How the earthquake zone voter absence could affect Türkiye’s elections

Charter buses criss-cross Türkiye. Free fuel. Tents to spend the night for those who have no home left.

Turkey’s major political parties are preparing for an election mission like no other this weekend: helping a million people who fled after February’s devastating earthquake return to their devastated towns, find their local school buildings, and vote.

Polls suggest that this number of voters could be an important force in Turkey’s most closely contested election race – and ensuing – in a generation, pitting Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s leader for two decades, against Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who represents an opposition coalition. . The earthquake covers 11 provinces that produced sharply mixed results in the previous presidential elections.

The desperate situation and massive logistical challenge have heightened long-standing concerns about the integrity of Turkey’s elections after the slide towards authoritarianism under Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP).

In the quake-hit city of Antakya, capital of the southern province of Hatay, Servet Mullaoglu, a candidate for the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), said his team had received thousands of phone calls and social media messages from people seeking to return. In order to vote in the only way possible under Turkish law.

He said the party would pay for bus tickets and fuel, look for tent accommodations, arrange cars and hire buses to bring back survivors. “we will [also] Meloglu said, speaking with an office wall behind him that was cracked from top to bottom by the February earthquake.

An aerial view shows the historic center of Antakya after the February earthquake © Umit Bektas / Reuters

The numbers affected are huge: nearly a sixth of all voters in Turkey live in the quake zone, according to a Financial Times analysis of official data. A large number have been displaced from their homes – about 3 million, according to the government – leaving some far from where they registered with the electoral authorities.

Most of these people are in container cities, dormitories or other official facilities and have a special mandate to vote where they live now. But nearly a million people still theoretically need to return to their places of origin – a significant segment of the region’s electorate.

Observers highlighted the possibility of people being denied their votes in the parliamentary and presidential elections. A delegation from the Council of Europe, which visited the quake zone last month, interviewed a range of politicians to officials and observers. They were warned about registrations and whether many of them would be able to cast ballots.

“This raised concerns about the logistical organization of the elections in the earthquake-affected areas (including polling station locations),” the Parliamentary Assembly delegation said in its report.

More than 50,000 people were killed in the strongest earthquake in Turkey in a century. Rows of badly damaged buildings lie vacant in a sprawling area of ​​central Antakya, many still strewn with furniture left behind as survivors rushed to the exits on Feb. 6.

Workers continue to remove huge piles of rubble strewn with mangled iron bars and concrete shards, while dusty roads remain difficult to traverse due to potholes and strewn debris.

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“It’s all gone,” muttered a man who was inspecting the damage last week in central Antakya, where a nearly 1,400-year-old mosque was badly damaged.

Lütvu Savaş, the mayor of Hatay Metropolitan Municipality, said he expects only 10-15 percent of the roughly 200,000 voters who left the province to return to cast their ballots.

The results from the province are important because in the 2018 elections, Erdogan defeated his main opponent by only six percentage points there.

Savasch said getting all voters home would require an “enormous effort” — estimating that in theory he would need to arrange nearly 4,000 buses for the displaced, a practically impossible solution. The fraught conditions on Earth make dealing with the smaller numbers difficult.

Because of the increasing number of people [in Antakya]”We will need additional accommodations and food distribution during Election Day, but our means are limited,” Savaş said.

Many IDPs live in informal settlements that have sprung up across the earthquake zone, for example in front of collapsed homes or buildings. Others fled to Turkish cities such as the coastal cities of Mersin and Antalya, as well as large metropolitan areas such as Istanbul and Ankara. Just 133,000 people have been registered across the entire quake zone at a new address outside their hometown, according to Turkey’s Supreme Election Board.

A boy plays among tents in a camp in Antakya © Umit Bektas / Reuters

A shopkeeper selling petty items in downtown Antakya, who had a long-running business before the earthquake, said he was worried that not many people knew about where they had to go to vote.

He said, “We don’t know anything about the elections.” “If you ask 10 people where they go to vote, only five will know.”

Perihan Agaoglu, a regional official with the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) — a pro-Kurdish group that is Turkey’s third largest political party — said she has been in regular contact with colleagues in Kilicdaroglu’s opposition coalition. The HDP is not part of the coalition, but it supports Kilicdaroglu in the presidential race. In HDP strongholds, the opposition coalition will rely on it to monitor the vote.

Ağaoğlu said that the HDP had been contributing to efforts to bring voters to Hatay several days earlier, fearing that the government or elements affiliated with the AKP would start “efforts to prevent people from voting.”

However, she felt confident that the opposition groups were well prepared logistically, and had observers, lawyers and others to ensure a fair vote.

Outside the quake zone, analysts worry about the impartiality of the Supreme Council for Elections, which has sweeping powers to overturn voting results and cannot be challenged in court.

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“We will exercise our democratic rights,” said Melaoglu of the CHP, adding that if there were any irregularities related to the election board, the demonstrations. . . And many other things will be done.

An official working in an AKP office in a small container camp, who asked not to be named, said he was worried there was “no place to accommodate people” returning home to vote.

However, he said he believes the resources provided by the Erdogan government and the AKP will be enough to bring people back to Hatay to cast their ballots.

The Avad disaster management agency said in April that it would pay travel expenses for those seeking to return to the quake zone, and would also provide buses where required. A three-month state of emergency ended this week, giving the authorities much broader powers.

The AKP volunteer said he did not think “there will be any problem” and emphasized: “Our state is doing everything it can to bring voters back to Hatay, regardless of who they vote for.”

Additional reporting by Junca Tokyol and Funja Guler

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