Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  For the people who wave his flag, Atatürk is the man who saved Turkey from the fate of some of its unfortunate neighbours. ‘If it wasn’t for Atatürk, we would be like the Arabs!’ is a common refrain. If that sounds bigoted to a Westerner’s ears, then some time spent in the Middle East might bring you round. Travelling and working as a woman in the Arab world can be infuriating at best, scary at worst. I have been heckled, grabbed, groped, patronised and scorned during my time working in Arab countries – simply because I am a woman –though I would like to pay tribute here to my scores of male colleagues and friends in that part of the world who do not fit the stereotype, and who have often saved me from those situations. In Turkey, women seem simply to sigh inwardly at embarrassingly clichéd chat-up lines, and learn how to deal with machismo displays of jealousy and the constantly hungry stares from men. What they don’t sigh at but have to bear is the appallingly high, and apparently rising, rate of domestic violence and killings of women at the hands of their male relatives. Yet in the secular neighbourhoods of Turkey’s western cities at least, women can live almost as freely as they do in the West. I can go running, Lycra-clad, in the morning, and hit bars and clubs wearing mini-dresses at night in Istanbul. Atatürk’s admirers would credit that to him – whether that is true or not.

  Atatürk’s fan club is secular (at least politically if not always privately), relatively wealthy, educated, well-coiffed and decidedly less spiky to deal with. In short, they are almost the mirror image of the Turks who turn out for Erdoğan. During Kılıçdaroğlu’s long walk, a joke goes around that his supporters who can’t be bothered to walk alongside him are sending their drivers instead. The people who turn out to what has become known as ‘the justice rally’ look like professors, writers and engineers. There are large groups of middle-aged women who arrive on chartered coaches from faraway cities, cackling between themselves at crude jokes as they walk to the parade ground. I watch sweet old retired couples in matching JUSTICE T-shirts walking hand in hand along the corniche. These people belong to the same Turkey as the old ladies with fur coats and small dogs who live in my 1960s apartment block, clinging to their crystal tumblers of whisky, their cigarettes and all the former glamour from those heady days. There is no horror-show dental work on display here.

  ‘Aaaaaah, we’re among the beautiful people!’ says Yusuf, a Turkish photographer who is firmly of this world, even though it pains him to admit it. When I really want to needle him I call him a ‘White Turk’, the lazy label for this half of the country. It refers to the elites, the secularists, ‘those people who sit by the Bosphorus sipping on their whiskies’, as one of Erdoğan’s staunchest allies once put it, with a visceral sneer of disgust. The president is proud to represent the other half of Turkey – the poor, the religious, the marginalised. ‘Your brother Tayyip is a Black Turk!’ he once roared in a speech to his faithful. Whenever I call Yusuf a White Turk, he rolls his eyes and huffs a little. But he never denies it.

  The walk down the corniche to the Maltepe parade ground, where Kılıçdaroğlu will take the stage, has the air of a genteel Sunday stroll. The white-clad masses lick ice creams and pause for tea in the kitsch waterside cafés. There is a happy, easy hum of conversation – I pick up snippets of holiday stories, and of updates on how the children are doing at university. There is less venom here than at Erdoğan’s rallies – but also less sense of drive and direction. These people lost control of Turkey fifteen years ago, but they still wear the easy nonchalance of power. Meanwhile Erdoğan’s supporters are still full of the scrappy aggression of the underdog. Old habits are hard to give up.

  Kılıçdaroğlu, the bureaucratic grey man, has always made an easy target for ridicule. During his rallies Erdoğan plays videos showing the state of Turkey’s hospitals in the 1990s, when Kılıçdaroğlu was head of the state health department. Admittedly they were terrible back then, full of filthy wards and mind-numbingly long queues. The crowd boos whenever Kılıçdaroğlu’s face pops up on the screen. And as Kılıçdaroğlu begins his walk, Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım – a Erdoğan loyalist to the bone – mocks him.

  ‘Why don’t you use our high-speed trains?’ he baits, highlighting the sleek new rail link, one of the government’s vote-winning projects.

  But by the time Kılıçdaroğlu nears Istanbul Erdoğan is spooked. As thousands of Justice March supporters file past the neo-Soviet-style billboards for the upcoming coup commemorations it becomes embarrassing for Erdoğan: this inadequate rival, stealing his thunder? And so he starts accusing him of tacitly supporting both Gülen, the alleged ringleader of the coup attempt, and the PKK – a known terrorist organisation – through this endeavour.

  ‘Politics in the parliament has become impossible, so I’m taking it onto the streets. They can’t cope with my free spirit,’ a suntanned and fit-looking Kılıçdaroğlu tells me, back in his Ankara office five days after he has finished the march. With so few trusting the ballot box, these rally turnouts have become the new battleground.

  Each time the politicians call their legions to the streets, fierce debate breaks out over the numbers. The CHP claims two million attended Kılıçdaroğlu’s Justice Rally; the office of the Istanbul governor (a government appointee) counters, saying the real figure was 175,000.

  Meanwhile, the government’s claims for its own rallies – generally held in the purpose-built Yenikapı parade ground on the European side of Istanbul – always stretch into the millions. At the post-coup ‘Unity Rally’, they claim five million. At a pre-referendum campaign meeting, despite the large gaps in the crowd, they say one million. When I write in my report for The Times that the figure appears to have been inflated, pro-government journalists howl in protest. One accuses me of being a Zionist trying to destroy Erdoğan. The headline in the rabidly loyal newspaper Sabah screams that ‘millions’ turned out on the bridge for the coup anniversary. But even the Sabah journalist loses faith by the first paragraph, revising the figures down to ‘hundreds of thousands’.

  For perhaps the first time ever, Istanbul’s Office of the Chamber of Topographical Engineers finds itself in the position of political referee. It weighs in with a statement on the justice-rally numbers, couched in rather different language to the usual Turkish rhetoric:

  The rally area of Maltepe is approximately 275,000 square meters. Participants were also located in an area that was closed to traffic, which is around 100,000 square meters. So citizens took part in the rally over a space covering 375,000 square meters … In estimating the participant number, it is usually accepted technically that three to six people are located per meter square, so it can be stated that at least 1.5 million joined the ‘Justice Rally’. Experts say that considering the fullness of the rally area, this number could even be as high as 2 million.

  My own back-of-a-fag-packet calculations concur: the areas of the Maltepe and Yenikapı parade grounds are roughly similar, while the part of the bridge where Erdoğan’s coup commemoration was held is not large enough to hold more than 200,000.

  ‘They don’t inflate the numbers, they just make them up!’ Yusuf says, our calculations hieroglyphing pages of my notebook.

  Mehmet the street hawker doesn’t need mathematics.

  ‘I spend my life in crowds and I know the size when I look at them!’ he says. ‘There were at least three million at the Justice Rally. They were lying when they said a hundred and seventy-five thousand.’

  So, yes, Kılıçdaroğlu has boosted his image beyond anyone’s expectations. Yet over his shoulder looms the man who really called out the party faithful: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

  The rivals

  If you have ever read Daphne du Maurier you might recognise Erdoğan’s relationship with the blue-eyed blond. Just as the unnamed narrator of Rebecca obsesses over her husband’s dead first wife, it is easy to imagine how the thin-skinned Erdoğan, desperate to establish his own place in history, spends hours fretting over the continuing popularity of his biggest rival.

  Y
ou could forget that Atatürk is no longer with us. He is so present in Turkey that you might expect him to pop up at a rally, or be interviewed on TV. Like the Queen, his face is so familiar it becomes difficult to see it objectively. Right now, he is the only person who might wield more power than Erdoğan. He is definitely the only one whose picture you will see more often as you travel around Turkey. Erdoğan’s face, always twenty years younger in photos than in real life, looms large from the banners strung between apartment blocks in conservative neighbourhoods. But it is Atatürk who hogs Turkey’s limelight.

  It helps that he was photogenic – a natty dresser who instinctively understood the power of the camera at the exact moment the camera was becoming ubiquitous. Each stage of Atatürk’s career – officer, rebel, war hero, visionary – together with his transformation from conventional Ottoman gentleman to twentieth-century statesman and style icon, is represented in a series of classic images.

  Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara, can probably be classed as his fanbase HQ, but you will find miniature shrines around every corner and underneath almost every shop awning. In his earliest portraits and photographs he looks like any other stiff-backed Ottoman officer. But in later images Atatürk swims, dances and flirts with the lens, dressed in finely tailored clothes and smoking monogrammed cigarettes. There is the famous silhouette of him stalking the front lines at the Battle of Gallipoli, deep in thought with a finger on his chin and a fez on his head. There is another of him in black tie and tails dancing with his adopted daughter, sleek in her sleeveless evening gown. There is the one where he stares directly into the lens, his cigarette in one hand and the other in his pocket, a Mona Lisa smile on his lips. There he is in a nerdish knitted tank top, teaching the newly introduced Latin alphabet to a group of enthralled children. The list goes on …

  I like to try to guess the character of any individual Turk through the picture they display. Whenever I see a military Atatürk pinned up behind a counter I imagine the owner to be a patriot who looks back on his own military service with pride and warmth. If they have opted for a besuited and coiffed Kemal, I wager them to be pro-Western intellectuals. If, as in one meyhane (a traditional rakı-and-fish restaurant) close to my flat, the walls are plastered with various portraits from the start of his varied career to its end, I guess them to be full-blooded Atatürk fanatics.

  My own favourite is the picture pulsing with such life and humour that the first time I saw it, hung behind the cash register of an Istanbul bakery, I yelped in delight. It is a colour photo of Atatürk on a child’s swing, aboard a pleasure steamer on a trip to Antalya. It was taken three years before his death, and he is not a well man. His sunken bright eyes and his receding blond hair, his pallor and stout middle betray his love of drink; he would die from cirrhosis of the liver aged fifty-seven. Yet he is grinning so widely you can almost imagine him whooping as he flies. A second, less famous frame taken minutes before or after this one shows him standing on the swing with a young child peeping between his legs. This, I thought, is a personality cult I could get with – and a personality cult is what it is. Insulting Atatürk or defiling his image can still land you with a prison sentence, or at the very least the probability of a beating from the nearest Atatürk devotee. Back in 2007, under Erdoğan’s government, a court decided that all of YouTube should be blocked because it carried a few videos deemed insulting to Atatürk. The ban stayed in place for two and a half years.

  Internet censorship is still widespread, although these days insulting Erdoğan is far more likely to bring down a court order. Meanwhile, though, Atatürk’s genuine appeal burns strong. It is not unusual to see young Turks use an image of Atatürk as their Facebook profile picture, or tattoo his signature down their arm. You can buy T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and keyrings emblazoned with his face. My own collection boasts a wine carafe, an egg timer and a compact mirror. In almost every town you can find small museums dedicated to him in some way, staffed by volunteers and visited by Turks who earnestly take selfies with the Atatürk waxworks. During Gezi, the 2013 summer of riots sparked by plans to concrete over the eponymous park in Istanbul, the young protesters quickly realised that if they added an Atatürk image to the anti-Erdoğan slogans they spray-painted on the walls, the authorities would not paint them over. The council workers charged with this unenviable task decided to walk the tightrope between the two camps by painting out the slogans while fastidiously leaving the Atatürks. Though Erdoğan might dislike it, Atatürk’s cult endures. And so, Erdoğan has nurtured his own.

  Shortly before the parliamentary elections of November 2015 – a contest in which Erdoğan, by that time president, was not even running – I visited his home district of Kasımpaşa, a port neighbourhood in central Istanbul. In a backstreet shoe shop, I found Fatma Özçelik, a lively 59-year-old who had known Tayyip from childhood.

  ‘Ooooh, he was so handsome!’ she told me. ‘So tall. So handsome! Yes, he’s a bit aggressive on screen. But what can you do?’

  I asked who she would be voting for.

  ‘Tayyip!’ she replied.

  But Erdoğan isn’t on the ballot, I said. Did she mean she would be voting for the AKP?

  ‘Nope!’ she insisted. ‘Don’t like any of them! I’m telling you, the guys ruling the AKP now are terrible. They’re blaming Tayyip for all their shit.’

  I pressed on. But would she be giving her vote to Ahmet Davutoğlu, the prime minister (later purged by his boss for being too independent of spirit), knowing that it would actually be an endorsement of Erdoğan?

  ‘Nope! I don’t like that Davutoğlu, I don’t trust him. I don’t like any of them – only Tayyip! They can’t replace him. It can’t be the AKP without him.’

  She would not countenance any other option, and I never did get to the bottom of whether she would be voting or not.

  Around the corner I dropped in on Ahmet Güler, perhaps the most famous barber in Istanbul, with the country’s most famous customer. A small TV screen in a corner of his shop played live footage of Erdoğan speaking at a rally in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır. Both Ahmet and the cloaked and shaving-foamed customer in his chair had the same clipped moustaches as their hero.

  ‘We should all be proud of Erdoğan, he’s a son of Kasımpaşa!’ he told me. ‘He’s still one of us. I know him well and I don’t feel he’s changed at all.’

  He paused, thought a little, and then added a brutally honest and very Turkish appendix:

  ‘Well, OK – he’s tired and old, so he’s getting bags under his eyes. But otherwise, I have only positive things to say!’

  How does he do it, this grumpy old man in an ill-fitting suit? It is a question I have often asked myself as I travel around Turkey talking to his faithful. Usually I get the sense of a demographic who feel their time, and their man, has come. For decades Turkey’s poor, conservative voters found they could participate in democracy, as long as they did not threaten the order. When the politicians they elected looked as though they might actually change things in the way their supporters had been yearning for, the army – self-appointed guardians of Atatürk’s secularity – stepped in to overrule them.

  Yet that is only half the story. Alongside the women banned from universities and the public sector because they wear the headscarf, and the men who long yearned for a politician who prays and abstains from booze just as they do, there are others who you would never expect to support Erdoğan – yet they do. Over lunch on a waterside terrace one afternoon, a blonde, wine-drinking academic who grew up in the UK spoke openly about the things that irk her about Erdoğan. Single, secular and childless, she said she felt personally offended when the president had described women like her as incomplete, his latest in a series of bullish statements alienating anyone less pious than he is. Ultimately, though, she – like his other supporters – let him off the hook. When I asked her why the most powerful man in Turkey appeared so sensitive, so petulant and so undiplomatic, she threw back her glamorous coiffed h
ead and laughed: ‘Because he’s a Pisces.’

  What is the root of his appeal in these unexpected quarters? One secular, Western-educated journalist told me that she has two great political heroes – Erdoğan and Margaret Thatcher. She sees the same traits in both of them – a tireless work ethic, and a single-minded belief that their way of doing things is the right way, and screw all the haters. She also admires the way that both were self-made, people who had started from modest backgrounds and clawed their way to the top. Others, even if they do not admire him, can appreciate the way Erdoğan has broken the grip that the Kemalists, the devotees of Atatürk, kept on the country for decades.

  It is easy, now that they are the underdogs, to romanticise Turkey’s secularists, and to imagine that all would be right with the country if only they could seize back power. But those who remember the secular glory days know they could be as despotic as any religious regime. The dogmatic banning of headscarved women from higher education and from working in the public sector after the coup of 1980 confined millions to a life of child raising and housework – ironic, given Atatürk’s outspoken feminism. Atatürk pushed his own bizarre law banning the fez, the iconic, tasselled, brimless red felt hat ubiquitous in the later Ottoman Empire. This decision sparked a ‘Hat Revolution’ on the part of stubborn fez-wearers in the conservative eastern city of Erzurum that was crushed by Atatürk’s military, thirteen of the ringleaders being executed.