I, too, would have voted Erdoğan

I spent my Monday in a state of shock and frustration: while I did expect Erdoğan to eventually win the elections in the second round, I was sure that he would lose the majority in Parliament, or at least have the opposition force him into a second round. It had to be the beginning of something new, something beautiful in Turkish politics.

A galvanised opposition managed to come up with strong, charismatic candidates. They managed to build their campaign in a way which clearly showed that a different Turkey could be possible. They had an inspiring message, full of hope and reconciliation. But it wasn’t to be. I spent Sunday night watching Turkish news channels (mostly government controlled), hoping that the Sultan (as they call him), would eventually drop from 59% to under 50%. But he stopped at 52% and he became in the end the first executive president of Turkey. With this result, any hope I had about a new Turkey, which would commit to a clear pro-European and pro-NATO path, which would lift its censorship of the Internet, which would free the thousands of jailed opponents of the president, died away as the supporters of the Sultan were chanting and partying all over Turkey and Europe.

As I went through the five stages of grief, today I finally reached the point where I accepted what happened and tried to find comfort in imagining myself as a supporter of the Sultan. I wanted to feel that background, to understand why one would do ardently vote for the man who started as a committed democrat and ended up thinking about himself as a new Father of the Nation. As it is quite difficult for me to imagine myself as an old man from Anatolia, I decided instead to put myself in the shoes of a 20-year-old man who had finished high school with average to worse-than-average results, who grew up in a religious family in a small town in Anatolia, and went to Istanbul to find work opportunities. My parents, and my grandparents before them, are relatively poor people with a low level of education. My family had to endure the corruption in the Turkish state, a state captured by a military which sworn to protect the Constitution, but at the same time enjoyed highly lucrative deals through its shady businesses. The generals were rich — this was no secret. And people like me would be ridiculed and isolated by the secular-nationalist elite in big cities like Istanbul, Ankara, or Izmir.

It would be clear, then, that politics would not be for people like my family — the power would always lay with the powerful secular elites and the rich generals.

There was absolutely no way for my family to feel that the regime in Turkey would include us in the polis, in the political decision-making processes. As religious people, my parents and grandparents would have probably liked to vote for more pious candidates. But every time they would do so, the military would intervene and remove any leader it suspected of not being committed enough to the “secular values of the Republic”; it was indeed the case in 1960, 1971, and in 1980. In 1997, as Turkey was already on the path towards more European integration, the military understood that it could not act so overtly, so they overthrew the government through a ‘memorandum’, in what was called a ‘post-modern coup’. The message was clear: we are free to vote, but only insofar as we vote for the right people. In 1997, Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul, recited a poem with religious connotations for which he was eventually jailed for four months and removed from office. It would be clear, then, that politics would not be for people like my family — the power would always lay with the powerful secular elites and the rich generals.

Finally, the Sultan’s political prowess came to fruition with the elections of 2002, one year after Erdogan had established the brand-new Justice and Development Party (AK Parti). He managed to build a liberal conservative discourse and broke ranks with the traditional religious parties which enraged the military establishment — parties focused on the “Millî Görüş” ideology and its founder, Necmettin Erbakan, with whom Erdogan parted ways. The rest is history, as they say: you can read a library about that, or just pick this, this, or this article. What matters instead to our story is how this working-class family managed to have a better life under Erdogan: finally, we had one of ours in the most important political office in the country, that of Prime Minister. My mother could finally wear her hijab in public institutions or in schools — she managed to get a degree and would become a primary school teacher in our community. My father could finally afford to leave to work in Germany for a few years to get some money for me and my family.

In 2012, the government managed to reform the education system and impose 12 years of mandatory education. Just a decade ago, most people in my community would leave high school and take jobs in order to feed their families. I was the first of my kin to go to high school and be sure that I would finish it without issues. And of course, I chose a religious school, called “Imam Hatip schools” in Turkey. That way I could better focus on my studies and not be forced to regurgitate the propaganda of the secular elite. I would feel comfortable growing up in Erdogan’s Turkey. Unlike what my parents and grandparents would tell me about their childhood and teenage years, I lived in relative prosperity, free of the instability and coups that characterised post-War Turkey. I would finally grow up in an environment where people from my backgrounds would be more accepted — where people from my backgrounds would be represented in the highest offices of the land. The power no longer belonged to the military and the secular elites; politics became something that I, too, could aspire to.

And now, it’s 2018. I managed to find a decent job in Istanbul, even though I did not, in the end, go to university. But the Imam Hatip school gave me some decent skills and opportunities which I could use to live a better life. Economic growth in Turkey from 2002 to 2018 was not as impressive as in other developing countries, but it was impressive nonetheless. And the Sultan’s rule gave me and my family opportunities that my parents told me they could have never dreamed about in their youth. The economy is not doing so good these days, but I trust Erdogan because my life is going quite decently, and this is all I’ve known in my life. I don’t really want to take the risk of going back to the era that my parents talk about with disgust and pity. I am Muslim, I am Turkish, I am working for my money, why should I be ashamed of being so? I am proud of both my religious and my national identity and I can’t allow those who have no respect for my identity to take power again. Maybe one day Erdogan should leave office, but today is not the day. With increased powers, he will be able to fix what is broken, and I trust him. And this is what matters to me.

It is necessary to understand that a man my age from Turkey, with a working-class background and medium level of education, would not be as connected to international and opposition mass media as we are. And probably democracy and human rights would not represent priorities for him at all — why would they, given that in the times when the secular elite says there was democracy and human rights, people like him would be marginalised and ridiculed, representatives of his background would be overthrown in coups or arrested for reciting poems? He watches government-controlled media and he watches what is happening around him. And he can see, both for himself and from what his parents tell him, that his life is more decent than his parents’ or the people in his community. And even with the inspiring and inclusive campaign of the opposition, even with its message, even given the fact that Erdogan entered into a coalition with the Nationalist Movement Party, which is to blame for many of the coups which kept his people from power for ages, he is not prepared to transfer his trust to them. He knows Recep, and he feels that Recep knows him. And nothing else matters. And given these circumstances, I, too, would have voted Erdoğan.