How Erdogan won earthquake-stricken southern Türkiye

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NORDAGI, TURKEY – Near the center of this small town in southern Turkey, a father and his sons carried the doors and windows they had smashed out of an abandoned apartment building onto a waiting truck, glass shattering under their feet. The street, which used to be lined with multi-storey buildings, is now delimited by flat pieces of rubble.

At the end of the road, there was a working gas station still standing. 18-year-old Eren Yaca participated in the elections for the first time, casting his vote for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “We are with the president,” he said, referring to Erdogan by a title from the Ottoman era, meaning the leader or commander, which the president coined for himself.

The first of two twin earthquakes to hit southern Turkey on February 6 struck less than 15 miles from Nordagi, leaving most of the city in ruins. A construction boom here over two decades, symbolic of Erdogan’s nationwide focus on development, has more than doubled its population to around 25,000. One in six people in Nordağı died in the earthquakes. More than 50,000 have been killed across the region, according to official figures. Many observers believe the real losses are much higher.

The earthquakes came at a difficult time for Erdogan, who was already preparing for his toughest election in two decades. Opinion polls suggest his grip on power is slipping, mainly due to a faltering economy and high inflation. When the scale of the disaster became apparent, and his government struggled to respond, many expected that there would be a political price to pay. But on May 14, across the quake-stricken south – a traditional stronghold of Erdogan and his ruling party, the AKP – voters stood firm in their support for him.

In the six provinces with the highest death tolls, Erdogan received an average of 63% of the vote. He lost in Hatay, which saw the worst of the destruction, but only by five percent of a point. Nationally, Erdogan won 49 percent of the vote against 45 percent for Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the Republican People’s Party and opposition alliance. The two men will face each other in a runoff on May 28, with the incumbent in a leadership position to consolidate his hold on power.

Erdogan has an advantage as run-off elections approach in Türkiye

“Erdogan is a good man,” Yaca said. “After the earthquakes, God bless him, he took good care of us.”

After Yaka’s four-story apartment building was damaged and found guilty, the government provided him with a container home that he said was equipped with an air conditioner, washing machine, and dishwasher. “Erdogan helped the victims a lot,” he added. “These are things that can be clearly seen.”

Much of the blame for the scale of the destruction has been placed on poor building practices, enabled in part by Erdoğan and the AKP-controlled parliament. The belated and disorganized rescue effort has been widely blamed for the worsening death toll and has raised urgent questions about the president’s hollowing out of state institutions.

But in a country as polarized as Turkey, the tragedy does not seem to have changed the political fundamentals. “The Turkish electorate is divided into two blocks that are more or less frozen,” said Murat Sommer, a professor of political science at Istanbul’s Koc University.

A pre-election poll by the Ankara Research Institute revealed a clear split along party lines: more than 90 percent of AKP voters felt the government had successfully dealt with the earthquakes; Roughly 96 percent of CHP voters felt the opposite.

It is a dynamic reinforced by the state’s near-total control over the media, according to Gonul Tol, director of the Turkey program at the Middle East Institute: “In polarized societies, and especially in authoritarian regimes, where there is limited access to information, facts can tell.

Located about an hour north of Nordağı, Kahramanmaras is a city of more than half a million people that was among the hardest hit in the disaster zone. Mehmet, the 57-year-old hardware technician who voted for Erdogan and the AKP, pointed to a tented camp where he was staying with his wife, and to local businesses that had started operating from a row of small prefabricated houses nearby. “What else can they do?” He said.

Like others in this city, Muhammad spoke on condition that he be identified by his first name or not at all, fearing repercussions for speaking out about politics.

A new threat is rising in quake-hit Türkiye: mountains of rubble

It sat on a short wall near the municipal government building, down the road from an outdoor sports field that housed tents for several weeks before it too was demolished. Erdogan visited the city on February 8, two days after the earthquakes, and in a speech at the stadium acknowledged the country’s slow response and called for unity. “This was very important,” said a 35-year-old construction worker in Kahramanmaras. “He didn’t leave us here alone.”

The Turkish Disaster Management Agency estimates that nearly two million people have migrated far from the quake zone. The survivors had until April 2 to register to vote in their new district, but only 133,000 have done so, according to Turkey’s Supreme Election Board. Everyone who wanted to vote had to return to the regions they had left, some at their own expense, others funded by political organizations or private donations.

It is not yet known how many people managed to make these trips. While voter turnout totaled 89 percent in the first round of the election, turnout in much of the disaster area was lower, in some counties by five or six percentage points. Bulent Ok, an official in the local government run by the CHP, said turnout in Hatay fell to 83 percent, although that was much higher than expected.

Here Erdogan proved more political flexibility than his party. In the parliamentary elections to decide all 600 seats in the Turkish National Assembly, the AKP received the most votes of any party in the earthquake zone, but far fewer than it did in 2018. Support for the AKP in Kahramanmaras fell 11 percentage points . People showed their anger towards the AKP [members of parliament], not President Erdogan, said Cerin Sylvain Korkmaz, executive director of the IstanPol think tank. Despite losing 27 parliamentary seats, the AKP gained enough support to retain its coalition-based majority.

Ox, a 64-year-old retired security guard in Kahramanmaras, has criticized the AKP-led city government, particularly what he describes as a lack of leadership from the mayor. Oakes said that “the left and the right” were angry with him.

“People here are just used to voting for the AKP without thinking about it,” he added. “After that, it will be difficult for the party to stay in power.” He was selling household items from his car on the side of the road south of the old stadium. The lot behind him, once the site of an eight-story apartment building, has been transformed into a container garden. He declined to say who voted.

Some of those who voted for Erdogan spoke of him as an old friend. “He understands us in every way, and he knows us in every way,” said Mohammed, the hardware technician. “We know who our boss is.”

In times of disaster and uncertainty, Toole said, “people just want a firm leader.”

After the earthquakes, while Kilicdaroglu continued to make political reform and correct the economy the cornerstone of his campaign, some voters in the earthquake zone came to believe that only Erdogan was looking for them. Toole said he came up with a plan to rebuild – to put up homes for every displaced person within a year – “even before people could dig the bodies of their loved ones out of the rubble”.

Korkmaz noted that Kilicdaroglu had a plan to recover from the earthquake as well, but “the earthquake regions could not get the opposition’s proposals” due to the state’s control over the media.

“Erdogan’s main strategy in this election was to manage perceptions, rather than offer solutions to issues,” said Korkmaz, who grew up in Malatya, another hard-hit province. For his supporters, she said, despite the prolonged economic crisis and years of rebuilding ahead, “President Erdogan is still supreme leader.”

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