Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ruled Turkey for over 20 years. Now, there is a real chance he could be defeated in Sunday's election. A journey to disappointed supporters, companies suffering under the beleaguered economy – and to the man who could oust the…
The waterfront district of Kasımpaşa in Istanbul has hardly changed a bit since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used to sell sesame rings here half a century ago. Austere residential high-rises are lined up, one after the other, laundry hanging out to dry from the balconies. Most of the women on the street wear headscarves, and the men kill time in the tea houses playing backgammon.The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 19/2023 of DER SPIEGEL.
Erdoğan has been at the helm in Turkey for more than 20 years, first as prime minister and then, since 2014, as president. He has shaped the country to a greater degree than any politician since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern-day Turkey. Now, though, for the first time, his re-election is not a forgone conclusion. Most polls show him trailing opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
İlknur Emine Demirbaş lost everything when the building where she lived collapsed in the February 6 earthquake. Everything is gone, she says: furniture, dishes, jewelry. She was only able to save her three parakeets from the rubble. Erdoğan promised to govern efficiently when he introduced the presidential system following a referendum in 2017. But the earthquake has now revealed the weaknesses of the one-man state. Experts are convinced that one reason for the huge number of casualties is that construction companies didn't follow building regulations intended to ensure that new buildings are able to withstand earthquakes. Construction companies are among the AKP's largest donors.
But his audience didn't seem particularly interested in what the president had to say. Around half of those present had left before Erdoğan made it to the end of his speech. It's a situation that has made life difficult for businessmen like Muhammed Yılmaz. The 27-year-old had big plans when he took over his father's carpentry business in the central Anatolian city of Kayseri. He wanted to modernize the company and begin selling furniture to Europe. Now, though, the machines in his workshop have fallen silent, with orders coming in at a mere trickle."I don't know how much longer I can keep going," he says.
The extreme inflation currently gripping the country is a catastrophe for business owners like Yılmaz, who depend on raw materials from abroad. For his furniture, Yılmaz buys metal from Russia and wood from Bulgaria. He now has to pay eight times as much as he did just five years ago for a panel of plywood: 1,200 lira, or the equivalent of 60 euros. Back then, he says, almost half of the sales price of a 70-lira chair was profit, once costs were subtracted.
It's an afternoon in March, and Erdemir is sitting in a café in a mall in Istanbul, a vanilla-strawberry smoothie on the table in front of her. It's Ramadan, but Erdemir isn't fasting. Her hair is dyed blond, and she's wearing jeans, lipstick and earrings. Many other people her age have had experiences similar to Erdemir's. The country is in the middle of a cultural transformation. Even as Turkey has been governed for more than two decades by the Islamic-conservative AKP, a study performed in 2018 by the public opinion pollsters at KONDA found that religious devotion in the country is falling. Whereas 55 percent of survey participants described themselves as religious in 2008, that number had fallen to 51 percent 10 years later.
Many people from the generation of Erdemir's parents and grandparents are still grateful to Erdoğan for these achievements. In their view, he gave them back their dignity. And they are deeply mistrustful of the opposition, in particular Atatürk's Republican People's Party , which they view as being anti-religious.
For Erdemir and many others of her age, though, the privileges they grew up with are completely normal, and they are more likely to see the disadvantages that come with Erdoğan's regime. In Erdemir's world, Erdoğan has curtailed her rights. In 2013, for example, he violently crushed the protests in and around Gezi Park in Istanbul and, more recently, withdrew Turkey from the European convention for protecting women from violence.
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, with a small evil eye hanging from a red-and-white band on his slender wrist. A good-luck charm. He skips the small talk:"Let's get started," he says. During our interview, which lasts just short of an hour, he won't even lean back into his chair a single time."We no longer want to be a third-class democracy," he says.
Kılıçdaroğlu managed to anger many in the Turkish opposition in 2016, when he convinced the CHP to agree to lifting the immunity of parliamentarians. Many of his party allies also thought this concession to the government was a mistake, and it led to dozens of investigations being launched against members of parliament, most of them members of the left-wing, pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party and of the CHP.
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