After 20 years, is Turkey finally tired of its angry father figure?

Today’s elections are a chance for mild-mannered, modest Kemal Kilicdaroglu to take over

There is earthquake diplomacy and there is earthquake democracy. Earthquake diplomacy is when diplomatic relations between Turkey and Greece improve in the aftermath of earthquakes.

It was first labelled as such in 1999 when earthquakes struck both countries and they helped one another save lives. In a farewell speech not so long ago a previous Turkish ambassador to Greece lamented the fact that it took earthquakes for relations between the two countries to improve.

Earthquake democracy is the idea that the cluster of earthquakes that struck Turkey last February and killed more than 50,000 people, most of whom were buried alive in collapsed buildings, may have an impact on Turkey’s presidential elections this Sunday.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s response to the catastrophe was to say it was the force of destiny – kismet in the jargon of the Levant – and promise to rehouse all the survivors within a year.

His critics claim that earthquakes do not kill people, it is collapsed buildings that kill, and they collapse because of shoddy building in breach of building regulations for which Erdogan’s government was to blame. In Turkey, however, the cult of the strong leader that Erdogan projects would probably get him over the political tremors caused by the earthquakes, but that does not mean that that he does not have other more intractable problems this time round nor that the earthquakes are not the last straw that breaks the support of some voters.

The Turkish lira has been is in free fall for some time, and inflation is rampant, and he has no answer to the dire economic distress this is causing voters who previously benefitted from his successful management of the economy. At the same time the opposition to Erdogan has united behind the quiet and modest Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a Clement Attlee kind of figure who is the opposite of Erdogan in every respect.

For those who justifiably do not know Attlee, he was the quiet self-effacing man who became Britain’s prime minister in the demob election of 1945. He was leader of the Labour Party that had been part of the national government of Britain during the war. Labour defeated the Conservative party headed by the grand and mighty Winston Churchill shortly after victory in Europe at the end of World War II.

Attlee did not talk much and when he did it was in staccato monosyllabic terms. Like Attlee was an antidote to the imperialist tendencies of Churchill, Kilicdaroglu would be an antidote to the autocratic neo Ottoman tendencies of the charismatic Erdogan but not only that – Kilicdaroglu also looks a bit like Attlee.

But we must not get ahead of ourselves here because nobody knows whether Kilicdaroglu’s quiet modest style appeals to the Turkish people in preference to the strongman image of Erdogan. Have the Turks had enough of being ruled by a permanently angry father figure after 20 years? That is ultimately the million Turkish lira question.

Kemal Ataturk was a father figure too but he was also a war leader of genius and man of ideas, and a visionary who also had a sense of humour and loved a glass or two and long chats with friends late into the night and is rumoured occasionally even to have danced the zeibekiko with Greek fishermen in tavernas by the Bosphorus.

According to Hannah Lucinda Smith, the seasoned correspondent of the Times newspaper in Turkey, “Erdogan is a genius at reading his country” and his rise and hold on power the last 20 years is testament to his extraordinary political skills.

“Nobody manages to stay in power for 20 years unless they are extremely good at what they do,” she surmised in a documentary called Turkey: Empire of Erdogan,

currently showing on BBC iPlayer – a must-see for anyone interested in understanding the power dynamic behind the success of the Erdogan brand of Turkish politics in the 21st century.

And yet Erdogan himself is worried this time round because the omens have not been good ever since his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) lost mayoral elections in Istanbul in 2019. He has previously said “if we lose Istanbul we lose Turkey” and his prediction haunts him because as Ms Smith said, Erdogan is a genius at reading the mood of his country.

The 2019 result in Istanbul is not only interesting because Erdogan’s AK Party lost there, but also because it provides a glimpse of what might happen if Erdogan loses. What happened in Istanbul in March 2019 after the AK Party candidate and Erdogan loyalist Binali Yildirim lost to Ekrem Imamoglu was that the result was challenged and the High Election Board cancelled the result on some technical procedural ground. There was then a rerun and the AK Party lost again, this time by a much wider margin.

Ekrem Imamoglu, who was a strong candidate to run for president against Erdogan, was then prosecuted and convicted of defamation for allegedly calling the members of the board who annulled his election fools. In England judges are frequently called fools by the tabloid press and the law an ass, but far from being defamatory by damaging their reputation it somehow enhances it, which is why even Erdogan once brought a successful libel case in London against the Daily Telegraph.

Imamoglu was sentenced to 2 years and 7 months imprisonment and banned from taking part in politics. He appealed and his sentence is suspended pending appeal. So Erdogan is unlikely to go quietly and if the 2019 Istanbul mayoral election is anything to go by he may challenge the result unless he loses by a landslide.

A landslide is unlikely but as all the political parties opposed to Erdogan are now behind Kilicdaroglu, he is in with a good chance to oust the formidable Recep Tayyip Erdogan and people will have to get used to the correct pronunciation of his name because the twirls over and under some Turkish letters are challenging to English speakers even though Turkish as a language is very phonetic.

In Turkish ‘c’ with a hook underneath is pronounced ‘ch’ as in church and the ‘g’ with breve over it elongates the preceding vowel. Thus the pronunciation of Kilicdaroglu in English is as if it were written Kilichdarowlou.

Alper Ali Riza is a king’s counsel in the UK and a retired part time judge