Erdoğan holds onto the East for the wrong right reasons

There were moments, I confess, when tramping the baking streets of Anatolian towns in the middle of the fasting month of Ramadan when I wished I had been wearing my ruby slippers. I was participating in one of the P24 sponsored presidential campaign tours – an attempt to find out how the country is going to vote on 10 August and why. Dorothy managed to get herself back to Kansas by, reciting the mantra “there’s no place like home” and the further we roamed into the electoral hinterland from Malatya to Tunceli to Elazığ, I too began click my heels and recite “there are nothing like home truths.”
 
The “home truth” I had already packed in my bag is that the election matters.  In a week Turkey will vote and it is clear that the most likely victor, Tayyip Erdogan, intends to use this legitimation to increase still further the considerable powers he now enjoys as prime minister. A strong showing by his opponents will put that project at risk. It will weaken the new president’s grip over the Justice and Development Party (AKP) he leaves behind and make it less likely that a forthcoming general election will produce a large enough majority to allow him to orchestrate changes in the constitution.
 
So what is to be learned in a city like Malatya? This is AKP country. It won the municipality at the 30 March local elections with over 61% of the poll.  That ballot was regarded as a referendum on the Erdogan era and more specifically whether the electorate were prepared to overlook evidence that both the prime minister’s family and political inner circle were massively corrupt. The actual campaign was devoted in large measure to discrediting the motives of those behind the police investigation. The government’s subsequent success in its own heartland has been a strong indicator that this strategy has worked.
 
The long and the short is that no one in Malatya expects Erdogan to do less well now in a presidential race. The question remains how he manages such a comfortable lead.
 
The answer is more complicated than I supposed.
 
The hospital is shiny but don’t get sick
 
Malatya is, of course, a conservative place, a centre of Anatolian capital and just the sort of city where the AK Party “miracle” of ten years of not uninterrupted but relatively steady growth would seem to pay political dividends. There is a gleaming new state hospital, emblematic of the claim that however much the liberals moan about Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions to run Turkey in Putin-esque style, he has the people’s real concerns at heart.
 
So the assumption is that as long as people feel better off, they will not take a chance of a candidate they really don’t know. Enver Kiraz, the local head of the opposition party confesses that even he hadn’t heard of Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, the candidate his Republican People’s Party (CHP) endorses. “I was in a state of shock,” he says but adds that the more he gets to know him, the wiser he thinks the choice. Even then, there is no picture of İhsanoğlu on the Malatya CHP website.
 
Yet that assumption that Malatya is voting with its wallet is not entirely correct. By cruel coincidence, the 30 March ushered in a grim period. This has nothing to do with election and everything to do with the weather. The date marked the start of three days of freakish cold and hail. This destroyed the flowers on the boughs of the apricot trees, the crop on which the city depends.
 
The result, according to local dried apricot producers, is that 95% of the crop was destroyed. A normal year would produce 100-120,000 tons of the fruit. This year it was down to 8,000 tons. The price of the fruit skyrocketed which means that those farmers whose crop survived were compensated in part. However the food processing industry is responsible for 80% of the city’s economy so pretty much everyone is affected.  The notion that there might be an economic crisis which could obliterate AKP support as it did its predecessors in 2001 has to be tempered by the fact that in Malatya and elsewhere that crisis is already knocking at the door.
 
Local people say the government was slow to respond. And the complaints don’t stop at the agricultural policy. However glamorous the mirrored façade of the new hospital looks from afar, the advice one hears is “it is best not to get sick.”  In Malatya local journalists moan that the government simply takes the city’s support for granted. Ankara feels it can get away with brushing a few crumbs from its table.
 
These complaints are even louder in nearby Elazğ where the AKP did almost as well last March.  Yes, the government has built highways but is deaf to the demand that they link up the road going out of town to the one going in. When the prime minister campaigned that there were direct flights to and from Elazığ from all corners of Turkey, it was a claim that was palpably not true.
 
The issues at stake
 
Nor are opinion makers deaf to the issues at state. Even the conservative commentators in these cities realise that at stake is the whole tenure of Turkish public administration. What the government describes as AK Party’s vision of a prosperous Turkey is being pithed against what the opposition describes as a slide into one man rule. A vote for the scholarly Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu is clearly not one for the expansion of presidential powers but the consolidation of that office as an above-party, formal head of state.
 
Power breeds power and in the Malatya Chamber of Commerce as elsewhere one hears honest cynicism that if Erdoğan is going to win, why vote for someone else.  The same pragmatic attitude applies elsewhere. Yes, what is happening in Gaza is terrible but that is no reason to stop trading with Israel. Business and grand posturing don’t mix.
 
An often-heard remark is that the older and prosperous residents of these cities flee as soon they can. People even speak of neighbourhood peer pressure. That is an expression that has gained currency to account for more of an outward show of conservative piety. Here, it can take the form of resentment against those who actually benefit from the AKP prosperity.
 
The complaint one used to hear in Istanbul, that the urban fabric has been torn by wave after wave of in-migration, one now hears in these cities  in the East. There is even an association for Malatyans born in Malatya – and it draws from a pool of what  is only a quarter of the city’s population.
 
If the opposition to Erdogan is weak, it is on account an enormous demographic shift. In-migrants, including previous generation of Kurdish villagers displaced by conflict and government policies swell the urban population. These new comers are very much dependent on the local grace and favour of the authorities, be it fuel in the winter, a Ramadan package of food or access to medical care in that new hospital. Discussion over the constitutional role of the president is a luxury that they dare not afford.
 
I begin to suspect that the well from which Erdoğan draws support in Malatya or Elazığ is not so much the enthusiasm of the newly prosperous, but the insecurity of those, locked into a newly formed urban network and living on the edge. It might, I speculate, provide a key to the underlying antagonism between the prime minister and the Gülen movement. The latter advertises itself, with its emphasis on education and tutorial colleges, as a ladder of social mobility.
 
There is a statue in Malatya of İsmet İnönü, one of the town’s most famous sons, Turkey’s second president and, in the immediate post-War period, the leader (like Erdoğan) of an all-powerful party – albeit the CHP.  Now the tides of history have reversed and the CHP does well to return a single MP. However,  it is not just the political opposition that is weak but also dissent within the governing party.
 
As I listen to all this, I am reminded that Turkey is in the classic middle income trap, that while it is possible to raise people’s standard of living from relative poverty, it is a much more difficult task to bring people to the next plateau. This requires investment in human resources and in an economy that can withstand a three-day patch of bad weather. Erdoğan may win the battle but like every war it will produce refugees. In this case those who flee are the brightest and the best, and like the flights from the airport, their destination will be Istanbul. 

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