Defeat and the death of democracy wears an ashen, sickened face. On the top floor of a draughty old Istanbul building, men cluster around a small television set as a map of Turkey turns Erdoğan-yellow.
All of them smoke and few of them talk. Those that do murmur vague protest.
‘The count isn’t finished yet!’
‘Their numbers don’t match with ours!’
‘There’s still time!’ This last in a small, desperate whisper.
Hope’s dregs gurgle away as the count nears its finish. Erdoğan wins it outright, calling victory at 9.30 p.m., only four and a half hours after polling booths have closed. And that is the end of parliamentary democracy in Turkey.
As soon as it was settled it all seemed so obvious: of course Erdoğan would never lose. Every weapon in this battle had been his for the choosing: the media coverage, the resources, the power to lock up his opponents – everything he had gathered over the past fifteen years. But the outcome is no longer the real point of an election in Turkey – it is all about the journey, the show. The June 2018 elections had turned into the greatest test of his flock’s loyalty since the coup attempt: a challenger rose, Erdoğan faltered, and for the six weeks of campaigning his opponents started believing that things could change. And so, his devotees came out stronger, fought tougher, and played dirtier. And when he defied all the doubters and won it again, they lauded him more fiercely than ever. Jeopardy was not the process here but the goal – and payoff came with proof that, once again, the most skilled and practised populist in the world could rally his army and march on.
The June 2018 election campaign was a masterpiece of black comedy, timing and suspense: the opposition’s last chance to stop Erdoğan, the endgame. He knew he couldn’t wait much longer to set the last pieces of his plan in motion: the economy was stuttering, the currency weakening. Everything he had built his support on was going into reverse. Ever the gambler, Erdoğan was gambling on an opposition in shambles, and a country flying high on the jingoism of Afrin.
‘Who’s getting ready? Making preparations? Working ten hours a day? Touring the provinces? Making alliances? Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Who else is doing that? No one,’ a former member of his circle told me a month before the elections were called. ‘It is his big asset – he knows what the mood is. Aged thirteen he started giving speeches. Since then he has been dealing in politics. It is the first time that we have a natural-born politician. Atatürk didn’t have to win popular support, it was narrower elite politics when he ruled, he was managing groups. But Erdoğan grew up being a populist. He is a deal-maker, a deal-breaker. He keeps his constituency under strong control. His family lives politics twenty-four-seven, even on holiday. It is defensive politics at home. Do they go on holiday? Never. Never happened in that family. In the past, ministers would dream of retirement. His only relaxation is maybe playing with his grandchildren. Maybe Islamist politicians are like that because they are defensive. It is their style of engaging with life – politics is everywhere. It is twenty-four-seven, without an exit strategy. They believe there is an afterlife, maybe that is their holiday.’
Turkey had no shortage of issues in the spring of 2018. Soldiers were dying in Syria and the educated youth was deserting the country. Construction projects were stopping midway, cranes frozen, as companies’ credit lines dried up. Their huge skeletons loomed over the cities’ highways like the concrete ghosts of Christmas yet to come, a warning of what the future surely holds as the backlash of the AKP’s obsession with borrowing and building begins. But all else was pushed aside in the spring of 2018, because there was only one issue in this election – a Turkey with Erdoğan, or without?
All the main opposition candidates pledged to scrap the results of his referendum should they win and rewrite the constitution – again. The nationalist Iyi (Good) Party had Meral Akşener, a glamorous grandmother with hennaed hair and a problematic past; she was interior minister in the 1990s, at the very time that the Turkish state was committing its worst atrocities in the Kurdish south-east. She reinvented herself by replacing the wolf’s-head hand gesture of the ultra-nationalists with pearl earrings and a hennaed star and crescent on her palm to match her hair, but the Kurds would never forget.
Saadet, the rump Islamist party left behind when Tayyip and the other young guns broke away to form the AKP, had the aged Temel Karamollaoğlu, a grandfatherly, grey-bearded figure. The party’s campaign video featured a cartoon Karamollaoğlu depicted as Superman, swooping down to stop a car steered by Erdoğan from driving off a cliff.
‘The first ever Islamist with a sense of humour!’ one friend remarked.
Selahattin Demirtaş, the first major politician to oppose Erdoğan’s presidential system, stood for the HDP. He had been in prison for seventeen months but was still by far the most popular Kurdish politician. If convicted before election day on any of the seventeen terrorism charges he faced his bid would be finished. He was not able to hold rallies or speak to his followers apart from through statements handed to his lawyers. Then, seven days before the election, state television decided to grant him a ten-minute slot. The pro-Erdoğan press heralded it ‘a first for democracy!’
The outsider was Doğu Perinçek, leader of Vatan – a neo-Maoist, ultranationalist party so marginal it never gleans more than 1 per cent of the vote. And the CHP had Muharrem İnce, a 54-year-old former physics teacher who had challenged Kılıçdaroğlu for the leadership of the party a year earlier.
İnce was a witty orator, well used to controlling a classroom full of bored and gobby teenagers. The Turkish paparazzi snapped him enjoying a beer and performing the Zeybek, a traditional Aegean dance. Such leisure pursuits marked him down as a full-blooded Turkish secularist – though his mother and sister wore the headscarf. As he announced his candidacy İnce took off his CHP lapel badge, his tribal marker, and promised to be a president for the whole of Turkey.
The AKP media sneered. ‘He couldn’t even win the CHP leadership elections,’ scoffed one commentator. ‘How does he think he can win the presidency?’
None of the challengers looked promising. İnce’s face adorned bus shelters around my neighbourhood, and on one I saw that a woman wearing bright red lipstick had kissed the glass over his forehead. Doğu Perinçek’s people pasted some scrappy posters on construction hoardings, showing the brush-moustached leader glaring beneath thick eyebrows. I caught a glimpse of Meral Akşener, regal and smiling, on posters pinned to the central reservation on the road out of Istanbul to Silivri prison, where I went in late April to watch a hearing of one of the terror cases against Selahattin Demirtaş. It would have been his first public appearance since he formally announced he was running for the presidency. Journalists, international observers and Kurdish activists jammed the building, hammering on the door of the prison’s courtroom as nervous young gendarmerie officers stood guard. But as proceedings got underway, we realised that even this stage was to be denied him – Demirtaş did not appear in the courtroom at his own trial. The judge said he was ill.
Almost everywhere else, from Taksim to the gecekondu districts, it was Tayyip’s stern face that gazed down on you. His face was on billboards in bus stations and bunting fluttering over ancient alleys. Every day, millions of Istanbullus riding in taxis and buses along the raised highways that cut through suburban-sprawl Istanbul caught Erdoğan’s eye countless times, as he watched them from storeys-high banners pasted onto the tower blocks.
Erdoğan’s people were determined to keep a grip on us as we covered the election. On a Saturday afternoon in late May, halfway through campaigning, the foreign press corps was called to the Hilton Hotel in Istanbul for a meeting with Mehmet Akarca, the head of the press ministry. Over more than two hours Akarca, a former journalist with state television, accused us of launching a ‘perception operation’ against Erdoğan, and begged us not to call him a dictator until after the elections. ‘Would you call Angela Merkel an alcoholic if you saw her with one drink?’ he said. ‘Then why are you calling our president a dictator!’
Things weren’t always like this. Not so long ago, you could talk about almost anything with almost anyone in Turkey. Interviewees would proudly tell a journalist their full name, occupation and where they lived as they cascaded their opinions, and make sure you noted them all down correctly. Of course there were limits, Atatürk being one and the Kurdish issue another – it was always easy to slip up when discussing both subjects. But on the whole I had found Turkey refreshing at first, after the smog of noms-de-guerre, pseudonyms and suspicion I’d had to deal with in Syria, by-products of forty years under dictatorship and an inherited fear of the system. But then Turkey changed, starting around the time Erdoğan first became president in 2014, accelerating through the breakdown of the PKK peace process and becoming entrenched right after the coup attempt. Now most Turks will only talk anonymously, giving their first name but not their last, or else refusing to speak at all. Those who support Erdoğan might be happy to say so, but their suspicion of foreigners – and particularly of foreign journalists – mirrors the deepening paranoia of their leader. At some point an epiphany hit me. I had come to Turkey in 2013 thinking I would bear witness to the fall of one dictatorship. Now I was watching the rise of another.
No matter the shift in Erdoğan’s demeanour or the depth of his political descent, those who were once close to him still speak with overtones of loyalty.
‘If you lived his life for twenty-four hours a day, in three days you would be a dictator – all these people around you treating you like a god and saying yes to everything,’ one of his closest former advisers, an ally of his since the late 1980s, told me during the 2018 election campaign. ‘I see that the illness of power has now reached him. I’m often angry with him – there is not a week goes by when I don’t try to help him. If I see him in a good mood, he is the same guy as he has always been. Then it falls apart. This is the curse of being too successful – I also see it with CEOs. They start to make mistakes because they think they know better. Now Erdoğan is surrounded by these young guys who had no successes in life before, and therefore they look at him like a god. They never dare to say no to him. The main question is whether he realises that he does not have good people around him.’
The charismatic rebel had started to look old and out of touch. It was not only the shrinking of his inner circle that had shifted the gears of his politicking: without Erol Olçok’s polish, his shine had come off. Olçok’s spin agency Arter was dropped by the AKP just before the 2018 elections and the new team had none of Olçok’s old magic. There were plenty of slogans – ‘A big Turkey needs a strong leader!’ ‘It’s Turkey’s time!’ – but nothing about the future. At his rallies Erdoğan simply talked about all he had done, and blamed Turkey’s mounting problems on shadowy foreign lobbies.
‘There is no strategy. No perspective about the future. In political campaigns, you should enrich the policies with fresh perspectives and content. I couldn’t find that in their latest campaign,’ Atılgan Bayar, the AKP’s strategic adviser between 2010 and 2015, told me. ‘The Turkish nation needs to tend to its wounds. The campaign needed to assert a more positive and peaceful discourse. They didn’t understand that. Surely this amateur campaign will affect the results. Political campaigns are like organic bodies. They evolve as you are working on them. And all the elements – films, slogans and music – harmoniously come together around a predefined strategy; there’s no room for discord or wild cards. In a sense, campaigns are like sentences. Their campaign has elements of a sentence but with no syntax or coherence, and therefore no tangible meaning.’
As Erdoğan stumbled, Muharrem İnce, the man who couldn’t even win control of the CHP, seized the bait. İnce ran a storming campaign, outstripping everyone’s expectations including mine. After six years of watching them flail and bumble, I had written the opposition off as irrelevant and irredeemable, a fading snapshot of old Turkey. But three days before the election, a millions-strong crowd filled a rally ground to see İnce speak, the mass of fluttering Turkish flags turning the huge area into a blanket of red. In the heat and humidity of an İzmir summer evening, the mass sang and shouted slogans, roaring in glee each time the MC mentioned the main act’s name.
This was İnce’s 105th rally in forty-nine days, each one bigger and more enthusiastic than the last. He had been virtually blacked out from state television network TRT, Erdoğan getting 181 hours of coverage during the campaign, İnce just 15. Most of the other channels, owned by Erdoğan’s allies, ignored him altogether. But on social media İnce was a hit. His witty put-downs of the president won him respect and adoration. Erdoğan’s media army tried to hit back by unearthing some poetry that İnce had published decades ago, cringeworthy soft-erotica that they claimed indecent. İnce merely laughed. ‘What can I do if you have never fallen in love?’ he replied.
Professionals, students and families gathered in İzmir to hear İnce speak as the campaigning reached its climax. ‘He is going to win it! If the other guys don’t fake it, of course …’ said Nuran Oğuz, a schoolteacher who had come along with her two colleagues.
The stage had been set up in a park that runs along the seafront, and an estimated two million people flooded the areas before and behind it as well as all the streets and alleyways around. Every balcony overlooking the stage was crammed with people waving Turkish flags, and the special forces cops on the rooftops were joined by crowds of İnce’s supporters. In the bay, boats hoisted sails decorated with images of Atatürk, and from the speakers the İzmir March boomed out on repeat.
İnce arrived on his bus in the sticky heat of the late afternoon, just as the sun was setting and the crowd worked up to fever pitch. He strode on stage hand-in-hand with his glamorous blonde wife, Ülkü, and launched into a blazing hour-long speech. ‘Erdoğan is tired, arrogant and lonely. He is a man without dreams!’ he laughed. The crowd roared in hysterics along with him.
Anyone who does not know the Turkish language might have thought from their onstage voices that Erdoğan and İnce were the same man. This rival adopted the president’s oratory style exactly – the shouting, the key words drawn out for emphasis, the laughs at the expense of his opponent. His media team sliced clips of Erdoğan with performances by the classic Turkish comedy actor Kemal Sunal, whose best-known character is an Ottoman idiot, and beamed them onto the big screens. In the crowd people held aloft witty signs: TEACHER, TAYYIP IS TALKING TOO MUCH!
At last, the opposition had a living candidate whose face they could slap onto their merchandise. The hawkers said they had never seen such demand. ‘I can’t find İnce stuff from the producers any more, I have to go to the black market!’ a trader called Serdar told me as he showed off his scarves, printed with İnce’s picture at one end, Atatürk’s at the other, and EVERYBODY’S PRESIDENT written in between the two.
It was easy to get swept up in this tide of hope – after all, it had been sixteen years since the opposition last seemed in the ascendant. İnce looked to have seized the political narrative. When he pledged to lift the state of emergency if he won, Erdoğan was backed into a corner and responded that he, too, would review the emergency law. Pollsters predicted that Erdoğan would fall below 50 per cent in the first round of the elections and be forced into a second-round run-off against İnce. And many Turks believed that if that happened, İnce could build enough momentum to take the presidency.
Meral Akşener and Temel Karamollaoğlu said that they would throw their weight behind İnce should the vote go to a second round. There was a chance that followers of Selahattin Demirtaş, the Kurdish HDP leader, would do the same – İnce visited him in prison, breaking the decades-old animosity between the Kemalists and the Kurds, and held a rally in Diyarbakır. Finally, after sixteen years, the opposition found something that they could agree on – that whatever their differences, Erdoğan must go.
But there were warning signs in İzmir on that midsummer night, even if the opposition did not want to see them. The crowd – like the ones in Ankara and Istanbul that would gather over the following two days – was millions strong but showed only one side of Turkey. I counted just a handful of women wearing headscarves, and the crowd’s slogans and the way they packed into İzmir’s seafront bars for beers once the rally was over left little doubt as to whose tribe they belonged.
I asked Serdar the street hawker when he would be getting in some more İnce merchandise. He told me the producers were hedging their bets. ‘If the election goes to a second round then they will make a lot more,’ he said. ‘But they have to produce in big quantities, and there are only two days left, you know …’
At the CHP’s Istanbul headquarters, election night began with high promise. İnce, having witnessed some of the first counts, tweeted that the news looked good. But when preliminary results started coming in the optimism withered like a punctured balloon. İnce, meanwhile, had disappeared. He had pledged to stay at the higher board of elections all evening to make sure the count was fair, but after casting his vote in his home province of Yalova he flew to Ankara and holed up in his hotel, presumably watching his defeat unfold.
It was Bülent Tezcan, the CHP’s spokesman, who stood in front of the television cameras as Erdoğan declared early victory and his supporters thronged to the streets. As the sound of car horns and chanting filled the city centres, Tezcan tried to hold back the tide. ‘We are following the count step by step and at no time did Mr Erdoğan’s vote go above forty-eight per cent,’ he said. ‘This is open manipulation but the result is certain – Erdoğan will lose. We are asking people not to leave the ballot boxes. They want the election observers to stay at home so they can do their tricks.’
The state-controlled Anadolu Agency is the only news wire given access to the polling booths where the votes are first counted. It has a habit of announcing the figures from the staunchest pro-Erdoğan constituencies first, to make it seem as though he is storming to victory – on referendum night the results for Evet had started at 70 per cent before shrinking back to just over 51 per cent. Mehmet Akarca, the head of the press ministry, had implored us to go to a government-run press centre on election night, so we could take Anadolu’s earliest results. The CHP was insisting that their own polling station tallies did not match with Anadolu’s.
But Tezcan’s words were lost in the racket – as far as the people waving flags were concerned, victory was already a done deal. Just after midnight, Fox News Turk, the last of six main Turkish television channels operating independently, reported that it had received a WhatsApp message from Muharrem İnce, who had still not been seen since counting started. İnce had admitted defeat, the Fox journalist, İsmail Küçükkaya, said. The atmosphere in the CHP’s office became chill. On Twitter, the jokes started flying straight away. ‘İnce literally just split up with his supporters by WhatsApp!’ wrote one. Others insisted it must be a con on the part of the government, or that İnce must have been threatened. How could the man who had raised the hopes of half a nation and spoken in front of millions over the past three days have ended it all like this?
Within minutes Bülent Tezcan was back in front of the cameras, his demeanour flattened and distress clear. ‘The turnout was very high. We are thanking all the voters,’ he stated. ‘We said that we will defend the law and ensure that what goes into the ballot box is the same as the result that comes out. Our friends are still waiting and the counting continues. But our figures are matching with those of Anadolu Agency. Be peaceful, be careful of provocations. Democracy is working and whatever the result, we will continue with our democratic fight.’
It was over, and everyone knew it. Erdoğan had won, and there would be no second round. Turkey would continue on Tayyip’s path, reshaped to his liking and with a resounding restatement of his people’s will. The nation had spoken, and they had said they wanted more of the same – no matter how authoritarian their leader, no matter how unfairly he had run his campaign, and no matter the 47 per cent who did not vote for this. Everyone started filing out of the CHP’s offices.
Me too. I walked out into the deserted street and started searching for a taxi to take me back across the Bosphorus to Kadıköy. I knew no protests would take place there this time, as there were after Erdoğan’s referendum victory. This time the defeat was too crushing, too final. Erdoğan had apparently increased his share of the vote since the last presidential elections in 2014. The opposition had bowed out with a disgraceful whimper. Over the coming days, international election monitors would raise serious questions over the fairness of the campaigning period and reports would emerge of ballot box tampering in the east. None slowed Erdoğan even for a minute as he soared on his self-declared victory.
My street was silent and empty as I buzzed open the heavy front door of my apartment building. But, looking out across the road from my window, I saw all my neighbours still awake, gathered around their television sets and smoking as they had on the night of the coup. All the channels were showing the scenes outside the AKP’s Ankara headquarters, where huge crowds had gathered to see Erdoğan speak. From the balcony he delivered the speech of his political lifetime, scorning his enemies at home and abroad and vowing to speed up Turkey’s transformation.
‘The winner of this election is democracy,’ he boomed. ‘The winner is the superiority of the national will. The winner is Turkey and the Turkish nation. The winner is all the oppressed in our region and across the world!’
The crowd thundered its approval. Flags waved for the television cameras swooping overhead. Erdoğan promised to keep on fighting all who stood against him and his people.
‘We will not stop! We will not stop! We will never stop!’
Outside, I heard a distant din of car horns, growing louder as they came closer. As I peered out the window the convoy swung into my street, a long chain of cars flying Erdoğan flags and star and crescent banners from their roofs. His anthem blared from their stereos, and a young woman in a colourful modern headscarf hung out of a window and wailed at this Turkey, the old Turkey, the heartland of the 47 per cent. I saw her face as the convoy passed beneath my window; it was caught between ecstasy and fury.
‘RECEP TAYYIP ERDOĞANNNNNNNN!’ she screamed.
A week after Erdoğan’s election win I take a train ride across the breadth of Turkey. The Eastern Express runs from Ankara to Kars, the last city before the Armenian border. It takes twenty-four hours to cover the 700 miles between the two cities.
The route has recently become a hit with Turkish hipsters. The winter journeys through snow-locked Anatolia are picture perfect, like Narnia; the glistening vistas through windows branded with a kitsch star and crescent custom-made for Instagram. Thousands of young Turks from the wealthy and liberal west used the train to travel to the other end of their country for the first time over the most recent winter, hanging out of the open carriage doors to smoke cigarettes and feel the cold air slap their faces. But now, in the humid dog days of late June, the train has sunk back into its old unglamorous role – the workhorse carting Turks who can’t afford plane travel from one end of the country to the other.
The towns the train stops in are the least alluring parts of Turkey, even though the scenery in between is stunning. Kayseri … Elazig … Erzincan … Erzurum … The carriages pull into one identikit city after another, shanty-houses next to the train tracks and dingy new apartment blocks behind them. Old women in shawls haul huge bags onto the train. Ragged children hurl rocks at it as it pulls out of the station again. Litter blankets the ground on either side of the tracks, and I can see little evidence here of the huge investment and modernisation that has swept across Istanbul and other cities to the west, or even the cities on the border with Syria, with their cosmopolitan new populations of refugees, diplomats and aid workers. The way young mothers line up with their small children to watch the train go past suggests there is little else new or exciting here – they have so far gained the least out of the New Turkey. But these are the places where Erdoğan’s support is unshakeable: in the ramshackle villages the train line cuts through, huge posters of him are hoisted on the houses closest to the tracks.
I travelled to Kayseri two months ago, to see Erdoğan’s first rally of the election campaign. That time I, like him, travelled there through the city’s airport – a far more glamorous entrance than the railway station. I had happened to time my journey just right: my low-cost flight back to Istanbul left at almost exactly the same time as Erdoğan’s private jet, and my taxi home from the airport at the other end trailed just behind his motorcade for a short stretch. He had been whisked to his jet from the town square rally on blacked-out buses with special forces soldiers balanced on the top, down roads closed to allow the convoy to pass through speedily.
‘With love and respect, Kayseri!’ boomed the bus’s loudspeaker as it tore down the main street away from the rally, the soldiers training their assault rifles across pavements packed with Saturday shoppers.
‘Have you ever read 1984?’ I asked my Turkish friend, as we sipped coffee and watched the spectacle roll past.
‘Dear, I’m living in 1984,’ he replied, spluttering with laughter.
Erdoğan had tagged his Kayseri rally on to the opening of a new, PPP-funded state hospital – one of his tried and tested tactics to show just how much he is doing for his country. Days earlier he had promised to raise the state pension – a sure winner for the men with heavy moustaches who gathered around me as I pulled out my notebook in the crowd. Mostly, though, they wanted to talk about Europe.
‘I like his tough stance against the foreign enemies – Greece, Armenia, France,’ said one. ‘They all support terrorism. And we don’t trust the EU! They don’t keep their promises.’
The others talked over one another, each wanting their quotes to be the ones I scribbled down. Each of them echoed the last.
‘None of our other leaders defended our rights in the international community,’ said another. ‘That is why the world doesn’t want Erdoğan to lead us – because he’s against their colonialism.’
‘Tell me,’ said his friend, ‘which European city has new hospitals opening? I lived in Germany for forty years and they don’t!’
I felt like pointing to the figures that could show him exactly how many billions in grants and investments the EU has poured into Erdoğan’s Turkey over the years. I had added it up; nearly four billion euros to bridges, tunnels, rail links – and hospitals. But a rally is no place to argue reasonably. The familiar music started and the MC came on stage to warm up the crowd. The speakers were turned up so loud I could feel each word hitting my eardrums. My interviews came to an abrupt end – it was almost impossible to hear anyone over the racket. But one of the men leant over to give me a final thought, holding up his index finger and striking it through the air to emphasise each word like a conductor leading an orchestra.
‘Tek millet! Tek bayrak! Tek Vatan! Tek lider!’ he shouted over the din – a twist on one of Erdoğan’s campaign slogans: ‘One nation, one flag, one Motherland, one state’.
My interviewee had added his own ending: ‘one leader’.
Erdoğan’s about-face on Europe is the most startling aspect of his metamorphosis. Back in 2003 he promised to be the man who would take Turkey into the European Union. Now, he often appears to be trying to get Turkey kicked out before it has joined.
‘After [Erdoğan] became prime minister he did more to seriously move forward the EU process than any other government. When I think about Turkey today and how it got there … Erdoğan is the best politician in Turkey,’ says one diplomat based in the country during the 1990s and early 2000s. But when Erdoğan began his snarling slide into real populist authoritarianism after 2016, the EU made an easy fall guy. Turks were already fatigued with the endless accession process – both Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy had said that the country would never become a full member, even back in the days when Ankara was playing nice. The final insult came when the Schengen visas Turks were promised under Davutoğlu’s 2016 deal to stop refugees flocking to Europe failed to materialise in Erdoğan’s Euro-Hate era. Brussels said the sticking point was the same as always – Turkey’s refusal to liberalise its anti-terror laws, a condition for Schengen access. Erdoğan, then in the opening throes of his new war with the PKK, was never going to make concessions on that – and after the coup attempt in July that year the human rights outlook worsened. Soon the two sides were trapped in a spiral of mutual abuse – Europe criticising Turkey’s latest human rights breaches, and Erdoğan picking up on their words to spit back to the adoring crowds at his rallies, with asides about hypocrisy and Turkey-phobia in Brussels.
‘From my perspective, when Sarkozy and Merkel said never to the EU membership, Erdoğan was liberated from having that as a national aspiration and he was able to substitute it with his own aspiration,’ the diplomat says. ‘And I think that is one of the reasons why we are where we are today … But I also think that people will look back and say that the secularists did not fight for their country. In 2003, the big business people were thinking that Erdoğan was great. They tried to ride the tiger but things did not work out the way they wanted them to. Secondly, there are secularists like the CHP party that never organised themselves to provide an alternative vision of what Turkey could become instead of no to Erdoğan. They provided nothing to the larger group of people.
‘When this history gets written, we will see that Erdoğan holds the most responsibility for Turkey today, but some of it also belongs to the opposition and to Europeans who made a strategic error.’
Erdoğan’s personal views on Brussels have always been far muddier than those of his AKP co-founders. He fits more naturally with the leaders of Muslim countries, who tend to look up to and flatter him, while among the leaders of Europe he appears awkward and surly. Turks’ views on the EU have also shifted, so that now most say they do not want to join compared to the two-thirds who were in favour in 2002. Doubtless that is partly down to the endless agitations of Turkey’s pro-Erdoğan media (one tabloid newspaper published a front page of Angela Merkel mocked-up as Hitler during the height of the row between the two countries in 2017). But as the EU bloc is engulfed by economic woes, squabbling over refugees, and its own rising swell of populism, it no longer looks the good bet it was at the start of the AKP’s tenure. Turks believe they have other relationships they can turn to, in Russia, the Balkans – and post-Brexit Britain.
Back in Ankara there are few people left in Erdoğan’s inner circle who can either speak truth to power, or who are sufficiently Europhile to push for a reconciliation with Brussels. Hours after Erdoğan was re-inaugurated following his election win – an event billed in the Turkish press as ‘the first day of the New Turkey’ – he announced his new, hand-picked cabinet. Twenty-six ministries had been streamlined down to sixteen. One of those culled was the ministry for EU affairs, now absorbed by the foreign ministry. It is a clear sign of how far any thoughts of joining the bloc have slipped down Erdoğan’s agenda. When I met with former president Abdullah Gül six weeks before the elections, it was the crumbling of the prospects for EU membership that disappointed him the most. ‘I am not happy with the current situation. In the first five years [of the AKP’s rule], all of us embraced the people, the different and we focused on the future. We did this. The soft power is the democracy. It is the separation of power. The transparency. The accountability. We proved this. If devoted politicians prove that they are on this line, it would be a wonderful gift to world peace,’ Gül told me.
‘We became the model for many surrounding countries. We became a source of inspiration. We were trying to be good Muslims but at the same time we were democratic. These were the soft policies. It created influence in our neighbourhood. I have always defended soft power … In my last years of presidency I was telling our friends in Europe that they should not block our progress [to join the European Union], that they should help us complete the negotiation process. I asked why they were opposed to all these things. I asked to finish the process, and maybe Turkey will be like Norway in the end. Maybe we would not be a full member [but] what is important is to reach that level and to adopt those [European] standards … We are in a very different position now [regarding] the EU, foreign affairs, the region.’
The void left by men like Abdullah Gül, Ahmet Davutoğlu and Bülent Arinc as they have drifted from the party or been shunted aside has been filled with ultra-loyalists, sycophants and yes men. Several ministers stayed in their posts following the election, but Erdoğan’s appointment of his son-in-law Berat Albayrak to the treasury, his childhood friend Mustafa Varank to the industry and technology ministry, and Hulusi Akar, the army chief who stayed loyal on the night of the coup, to the defence ministry, showed he has little concern for diversity of opinion in his cabinet. Gone is the man who was once willing to learn, to hear outside voices and listen to criticism.
‘Read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch: the classic closing-in and narrowing of a circle of advisers around a … highly successful leadership personality,’ said one diplomat based in Turkey at the time it all fell apart. ‘One by one, founding members of the AKP were purged or simply fell away.’
The guest list for the official celebration of Erdoğan’s inauguration in July 2018 is a good place to start if you are searching for hints of where the country might stand in the world in the years to come. His win met with a lukewarm reception from Western countries. Monitors from the OSCE observed that the vote was ‘free but not fair’; although they had not witnessed any significant tampering with the ballots, the skewing of media coverage in Erdoğan’s favour during campaigning had left the opposition at a crushing disadvantage. His early victory call squashed any debate about the results or the fairness. Once the crowds were on the streets it was all over.
No one from Washington or London flew in to sit among the crowd in the gardens of Aksaray, his presidential palace, though both had offered congratulations on his win. The only heads of state from the European Union were Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Bulgaria’s Rumen Radev – both of whom face charges of undermining the bloc’s democratic norms. Brussels sent its representative for migration, clearly keen to keep the refugee deal on track. Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt and frisky former Italian prime minister was there, as was Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, a fan of both Erdoğan and Turkey’s neo-Ottoman TV series. North Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Sudan, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, Somalia, Qatar, Kuwait … all were represented as Erdoğan did a slow walk of honour through the crowd with Emine, to applause and the boom of cannon fire.
It didn’t take Erdoğan long to start exercising his new powers. He had announced the cabinet within six hours of being sworn in. By the next morning he had issued his first presidential decree, appointing Hulusi Akar as the new head of the armed forces and changing the chain of command. The military’s higher appointments council, once a group of generals who decided who would fill the top positions, was abolished. Now, the commanders of the navy, air force and army are all under the direct command of the president, and all officers down to the level of colonel are appointed by him.
Meanwhile, Erdoğan’s crackdown widened. The day after the election, the nationalist leader Devlet Bahçeli, whose party went into the parliamentary polls in alliance with the AKP, took out full-page adverts in two national newspapers, listing the names of seventy journalists who had criticised or mocked him and using the headline: A THANK-YOU MESSAGE. Bahçeli’s MHP had looked set to be the election’s big losers, with everyone expecting them to haemorrhage their vote to Meral Akşener’s rival-nationalist Iyi Party. Bahçeli had barely even campaigned – but the MHP increased its share of the vote, taking 11 per cent. It is now the kingmaker in the parliament – Erdoğan’s AKP needs the support of Bahçeli’s nationalists in order to keep its majority of seats. That means that any hopes for a new Kurdish peace process have died – and that Bahçeli now wields a dark new kind of power. Erdoğan did not grant him any formal cabinet position, and the newspaper stunt may look petulant. But the MHP preserves strong ties with the underworld, right-wing mob bosses who were only too happy to wipe out troublesome journalists and other opponents back in the 1990s and would not hesitate to do so again. ‘It’s as good as a target on their backs,’ an outraged contact told me.
The day before Erdoğan is officially sworn in comes the largest single round-up of suspected Gülenists, almost two years on from the coup attempt. Eighteen thousand people, including soldiers, policemen and judges, are either sacked or arrested. The website of the Official Gazette crashes as Turks rush to check whether their names are on the list. The number of those dismissed now tops more than 180,000. The judiciary has lost more than a third of its manpower since the purge began – and under the new system, the top judges will be appointed jointly by Erdoğan and by the parliament that Erdoğan controls. The state of emergency has been lifted – almost two years to the day since it was first brought in – but that will make little difference now that Erdoğan has hollowed out the state and filled it with his loyalists, and rules by presidential decree anyway. Amendments to the anti-terror laws pushed through just before emergency rule ended allow the police to detain suspects without charge, for up to twelve days in some cases. Local governors, directly appointed by the government, can continue to restrict access to public areas on security grounds, and demonstrations can be banned on an even broader set of pretexts than under the emergency law.
Meanwhile, the foreign press corps is informed that the agency that issues our press cards – our tickets to stay in the country – is to be taken under the direct control of the presidency. Separately I receive a message from my oldest contact within the government.
‘I am afraid we are no longer cooperating with you, Hannah,’ it reads. ‘People are unhappy.’
My train journey had really been a means to an end – the very end of Turkey, and an event a friend and I had been vowing to see since we first heard of it years before. Bradley, a British photographer, was one of the first people I met in Turkey. Like me, he had lived in Antakya during the early stages of the Syrian war, covered the conflict, and then moved up to Istanbul at the same time as I did – when the odds of survival for Western journalists in Syria started lengthening. Over six years we had lived, travelled and worked together, and talked endlessly about whether it might be better to leave Turkey for an easier place. Like him, I always thought of what it might be like to live in another city, where I didn’t have to hustle through hordes on the pavements or swear at people to get jobs done. But then I would catch one of the perfect sunsets over the Bosphorus, or a busker’s melancholic tune on the ferry will hit exactly the right note for my mood, and would realise that I could never leave this place without leaving a huge chunk of my heart behind.
We arrived in the city of Kars, 620 miles east of Ankara, late on a Saturday night. It looked more like a post-Soviet town than one in Turkey, full of dark grey stone buildings and odd statues – and free of the huge posters hung by the loquaciously ambitious local mayors celebrating Erdoğan’s election victory back in Istanbul and Ankara. The next morning, we found a driver to take us the final sixty-five miles to Damal.
The tiny town sits in huge folds of grasslands next to the Georgian border. In the last days of spring the velvet green was daubed in purple and white wildflowers, and the rippling grasses caught the sunlight in gentle waves. Our driver, Ali, was determined that we do a language swap on the hour-and-a-half journey along the smooth, newly built road, so we pointed to the things we passed and shouted out their names, like toddlers.
‘I˙nek!’ Ali cried.
‘Cow!’ we screamed back.
In my imperfect Turkish I tried to explain to Ali what I love about his country – still, despite everything. ‘It’s so different, everywhere you go,’ I told him. ‘Every province, every town there is something different.’
‘No!’ he batted back. ‘Turks are one. After the coup we all came together, you saw!’
I explained that I was talking about the geography, not the people – the dusty deserts of the southern borders, the seaside party-towns of the western coasts, the luscious mountains of the Black Sea, the pounding metropolis of Istanbul … I wanted to tell him too that he was wrong, the people are also different. Erdoğan had once recognised that, with his old brand of neo-Ottoman pluralism. His nationalist-tinged rebrand had now put paid to that – and six years in this country had taught me when it was best to keep my mouth shut.
We stopped in a village to ask our way up to the viewing point. Everyone knew which way we should go. We followed their fingers up a winding track and there we found it – a small children’s playground, a couple of shaded seating areas, and rows of benches laid out down the natural slope of the hill. At the top there was a concrete shelter like a bus stop, covered in Atatürk-themed graffiti.
Three young men sat chatting and smoking in one of the seating areas. In the other, three generations of one family – a tiny girl sucking on a carton of juice, flanked by her father and a well-preserved old lady with bleached-blonde hair, leopard-print trousers and a gold necklace in the shape of Atatürk’s signature.
We looked across at the mountain opposite, and the shadows that were beginning to creep across it. Bradley thought he could see the shape of two eyes and a nose appearing. I squinted to make it out.
‘No, not yet,’ the woman, whose name was Nesilhan Akcan, told us. ‘Fifteen minutes more, and you’ll see him.’
It turned out that Nesilhan was the best person to ask, because it was her brother, Adıgüzel Kırmızıgül, who had first seen the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk appearing in the shadows on the mountain. ‘He came home and told us, and we all thought he was crazy!’ she said, laughing to show the two gold caps on her front canines. ‘But then we came and saw it for ourselves.’
It was 1954, sixteen years after Atatürk’s death and when Turkey was in the full throes of Adnan Menderes’s reforms. The shadow, a perfect replica of that famous profile, is cast when the sun sets just right over the plains. Fleeting and impermanent, it appears for only half an hour each evening for one month of the year. Slowly the news of it spread and in 1975 the Turkish army sent a photographer to capture the image. The nearest hamlet renamed itself Atatürkköy (Atatürk Village). And, eventually, the local council built the viewing platform and pilgrims started thronging to watch the spectacle.
A wedding party arrived as the sun started its descent, the bride holding up huge layers of satin and tulle as she picked her way through the benches. Then some families pulled up in their cars, and a gendarmerie patrol, too. Food hawkers turned up with ready-bagged popcorn and a portable kettle, and started boiling up strong tea.
The shadow was taking shape, stretching from right to left in a series of curves that sharpened before my eyes. The wedding band, a clarinet player and drummer, began belting out Balkan music and the guests arranged themselves into a circle. More people arrived and the benches filled up. One young couple had dressed their tiny sons in miniature soldiers’ outfits. And with the huge shadow face watching over them all, the wedding group started to dance.
I had been ready to scoff, mentally preparing my piece about how Atatürk’s devotees sneer at the superstitions of the religious Turks and then rush to take part in their own crazy rituals. But the likeness, as it developed, was stunning. The straight nose, the heavy eyebrows, the jutting chin – all of them were there, perfectly aligned, looming over the wedding party as the bride and groom embraced in the middle of the circle. There was no chanting, no slogans, no merchandise and no power-play, just a happy crowd of people watching a mountain in the warmth of the evening sunshine.
I bought a bag of popcorn from the hawker’s young daughter, and went to take my place on the benches as Bradley scooted around taking photos of the wedding crowd. Ali picked wildflowers from the grasses, looking up occasionally to watch the spectacle, and Nesilhan came and sat by my side. Arm in arm, we watched in silence as this vision of Atatürk came, and then melted away again into the shadows.