In Rize, governing party’s rally cry muted by local problems

In the central square of this Black Sea city, the face of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stares down from a trio of colossal election banners, larger-than life tributes to a hardscrabble region's favorite son.
 
The Turkish Prime Minister has always been a crowd favorite in Rize, where his conservative politics resonate with the city's deeply conservative base. But Erdoğan also spent his early childhood in Rize, and his popularity is bolstered here by a convictions of loyalty to city and kin.
 
“We always feel pride for our Tayyip,” explained Rize native Selda Karaarslan, who said her faith in Erdoğan remains unshaken despite a national corruption scandal, months of countrywide protests, and a stagnant national economy. “Some people are ungrateful to him. But Rize will always remain an Erdoğan fortress,” she said.
 
But with just weeks before Turks head to the polls in a round of local elections, Erdoğan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) faces a serious contender for control of the city.
 
The rival is Mehmet Bekaroğlu, a former Rize parliamentary deputy and veteran of Turkey's Islamist-right Felicity Party (SP).
 
Bekaroğlu, 63, hopes to corral the strong opposition vote of Rize's now defunct Motherland Party (ANAP), which scored 41.8 percent to AKP's 46.8 percent in Rize’s 2009 municipal poll. Despite coming from a party regarded as more extreme than AKP, Bekaroğlu's personal brand of politics is far closer to the center-right doctrine of ANAP. He is a reminder that Erdoğan is not the first prime minister Rize has spawned. Back in the 1990s the favourite son was ANAP leader, Mesut Yılmaz.
 
The AKP has taken Bekaroğlu seriously, and the opposition politician’s campaign is emerging as a city-wide test of personal loyalties.
 
“Our campaign is truly on a knife's edge,” the politician said over breakfast one overcast morning.
“The AKP is insisting I am here to personally run against Erdoğan, that this is a battle between two men,” a noticeably angered Bekaroğlu said. “This is a local election. I am not, in any circumstance, personally opposing Erdoğan.”
 
Bekaroğlu says scores of AKP supporters have harassed him at campaign rallies, where he has been accused of participating in an alleged conspiracy to overturn Erdoğan's rule. “Pack your bags, leave Rize!” the daily Radikal quoted one pro-Erodgan group as shouting at a Bekaroğlu rally in January.
 
AKP officials have joined the fray. Last month, ruling party Rize deputy Hasan Karal declared on local TV, “Bekaroğlu is disrespecting all citizens of Rize by directly opposing the prime minister.”
 
But Bekaroğlu and other opposition candidates say AKP is weak, and will lose voters to whichever party can resolve Rize's most visible problems: poor public services and a history of bungled redevelopment .
 
Getting to grips with local problems was once touted as AKP’s greatest strength. Yet a tour of Rize provides little evidence of good urban husbandry. Decrepit, 70s-era apartment blocks loom precariously over the city's narrow streets. It only takes a little bit of traffic to clog poorly  designed thoroughfares, and residents complain that a massive, raised highway cuts the city off from the sea.
 
“It's amazing how underdeveloped this city is, given that it is Erdoğan's hometown,” said Zeki Akgül, Rize's mayoral candidate from the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Akgül offers his own plan for the city in a brochure entitled “53 projects,” which imagines present-day Rize swept aside for a cartoonishly futuristic town of modern high-rises, gleaming monorails, and sprawling parks.
 
AKP's mayoral candidate Resat Kasap dismises the criticism, arguing that local affairs will take a backseat to the national question of Erdoğan's fate. “We are going to have one of the highest winning percentages of any province in Turkey. People here understand the threat to Erodgan,” Kasap said. The candidate predicts he will win around 69 percent of the vote, the number AKP secured in Rize's 2011 parliamentary elections.
 
On the street, many residents are eager to agree that the election is about more than local affairs. “We will stand by our AK Party because it needs us,” said Rize native Hande Malkoç. “We are voting for the party because it is under attack.” Erdoğan is likely to argue the same when he visits Rize on March 21.
 
But Bekaroğlu has countered by predicting that, if the current political crisis has “made half of Erdoğan's supporters more militant,” it has also raised doubts among others about the prime minister's leadership style.
 
“In the last election, there was a 55 percent vote for the opposition, in spite of any loyalty to the prime minister,” he says. “this is anybody's race.”
 
 

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