Turkey’s Disaster—and Erdogan’s

The earthquakes that struck ten southern Turkish provinces on February 6 mark the country’s worst humanitarian disaster in modern history. Bustling cities were leveled, ancient citadels crumbled, and thousands of residential and commercial buildings collapsed. In addition to numerous casualties in neighboring Syria, more than 44,000 people have died in Turkey as of February 24. More than 100,000 people have been injured and millions more are currently homeless. One-sixth of Turkey’s population—more than 13 million people—is thought to have been affected by the earthquakes.

Providing relief to the stricken areas is the Turkish government’s most immediate concern. The disaster, however, poses not just a logistical challenge but also a political one. Already, the government’s relief efforts have come under scrutiny, as have the neglect and corruption that allowed many substandard buildings to be constructed in recent decades. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president since 2003, now faces the most important test of his career.

It is one he might find ominously familiar. In 1999, an earthquake killed nearly 19,000 people and exposed the limitations of the social contract between Turkey’s citizens and their paternalistic state. That natural disaster, coupled with an ensuing economic crisis, stoked deep dissatisfaction and spurred the toppling of the secular and often illiberal regimes that had prevailed since the country emerged from the wreck of the Ottoman Empire, in 1922. Out of the rubble, Erdogan and his Islamist political party would eventually sweep to power and transform Turkey. The tables have now turned on Erdogan. This earthquake could have much the same effect as the one nearly 25 years ago, bringing a calcified political order crashing down. The 1999 earthquake helped bring Erdogan to power. The 2023 quake may end his rule.

DADDY ISSUES

Turkey has a long tradition of paternalistic, top-down governance, rooted in a state-led modernization drive under the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. The state in Turkey is nicknamed devlet baba (father state), as opposed to the country, which is known as ana vatan (motherland). In this political tradition, the state is like a disciplinarian father who takes care of his offspring, the citizens; it is stern and hardhearted, but also guides its citizens and provides for their needs.

Turkish leaders have long insisted that they know what is good for the people: first, the late Ottoman sultans; then, modern Turkey’s twentieth-century founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and his successors, known as the Kemalists; and now, Erdogan. These leaders have made clear that their careful stewardship of the country requires the obedience of the people.

The 1999 earthquake helped bring Erdogan to power. The 2023 quake may end his rule.

After liberating Turkey from Allied occupation at the end of World War I, Ataturk propagated this paternalistic social contract. He went to great lengths to shape both state and society in his own secularist, nationalist image. Ataturk embodied the modern Turkish republic. Poignantly, in 1934, the country’s parliament—at the time, a rump body under his thumb—passed a law endowing him with the exclusive last name Ataturk, meaning “father of the Turks.” To this day, no Turkish citizen is allowed to bear the last name of the country’s founding father.

Ataturk’s paternal contract with the citizens remained effective well after his death, in 1938, and after Turkey became a multiparty democracy, in 1950. Kemalist parties on both the left and right perpetuated that form of rule. For decades during and after the Cold War, Turkey’s secularist devlet baba was seen as omnipotent, powerful, and almighty. Citizens had no option but to fear it.

It took a natural disaster to shake the Kemalist state to its core. The devastating earthquake of 1999 destroyed industrial areas along the outskirts of Istanbul. What ensued proved to be a game-changer for Turkey’s citizens: in their time of need, the father state was nowhere to be found as thousands lay injured under the rubble, waiting for help from relief agencies that never arrived. It took days, and in some cases weeks, for government relief to reach some communities. That failure left the pretense of a severe but effective Kemalist state in tatters.

A massive economic crisis the following year put the final nail in the coffin of the Kemalist devlet baba. Turkish citizens not only felt abandoned by the state but also no longer feared it. The door was now open for Erdogan.

THE CAPTAIN AT THE HELM

The 1999 earthquake and the subsequent economic crisis ripped up the social contract between the state and its citizens, prying loose the former’s ideological grip on society. In 2001, aided by his popularity after a successful stint as mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s, Erdogan set up his Justice and Development Party (AKP). In November 2002, his party won national elections, and Erdogan became Turkey’s prime minister in March 2003.

In part by delivering growth and lifting citizens out of poverty, and in part by cracking down on opponents, Erdogan has since cemented his reputation as an autocratic and powerful leader whom citizens ought to simultaneously fear and respect. In other words, he has come to embody a new version of the devlet baba. Erdogan’s image is both sweet and sour: he casts himself as a dominant yet hard-working patriarchal figure who, like Ataturk, wants citizens to follow his lifestyle choices. Unlike his Kemalist predecessors, of course, he is deeply conservative and recognizes no firewall between rigid Islamic piety and politics.

His base has loved him and his opponents have feared him. To earn that love and fear, he has lifted many Turks out of poverty, while squashing dissent by sending his opponents to prison. Erdogan is nicknamed reis (captain), a term referring to his family’s maritime origins on the Black Sea coast. The title also underscores his undisputed position as the man at Turkey’s helm. Passengers must listen to the captain, since their welfare depends on him.

CHOPPY WATERS

Erdogan’s political persona, however, may not be able to stand up to the coming maelstrom. The earthquake this month is a disaster of historic proportions. It killed more people than did the Turkish War of Independence a century ago.

Perhaps any government would have struggled to address such a disaster swiftly and comprehensively. But by any standard, the Erdogan government’s initial response was slow and haphazard. The president will come under scrutiny for gutting and manipulating the country’s key institutions, including its relief agencies, over the past decade, replacing their executives with loyalists and in the process rendering the agencies dysfunctional. Erdogan downgraded the Turkish Red Crescent Society, also known as Kizilay, a relief organization linked to the International Red Cross Society, because it would not bow to his power. Instead, he set up the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD), Turkey’s equivalent of FEMA, the United States’ natural disaster management agency. Kizilay, Turkey’s traditional relief agency but now a ghost of its previous self, was nowhere to be seen after the earthquakes. AFAD, its replacement, also failed to show up. In the end, neither body provided adequate or well-coordinated assistance to earthquake victims.

Turkey’s citizens are still reeling at the scale of the devastation caused by the earthquake, but they are angered by how state negligence surely contributed to a high death toll. Images from badly affected towns and cities show one apartment block after another completely pancaked, evidence of widespread code- and construction-related violations and corruption. Pictures from Antakya (the ancient city of Antioch) are revealing of this malfeasance: a large apartment building has collapsed, trapping and killing dozens, if not hundreds, while a similarly sized building next to it stands almost intact, its numerous inhabitants presumably spared.

The Erdogan era in Turkey has been marked by construction sprees: vast apartment blocks have replaced single-family homes in most towns, and the skylines of major historic cities, such as Istanbul and Izmir, have changed beyond recognition. Erdogan is already facing harsh public criticism for his government’s response to the earthquake and for its complicity in allowing shoddy construction in recent years, as well as charges that corruption enabled contractors to get away with raising many poorly constructed buildings that have now collapsed.

Even more important, the social contract that tied Erdogan to the citizenry will come under pressure. Just as the 1999 earthquake rocked the Kemalist state, February’s earthquake is undermining Erdogan and the reputation of power and efficiency that he has long cultivated.

In fact, Erdogan’s image might be tarnished beyond repair once a more accurate account of the death toll emerges—many thousands may still be buried under the rubble—and the public’s grief turns into to anger. Many citizens will conclude that Erdogan has failed in his duties and therefore is no longer worth being feared. In other words, Turks may begin to see him less like the consummate leader of the devlet baba and more like a paper tiger. Already, over the past weekend, thousands of people attending soccer matches booed Erdogan’s administration and called for his resignation.

THE BATTLE AHEAD

Erdogan is a talented politician, and he will do his best to evade the coming furor. To absolve himself and protect his reputation, he will claim that the earthquake was an act of God beyond his control, using his influence over an estimated 90 percent of Turkey’s media to convince citizens that the high death toll was unavoidable given the scale of the earthquake. He may also attempt to shift blame to small construction firms, emphasizing individual negligence and misconduct to absolve his government of responsibility. On February 12, for example, police arrested numerous suspects allegedly associated with the collapse of thousands of buildings.

None of these actions may suffice, however, to insulate him from the fury of the populace. Once the actual death count of the earthquake becomes clear, debates will sweep across Turkey regarding the delivery and coordination of aid and whether government failures ultimately prevented the rescue of trapped people.

In response, Erdogan will shift posture and seek to once again instill fear in the citizenry, trying to appear strong and in command. He has already begun to take such a stance, including in his first address to the country after the tremor. With the camera zooming in on his flaring nostrils, an angle meant to accentuate his anger, Erdogan chided citizens for spreading “fake news,” in an indignant tone that seemed incongruous at a moment of such extraordinary grief and loss.

The earthquake and its fallout now present Erdogan with a challenge ahead of the country’s nearing elections. According to the Turkish constitution, parliamentary and presidential elections have to be held no later than five years after the previous polls, in this case in June of this year. In previous weeks, polls showed that Turkey’s Table of Six opposition bloc was running neck and neck with Erdogan’s alliance.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, has already vowed to end the corruption that led to many shoddy buildings being constructed and resulted in so many casualties. His remarks suggest that the opposition will use the earthquake to attack Erdogan during campaign season.

Erdogan might turn to autocratic measures to influence upcoming elections.

Perceiving a drop in his popularity, Erdogan may decide in the coming weeks to postpone elections. Such a postponement flies in the face of Turkey’s constitution, but Erdogan could use his grip over key institutions such as the Supreme Election Council (YSK), the national board for supervising polls, to delay the vote.

Erdogan has wielded the country’s institutions, including the YSK, against his opponents before. In March 2019, he directed the YSK to annul the results of Istanbul’s mayoral election, which the AKP candidate had lost by a narrow margin. The decision prompted outrage and backfired on Erdogan: the opposition candidate won the follow-up election that June by a landslide. To be sure, the YSK is not constitutionally empowered to postpone the national polls beyond June 18, and Erdogan will face pushback for any effort to do so. But he could still quietly compel the YSK to declare that for reasons of force majeure, the earthquake makes staging the elections in June impossible, thereby blaming the ostensibly independent body for any postponement. Even if he were to somehow bypass the constitution, Turkish voters may be so enraged that they punish him at the delayed polls, much as Istanbul’s voters did in 2019.

If Erdogan decides that he cannot or doesn’t want to postpone elections, he might turn to other autocratic measures. His government declared a state of emergency on February 7, suspending rights and liberties in the ten provinces impacted by the earthquake. He is likely to extend the state of emergency once it expires in May. This would mean that in the ten quake-hit provinces—constituting over a sixth of Turkey’s population and many of its most outraged and aggrieved citizens—elections would be neither fair nor free, handing Erdogan a competitive advantage at the polls.

Unless Erdogan can restore his image as the caring and effective reis, the era of Erdogan as a feared and respected leader in Turkey is over. Anger and anguish are building up across the country. Those who love Erdogan love him a bit less; those who fear him fear him even less.

Erdogan, in turn, will try to cling to power, either postponing elections in breach of the country’s constitution or holding unfair polls under a state of emergency. If protests start and spread around the country in reaction to his moves or crackdowns, he could even extend the state of emergency to the whole country. Perhaps anticipating public pushback, he shut down Turkey’s universities on February 11, sending over eight million students to virtual classrooms and dispersing young people from possible centers of protest and rebellion.

A RESILIENT CITIZENRY

A potentially heated showdown looms, but take a step back and grounds for optimism become apparent. In the big picture, Turkey might be experiencing a historic turning point regarding its traditionally paternalistic model of top-down governance. The country’s civil society has done exceptionally well in responding to the earthquake, providing massive and swift relief to victims, while also leading, and even surpassing, government-led rescue efforts. For instance, a Turkish rock star, Haluk Levent, has done perhaps more than some government agencies through his nonprofit group. Turkish Philanthropy Funds, another nongovernmental organization, raised over $8.5 million for recovery efforts in just a few days after the disaster. The country’s strong middle class, mostly a creation of the Erdogan-era economic growth, has taken charge of earthquake relief efforts, and the state and its leaders are playing catch-up.

The resilience of Turkey’s middle class and civil society allow a glimmer of hope amid all the gloom. Turkey’s citizens have now caught a glimpse of a brighter future, in which they are not infantilized and political leaders do not simply style themselves as stern fathers corralling unruly offspring. Instead of producing another paternalistic government, this earthquake could help rebalance the uneven relationship in Turkey between state and society.