Return ticket – Turkish society, deeply divided after 20 years of Erdogan’s rule

First modification: 01/27/2023 – 22:24

Born in Istanbul to a Black Sea family, and dreaming of becoming a professional soccer player in his youth, Erdogan proved highly attractive to what are sometimes called “black Turks”: conservative voters, often religious and poorly educated, who had long felt abandoned by previous secular and Western-leaning governments. For the past 20 years, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have put them in charge of the country.

Its early years marked one of the most open periods in modern Turkish history: opening up the economy to attract foreign capital; holding direct negotiations with the Kurdish PKK (since 1984, a civil war had killed tens of thousands); and allow veiled women access to the university, the army and the civil service.

The former Islamist militant allowed annual Gay Pride parades until 2014, which then brought close to a million people to the streets of Istanbul. His country was the first to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women (informally known as the Istanbul Convention).

embracing authoritarianism

But in May 2013, protests against a plan to build a shopping mall in Istanbul’s Gezi Park marked a turning point with a violent police crackdown ordered by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Shortly after, the emergence of Kurdish groups close to the PKK in the Syrian conflict contributed to the breakdown of negotiations with the terrorist group in Turkey. In 2015, the government launched a bombing campaign in the southeast of the country.

In July 2016, following a failed coup, Erdogan declared a state of emergency. In the months that followed, tens of thousands of people were arrested and the army was purged. Officially, they were accused of supporting Fethullah Gülen, a preacher and former ally of the head of state. In reality, all those who denounced the government’s policies, particularly with regard to human rights, were attacked. In July 2021, Erdogan pulled Turkey out of the Istanbul Convention.

A divisive figure

For the president’s electoral base, these events are seen as distant echoes that have no relation to their daily lives.

“Before Erdogan, when I opened my first business, you had to give money to officials, but I didn’t know. My restaurant was slow to get the necessary permits before opening. It was a colleague of mine who told me that I had to put banknotes bench between the pages of a notebook. But once the AKP (Erdogan’s party) came to power, when I tried to hand over a notebook again, the fireman who had come to inspect the ventilation refused, and my cheeks were red from shame,” says Mehmet Ali, owner of a kebab restaurant.

Like Ali, Turkish businessmen have often seen their fortunes improve in the past 20 years and remain loyal to the president. In the election, which is scheduled for this year, 6 million new voters will cast their ballots for the first time. They were all born after Erdogan came to power.

A decisive presidential election

Although some voters benefited from the Erdogan years, others, like Erdem, lost out. The former journalist was sent to jail for publishing “state secrets” in a 2015 article. Today he is the opposition mayor of a district in Istanbul. His party, the CHP, a secular group founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, won municipal elections in all of the country’s largest cities in 2019. By forming a coalition with five other opposition parties, he hopes to end the Erdogan era in the elections scheduled for June 2023.