them. I now want a new government that will respect us.”

Many others share her anger. While the president has blamed the state’s inadequate response on the unexpected intensity of the 7.8 and 7.6 magnitude shocks, critics have put the onus on him. They claim Erdogan failed to fix a corrupt system which oversees building and construction safety, and that he staffed Turkish relief agencies with incompetent bureaucrats.

This aspect of the disaster can be traced back to the beginning of Erdogan’s time in office. Since rising to power in the wake of a 1999 earthquake that killed more than 17,000 people and triggered a financial crisis, Erdogan has used the construction sector as a way to grow both Turkey’s economy and his own political base.

Read More: Erdogan Loses Key Cities as Turkey Feels Recession’s Sting

Through cheap loans, Erdogan has been credited with bringing China-style growth to regions like Kahramanmaras — money that helped small businesses rocket to profitability, and created a welcome sense of political stability.

Yet in the aftermath of the most recent quakes, that strategy has unraveled. Not only were many of the buildings completed under Erdogan’s watch found to be poorly made, pumping money into construction has not been able to keep the country’s once-vibrant economy growing.

Inflation has run wild in Turkey since 2018, when Erdogan named his son-in-law Berat Albayrak as economy czar. Albayrak’s mostly-futile efforts to control the value of the Turkish lira while avoiding interest rate hikes have resulted in price surges that have steadily eaten into consumer purchasing power and devastated the economy.

Even as inflation hit a high of 85.5% last year — breaching 100% in cities including Istanbul — Erdogan, in defiance of economic orthodoxy, pressured the central bank to keep cutting interest rates.

That, along with his ongoing efforts to muzzle critics and assert control over the country’s judicial system, have prompted many voters to reconsider their loyalties.

It wasn’t the economy that did it for him, said 39-year-old Mahmut Ordu, who runs a fertilizer shop in the southwest province of Adiyaman. After all, he observed, soaring fuel, pesticide and chemical prices have put pressure on farmers for years.

Instead, said Ordu, who added that he always voted for Erdogan in the past, it was the earthquake that made him stop and consider whether the dysfunctional state response was part of a larger picture.

“The government failed to deliver aid to all corners of the quake zone. But I am more critical of the one man trying to secure power,” said Ordu from his shop in the town of Araban. “Enough is enough. It is not right for one man to make all decisions without any oversight.”

Concerns about authoritarian drift have been growing in Turkey since at least 2013, when Erdogan curbed free speech and directed police to suppress anti-government protests. Then, in 2016, a failed coup attempt triggered a constitutional overhaul and a 2017 referendum that enabled Erdogan to consolidate his one-man rule.

Turkish Quakes Complicate Road to Elections: Balance of Power

If the opposition were to win power, they say that one of their first moves would be to reverse the referendum.

In the center of Adiyaman, another hard-hit city next to Kahramanmaras, restaurant owner Abdurrahman Karaoglu shared the concern that Erdogan had transformed Turkey’s once-ceremonial presidency into a nexus of power.

Yet it was the economy that finally turned him against the president. “My anger over the delay in sending quake aid is fizzling out, but I am very critical of the management of the economy,” he said. Skyrocketing meat and vegetable costs had already cut into profits, he complained, and his customers couldn’t afford to pay higher prices.

As he prepared to reopen his restaurant for the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, Karaoglu said he was relying on family members to work as wait-staff. Gazing at a collapsed building across the street from his restaurant, he noted that his employees who hadn’t died in the tragedy had chosen to migrate.

“The recovery depends on support from the government,” said Hanefi Oksuz. “Around 40% of the city’s population has left.”

Oksuz, whose Kipas Holding employs about 14,000 workers in paper, cement and textile factories in Kahramanmaras, lost around 100 factory workers and their family members in the earthquakes, and hundreds more to subsequent migration.

To get the region back on its feet, Oksuz said, “there is a need for cheap and long-term loans to factories and tax breaks in order to pay higher salaries to convince workers to come back.”

Despite his dissatisfaction, Oksuz plans to vote for the man he always has — Erdogan.

The president has a major edge in this region, where dissidents and swing voters still make up a minority of the electorate. The AKP has come out on top of every election here since Erdogan began dominating Turkish politics two decades ago.

With the May 14 election just weeks away, the six opposition parties have been loudly trumpeting the almost daily price hikes and campaigned on a promise to return to more orthodox economic policies.

While they stand a better chance at beating Erdogan in a popular vote than anybody in the past two decades, most polls and analysts are doubtful that this will happen. The big question, then, is not whether Erdogan will lose outright, but whether he’ll lose enough support to tip the parliamentary balance in favor of rival candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

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If Erdogan wins the presidency but loses a parliamentary majority, he could try to woo a nationalist party within the opposition bloc, or run the country through presidential decrees. While the executive power he has accumulated will ensure that Erdogan remains a powerful leader, tensions with parliament could create instability and aggravate Turkey’s already-jittery markets.

Whatever happens, the result will hinge in part new voter turnout. Of the 61 million eligible voters in Turkey, over 5 million may cast a ballot for the first time. Serap Dogan, a 21-year-old secretary in southeastern city of Sanliurfa, where recent flash floods added to the misery of residents still recovering from the earthquakes, is among them.

Dogan, who was raised in a conservative religious family, was excited about participating in an election that could possibly change her life for the better.

“Erdogan has been the country’s leader since I was born,” Dogan reflected as she walked along mud-covered streets on her way to work. “I want to live in a more free and just atmosphere,” she said. “My logic says Erdogan, but my heart says Kilicdaroglu.”

(Updated to include mention of Erdogan’s illness in fourth graf.)

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