Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Erdoğan’s people were determined to keep a grip on us as we covered the election. On a Saturday afternoon in late May, halfway through campaigning, the foreign press corps was called to the Hilton Hotel in Istanbul for a meeting with Mehmet Akarca, the head of the press ministry. Over more than two hours Akarca, a former journalist with state television, accused us of launching a ‘perception operation’ against Erdoğan, and begged us not to call him a dictator until after the elections. ‘Would you call Angela Merkel an alcoholic if you saw her with one drink?’ he said. ‘Then why are you calling our president a dictator!’

  Things weren’t always like this. Not so long ago, you could talk about almost anything with almost anyone in Turkey. Interviewees would proudly tell a journalist their full name, occupation and where they lived as they cascaded their opinions, and make sure you noted them all down correctly. Of course there were limits, Atatürk being one and the Kurdish issue another – it was always easy to slip up when discussing both subjects. But on the whole I had found Turkey refreshing at first, after the smog of noms-de-guerre, pseudonyms and suspicion I’d had to deal with in Syria, by-products of forty years under dictatorship and an inherited fear of the system. But then Turkey changed, starting around the time Erdoğan first became president in 2014, accelerating through the breakdown of the PKK peace process and becoming entrenched right after the coup attempt. Now most Turks will only talk anonymously, giving their first name but not their last, or else refusing to speak at all. Those who support Erdoğan might be happy to say so, but their suspicion of foreigners – and particularly of foreign journalists – mirrors the deepening paranoia of their leader. At some point an epiphany hit me. I had come to Turkey in 2013 thinking I would bear witness to the fall of one dictatorship. Now I was watching the rise of another.

  No matter the shift in Erdoğan’s demeanour or the depth of his political descent, those who were once close to him still speak with overtones of loyalty.

  ‘If you lived his life for twenty-four hours a day, in three days you would be a dictator – all these people around you treating you like a god and saying yes to everything,’ one of his closest former advisers, an ally of his since the late 1980s, told me during the 2018 election campaign. ‘I see that the illness of power has now reached him. I’m often angry with him – there is not a week goes by when I don’t try to help him. If I see him in a good mood, he is the same guy as he has always been. Then it falls apart. This is the curse of being too successful – I also see it with CEOs. They start to make mistakes because they think they know better. Now Erdoğan is surrounded by these young guys who had no successes in life before, and therefore they look at him like a god. They never dare to say no to him. The main question is whether he realises that he does not have good people around him.’

  The charismatic rebel had started to look old and out of touch. It was not only the shrinking of his inner circle that had shifted the gears of his politicking: without Erol Olçok’s polish, his shine had come off. Olçok’s spin agency Arter was dropped by the AKP just before the 2018 elections and the new team had none of Olçok’s old magic. There were plenty of slogans – ‘A big Turkey needs a strong leader!’ ‘It’s Turkey’s time!’ – but nothing about the future. At his rallies Erdoğan simply talked about all he had done, and blamed Turkey’s mounting problems on shadowy foreign lobbies.

  ‘There is no strategy. No perspective about the future. In political campaigns, you should enrich the policies with fresh perspectives and content. I couldn’t find that in their latest campaign,’ Atılgan Bayar, the AKP’s strategic adviser between 2010 and 2015, told me. ‘The Turkish nation needs to tend to its wounds. The campaign needed to assert a more positive and peaceful discourse. They didn’t understand that. Surely this amateur campaign will affect the results. Political campaigns are like organic bodies. They evolve as you are working on them. And all the elements – films, slogans and music – harmoniously come together around a predefined strategy; there’s no room for discord or wild cards. In a sense, campaigns are like sentences. Their campaign has elements of a sentence but with no syntax or coherence, and therefore no tangible meaning.’

  As Erdoğan stumbled, Muharrem İnce, the man who couldn’t even win control of the CHP, seized the bait. İnce ran a storming campaign, outstripping everyone’s expectations including mine. After six years of watching them flail and bumble, I had written the opposition off as irrelevant and irredeemable, a fading snapshot of old Turkey. But three days before the election, a millions-strong crowd filled a rally ground to see İnce speak, the mass of fluttering Turkish flags turning the huge area into a blanket of red. In the heat and humidity of an İzmir summer evening, the mass sang and shouted slogans, roaring in glee each time the MC mentioned the main act’s name.

  This was İnce’s 105th rally in forty-nine days, each one bigger and more enthusiastic than the last. He had been virtually blacked out from state television network TRT, Erdoğan getting 181 hours of coverage during the campaign, İnce just 15. Most of the other channels, owned by Erdoğan’s allies, ignored him altogether. But on social media İnce was a hit. His witty put-downs of the president won him respect and adoration. Erdoğan’s media army tried to hit back by unearthing some poetry that İnce had published decades ago, cringeworthy soft-erotica that they claimed indecent. İnce merely laughed. ‘What can I do if you have never fallen in love?’ he replied.

  Professionals, students and families gathered in İzmir to hear İnce speak as the campaigning reached its climax. ‘He is going to win it! If the other guys don’t fake it, of course …’ said Nuran Oğuz, a schoolteacher who had come along with her two colleagues.

  The stage had been set up in a park that runs along the seafront, and an estimated two million people flooded the areas before and behind it as well as all the streets and alleyways around. Every balcony overlooking the stage was crammed with people waving Turkish flags, and the special forces cops on the rooftops were joined by crowds of İnce’s supporters. In the bay, boats hoisted sails decorated with images of Atatürk, and from the speakers the İzmir March boomed out on repeat.

  İnce arrived on his bus in the sticky heat of the late afternoon, just as the sun was setting and the crowd worked up to fever pitch. He strode on stage hand-in-hand with his glamorous blonde wife, Ülkü, and launched into a blazing hour-long speech. ‘Erdoğan is tired, arrogant and lonely. He is a man without dreams!’ he laughed. The crowd roared in hysterics along with him.

  Anyone who does not know the Turkish language might have thought from their onstage voices that Erdoğan and İnce were the same man. This rival adopted the president’s oratory style exactly – the shouting, the key words drawn out for emphasis, the laughs at the expense of his opponent. His media team sliced clips of Erdoğan with performances by the classic Turkish comedy actor Kemal Sunal, whose best-known character is an Ottoman idiot, and beamed them onto the big screens. In the crowd people held aloft witty signs: TEACHER, TAYYIP IS TALKING TOO MUCH!

  At last, the opposition had a living candidate whose face they could slap onto their merchandise. The hawkers said they had never seen such demand. ‘I can’t find İnce stuff from the producers any more, I have to go to the black market!’ a trader called Serdar told me as he showed off his scarves, printed with İnce’s picture at one end, Atatürk’s at the other, and EVERYBODY’S PRESIDENT written in between the two.

  It was easy to get swept up in this tide of hope – after all, it had been sixteen years since the opposition last seemed in the ascendant. İnce looked to have seized the political narrative. When he pledged to lift the state of emergency if he won, Erdoğan was backed into a corner and responded that he, too, would review the emergency law. Pollsters predicted that Erdoğan would fall below 50 per cent in the first round of the elections and be forced into a second-round run-off against İnce. And many Turks believed that if that happened, İnce could build enough momentum to take the presidency.

  Meral Akşener and Temel Kara
mollaoğlu said that they would throw their weight behind İnce should the vote go to a second round. There was a chance that followers of Selahattin Demirtaş, the Kurdish HDP leader, would do the same – İnce visited him in prison, breaking the decades-old animosity between the Kemalists and the Kurds, and held a rally in Diyarbakır. Finally, after sixteen years, the opposition found something that they could agree on – that whatever their differences, Erdoğan must go.

  But there were warning signs in İzmir on that midsummer night, even if the opposition did not want to see them. The crowd – like the ones in Ankara and Istanbul that would gather over the following two days – was millions strong but showed only one side of Turkey. I counted just a handful of women wearing headscarves, and the crowd’s slogans and the way they packed into İzmir’s seafront bars for beers once the rally was over left little doubt as to whose tribe they belonged.

  I asked Serdar the street hawker when he would be getting in some more İnce merchandise. He told me the producers were hedging their bets. ‘If the election goes to a second round then they will make a lot more,’ he said. ‘But they have to produce in big quantities, and there are only two days left, you know …’

  Defeat

  At the CHP’s Istanbul headquarters, election night began with high promise. İnce, having witnessed some of the first counts, tweeted that the news looked good. But when preliminary results started coming in the optimism withered like a punctured balloon. İnce, meanwhile, had disappeared. He had pledged to stay at the higher board of elections all evening to make sure the count was fair, but after casting his vote in his home province of Yalova he flew to Ankara and holed up in his hotel, presumably watching his defeat unfold.

  It was Bülent Tezcan, the CHP’s spokesman, who stood in front of the television cameras as Erdoğan declared early victory and his supporters thronged to the streets. As the sound of car horns and chanting filled the city centres, Tezcan tried to hold back the tide. ‘We are following the count step by step and at no time did Mr Erdoğan’s vote go above forty-eight per cent,’ he said. ‘This is open manipulation but the result is certain – Erdoğan will lose. We are asking people not to leave the ballot boxes. They want the election observers to stay at home so they can do their tricks.’

  The state-controlled Anadolu Agency is the only news wire given access to the polling booths where the votes are first counted. It has a habit of announcing the figures from the staunchest pro-Erdoğan constituencies first, to make it seem as though he is storming to victory – on referendum night the results for Evet had started at 70 per cent before shrinking back to just over 51 per cent. Mehmet Akarca, the head of the press ministry, had implored us to go to a government-run press centre on election night, so we could take Anadolu’s earliest results. The CHP was insisting that their own polling station tallies did not match with Anadolu’s.

  But Tezcan’s words were lost in the racket – as far as the people waving flags were concerned, victory was already a done deal. Just after midnight, Fox News Turk, the last of six main Turkish television channels operating independently, reported that it had received a WhatsApp message from Muharrem İnce, who had still not been seen since counting started. İnce had admitted defeat, the Fox journalist, İsmail Küçükkaya, said. The atmosphere in the CHP’s office became chill. On Twitter, the jokes started flying straight away. ‘İnce literally just split up with his supporters by WhatsApp!’ wrote one. Others insisted it must be a con on the part of the government, or that İnce must have been threatened. How could the man who had raised the hopes of half a nation and spoken in front of millions over the past three days have ended it all like this?

  Within minutes Bülent Tezcan was back in front of the cameras, his demeanour flattened and distress clear. ‘The turnout was very high. We are thanking all the voters,’ he stated. ‘We said that we will defend the law and ensure that what goes into the ballot box is the same as the result that comes out. Our friends are still waiting and the counting continues. But our figures are matching with those of Anadolu Agency. Be peaceful, be careful of provocations. Democracy is working and whatever the result, we will continue with our democratic fight.’

  It was over, and everyone knew it. Erdoğan had won, and there would be no second round. Turkey would continue on Tayyip’s path, reshaped to his liking and with a resounding restatement of his people’s will. The nation had spoken, and they had said they wanted more of the same – no matter how authoritarian their leader, no matter how unfairly he had run his campaign, and no matter the 47 per cent who did not vote for this. Everyone started filing out of the CHP’s offices.

  Me too. I walked out into the deserted street and started searching for a taxi to take me back across the Bosphorus to Kadıköy. I knew no protests would take place there this time, as there were after Erdoğan’s referendum victory. This time the defeat was too crushing, too final. Erdoğan had apparently increased his share of the vote since the last presidential elections in 2014. The opposition had bowed out with a disgraceful whimper. Over the coming days, international election monitors would raise serious questions over the fairness of the campaigning period and reports would emerge of ballot box tampering in the east. None slowed Erdoğan even for a minute as he soared on his self-declared victory.

  My street was silent and empty as I buzzed open the heavy front door of my apartment building. But, looking out across the road from my window, I saw all my neighbours still awake, gathered around their television sets and smoking as they had on the night of the coup. All the channels were showing the scenes outside the AKP’s Ankara headquarters, where huge crowds had gathered to see Erdoğan speak. From the balcony he delivered the speech of his political lifetime, scorning his enemies at home and abroad and vowing to speed up Turkey’s transformation.

  ‘The winner of this election is democracy,’ he boomed. ‘The winner is the superiority of the national will. The winner is Turkey and the Turkish nation. The winner is all the oppressed in our region and across the world!’

  The crowd thundered its approval. Flags waved for the television cameras swooping overhead. Erdoğan promised to keep on fighting all who stood against him and his people.

  ‘We will not stop! We will not stop! We will never stop!’

  Outside, I heard a distant din of car horns, growing louder as they came closer. As I peered out the window the convoy swung into my street, a long chain of cars flying Erdoğan flags and star and crescent banners from their roofs. His anthem blared from their stereos, and a young woman in a colourful modern headscarf hung out of a window and wailed at this Turkey, the old Turkey, the heartland of the 47 per cent. I saw her face as the convoy passed beneath my window; it was caught between ecstasy and fury.

  ‘RECEP TAYYIP ERDOĞANNNNNNNN!’ she screamed.

  June 2018

  Travelling the Eastern Express

  A week after Erdoğan’s election win I take a train ride across the breadth of Turkey. The Eastern Express runs from Ankara to Kars, the last city before the Armenian border. It takes twenty-four hours to cover the 700 miles between the two cities.

  The route has recently become a hit with Turkish hipsters. The winter journeys through snow-locked Anatolia are picture perfect, like Narnia; the glistening vistas through windows branded with a kitsch star and crescent custom-made for Instagram. Thousands of young Turks from the wealthy and liberal west used the train to travel to the other end of their country for the first time over the most recent winter, hanging out of the open carriage doors to smoke cigarettes and feel the cold air slap their faces. But now, in the humid dog days of late June, the train has sunk back into its old unglamorous role – the workhorse carting Turks who can’t afford plane travel from one end of the country to the other.

  The towns the train stops in are the least alluring parts of Turkey, even though the scenery in between is stunning. Kayseri … Elazig … Erzincan … Erzurum … The carriages pull into one identikit city after another, shanty-houses next to the train tracks
and dingy new apartment blocks behind them. Old women in shawls haul huge bags onto the train. Ragged children hurl rocks at it as it pulls out of the station again. Litter blankets the ground on either side of the tracks, and I can see little evidence here of the huge investment and modernisation that has swept across Istanbul and other cities to the west, or even the cities on the border with Syria, with their cosmopolitan new populations of refugees, diplomats and aid workers. The way young mothers line up with their small children to watch the train go past suggests there is little else new or exciting here – they have so far gained the least out of the New Turkey. But these are the places where Erdoğan’s support is unshakeable: in the ramshackle villages the train line cuts through, huge posters of him are hoisted on the houses closest to the tracks.

  I travelled to Kayseri two months ago, to see Erdoğan’s first rally of the election campaign. That time I, like him, travelled there through the city’s airport – a far more glamorous entrance than the railway station. I had happened to time my journey just right: my low-cost flight back to Istanbul left at almost exactly the same time as Erdoğan’s private jet, and my taxi home from the airport at the other end trailed just behind his motorcade for a short stretch. He had been whisked to his jet from the town square rally on blacked-out buses with special forces soldiers balanced on the top, down roads closed to allow the convoy to pass through speedily.

  ‘With love and respect, Kayseri!’ boomed the bus’s loudspeaker as it tore down the main street away from the rally, the soldiers training their assault rifles across pavements packed with Saturday shoppers.

  ‘Have you ever read 1984?’ I asked my Turkish friend, as we sipped coffee and watched the spectacle roll past.

  ‘Dear, I’m living in 1984,’ he replied, spluttering with laughter.