Erdogan Rising

Erdoğan is the star of this show. First, he unveils a memorial to the martyrs. Stuck up on a grassy hill at the east side of the bridge, it resembles a space-age luminescent moon: huge, bright white and incongruous. Inscribed inside it are the names of the civilians who died. The Islamic funeral prayer is broadcast from here loudly, twenty-four hours a day, though, as one of my cynical friends points out, it is impossible to hear it over the roar of the traffic.

Next come the speeches from the stage set up at the apex of the bridge. The immediate audience is VIP only, but big screens have been arranged in the area just outside the eastern entrance for the tens of thousands who are here in order to be in close proximity to their leader. The event is also being streamed live on every Turkish TV channel. As Erdoğan takes his seat, a range of dignitaries take turns to pay homage.

‘Thank you to our martyrs, and thank you to our commander in chief!’ shrieks the announcer. ‘Recep. Tayyip. ERDOĞAAAAAAAAAN!’

Devout men in skullcaps spread flattened cardboard boxes on the road and kneel in the direction of Mecca. Everyone else falls silent as the announcer rolls through the names of the dead. Then Tayyip himself takes to the podium to deliver a speech full of invective against the traitors and the meddling foreign powers, packed with promises to chop off the heads of those responsible. He is then chauffeured to his private jet, which will fly him and his retinue to the capital, Ankara, where they will do it all over again.

Those who do not belong to Erdoğan’s fan club escape to Turkey’s liberal coastal towns, avoid the TV and newspapers, and drink cocktails on the shores of the Mediterranean until it is over. Yet their president finds them. Shortly before midnight, anyone using a mobile phone gets Erdoğan’s recorded message on the other end of the line: ‘As your president, I congratulate your July fifteenth democracy and national unity day. I wish God’s mercy on our martyrs and health for our veterans,’ he says in his distinctive, drawn-out tones. I get six calls within an hour from friends who just want to test it out, not quite believing that even Tayyip would pull such a stunt.

Events like the coup anniversary have become Turkey’s rock concerts – especially since the actual concerts dried up. I had tickets to see Skunk Anansie, a band I was obsessed with as a teenager, with an old school friend in Istanbul a few days after the coup. But the band cancelled the gig soon after the news broke of the 15 July massacres. Attendance at football matches – a working-class passion in Turkey – has also fallen since the Passolig, an electronic ticketing system designed to stamp out hooliganism, was introduced in 2014. Turkish politicians, though, always seem to find reasons to get on stage to bellow to their flag wavers.

At least the street sellers still have events where they can hawk their merchandise.

‘I used to sell at the football matches,’ says Mehmet, a small, gnarled old man with a thick grey moustache and a clear disdain for this evening’s show. ‘You know – fake team shirts, scarves, that kind of thing. Then they started cracking down on us. The Zabıta’ – a unique Turkish cross-breed of trading-standards-officer-meets-traffic-warden – ‘started issuing fines, and now the teams’ lawyers walk around and check out our stalls. If they see you selling anything with logos, they sue you.’

‘When did the crackdown begin?’ I ask.

‘When Erdoğan came to power!’ he laughs as he replies.

Even here, at Erdoğan’s own event, Mehmet is being screwed: official event marshals are riding around in pick-up trucks laden with Turkish flags and baseball caps bearing the official coup commemoration logo, cheap mementoes they are handing out for free. I pick some up to add to my burgeoning collection of Turkish political tat, and continue on towards the bridge.

Just before the arch takes flight the crowds grow so thick I lose the will to keep pushing through. Instead I stop, look around, and take in the febrile buzz. A friend and fellow journalist has texted me, warning that the riled-up crowd has been chanting abuse at the CNN news crew. I thought that, with my notebook firmly in my rucksack, I would blend in. I was wrong.

‘Excuse me, are you a journalist?’ asks a slight young woman in black abaya and headscarf who emerges from nowhere, catching me by my elbow, and off guard.

Yes, I reply, I am.

‘Which channel?’

Her eyes are hard and suspicious, not friendly as those of nosy Turks usually are. I tell her I work for a newspaper, not for TV, but she doesn’t believe me.

‘Really?’

My companion for the evening was caught in a mob attack during the coup in Egypt four years ago, and is alert to the warning signs. Other people are beginning to look around, so I shake the woman off and we push deeper into the crowd. When I stop again, I notice a young man with terrible teeth, dark brown and shunted into his mouth at weird angles, gazing up at the screen and grinning.

‘Tayyip!’ he yells as live pictures of his hero, just a few hundred metres down the road, flash up. ‘TAYYIIIIIIIIIIP!’

He is so enraptured he doesn’t notice me staring.

The Justice March

One week earlier: it’s the other tribe’s turn. On a humid Sunday afternoon scores of Turks in white T-shirts descend onto a corniche on the Asian bank of the Bosphorus. There is no Erdoğan merchandise on sale here.

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the opposition, has just walked here from Ankara – a 280-mile, three-week trek in the blistering heat, accompanied by hundreds of police officers. Along the way he has gathered thousands of supporters shouting ‘HAK! HUKUK! ADALET!’ (Rights! Law! Justice!) as they weave through Istanbul’s poor outer suburbs. One side of the highway leading into the city has been shut down for the marchers. Vans travelling up the other side beep their horns in solidarity. From the balconies of crumbling concrete apartment blocks, women swathed in black burkas shake their fists and scream in fury. Others hold up their hands in a four-fingered salute with the thumb tucked under – the sign of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, adopted by Erdoğan’s fan club.

Kılıçdaroğlu walks the final mile alone – a small, defiant figure surrounded by rings of black-clad cops. No one thought he would get this far. When he began walking, spurred by the arrest of one of his party members, he was mocked. Now he is about to step on stage in front of hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of people who support him, and who despise Erdoğan.

But Kılıçdaroğlu’s face wouldn’t look quite right on a T-shirt. He is grey, diminutive, pushing seventy. A career bureaucrat. A man who has spent his seven years at the head of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), Turkey’s secularist party, eclipsed by six-foot ex-footballer Erdoğan. So instead of Kılıçdaroğlu’s face the street sellers’ wares bear the face of a blue-eyed blond with sharp cheekbones and a debonair dash: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who not only founded Kılıçdaroğlu’s party, but also the Turkish republic. He was a polymath, a womaniser and a thirsty drinker, a war hero, a visionary and a statesman. And he is a hero – to this half of the country. He has been dead for eighty-one years, and he is still Erdoğan’s biggest rival.

Here is the Atatürk legend. He was born simple Mustafa, son of a former army officer and a housewife, in 1881 in Thessaloniki, now in modern Greece but at that time one of the richest and most diverse cities in the Ottoman Empire. He followed the familiar path for a bright boy from a modest background. First, he attended military school, where he studied Western philosophy alongside the bedrocks of literacy and numeracy, and was bestowed with the second name Kemal, meaning perfection, by a maths teacher. After finishing school he became an army officer.

He was serving an empire in decline. The Ottomans had once ruled a great stretch of the globe spanning Europe, Asia and Africa, but by the beginning of the twentieth century the peripheries were breaking away. The army Kemal joined was growing increasingly disloyal to the sultan, and by the onset of the First World War had all but overthrown him. Kemal was a lower-level player in the revolt, and a passionate advocate of reform. His experiences serving on fronts in the Balkans, North Africa and the Levant convinced him that such a huge, unwieldy, multi-ethnic empire could no longer survive and that it must be trimmed back to a Turkish nation state.

The Great War was the Ottoman Empire’s inglorious finale. By then it was being run de facto by the Young Turks, a cadre of military officers including Kemal. Meanwhile the sultan, Mehmet V, sat sulking in his palace in Istanbul, fully aware that almost all his power had drained away, even though by name he was still head of an empire.

Kemal was dismayed when his fellow officers decided to enter the war on the side of the Germans, but he fought with distinction. He secured his reputation as a war hero at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, when troops from Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand launched a huge naval attack on the Dardanelles, the last maritime bottleneck before Istanbul. Against all odds, the Turks led by Kemal beat them back in a final show of force – and then the empire crumpled entirely.

The Ottomans’ decision to ally with the Germans proved terminal. On 13 November 1918, just two days after the end of the war, British, French, Greek and Italian forces moved into Istanbul. Soon after, the Greeks seized a large swath of the Aegean coast and Thrace, the funnel of land leading from Istanbul into Europe. Meanwhile, the French had moved into the cities of the south-east, close to the current border with Syria, as well as the coal-rich regions of the north.

A new sultan, Mehmet VI, did little to prevent the unpicking of his empire. In 1920 he signed the Treaty of Sèvres, which recognised the various foreign mandates in his own lands. The fight appeared to have gone out of the Ottomans – but it had not gone out of Mustafa Kemal. Almost as soon as the armistice was signed he began hatching plans to reverse the damage. Slipping Istanbul, he headed for Samsun, a city on the Black Sea coast in northern Turkey, and began building a national resistance movement. Despite opposition from the sultan, who ordered him to cease his activities, by early 1920 Mustafa Kemal had built a massive following and established an alternative parliament in Ankara, a small city on the Anatolian plain. From there, he launched the Turkish war of independence, seizing back the Anatolian territories, the coast and then, finally, Istanbul. The last British warship departed the old imperial capital on 17 November 1922. Aboard was Mehmet, the last sultan, expelled in disgrace by the new parliament set up by Mustafa Kemal. Mehmet returned six years later, in a coffin, having lived out his remaining years on the Italian Riviera.

Five days after Mehmet was discharged, the sultanate was dissolved. His cousin, Abdulmecid, was appointed caliph – head of the world’s Muslims – but his tenure was similarly short. Less than two years later, the caliphate was also abolished. The 600-year-old Ottoman Empire was over.

Mustafa Kemal had led a movement that saved Turkish pride and reclaimed great swaths of its territories. From the ruins of the Ottoman Empire he established a modern republic: in 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, recognising Turkey as a sovereign state. For most men, this might have been enough. But it was here that Mustafa Kemal’s most remarkable work began. As the first president of the republic, from its founding in 1923 to his death in 1938, he set himself an enormous task: to pick up his people, shake out their old habits and mindsets, and reshape them as citizens for the twentieth century. Among his more famous reforms was to scrap the Ottoman alphabet, written in the same script as Arabic, and replace this with Latin letters. He introduced secularism into the constitution and banished God to the private sphere, and had everyone choose a surname in the Western tradition, leading to a plethora of colourful monikers in present-day Turkey. It is not unusual to meet a Mr ‘Oztürk’ (‘pure Turk’), ‘Yıldırıım’ (‘lightning’) or ‘Imamoğlu’ (‘son of an imam’). Mustafa Kemal’s own choice, ‘Atatürk’, means ‘Father of the Turks’. And he advocated passionately for the equal rights of women.

For the people who wave his flag, Atatürk is the man who saved Turkey from the fate of some of its unfortunate neighbours. ‘If it wasn’t for Atatürk, we would be like the Arabs!’ is a common refrain. If that sounds bigoted to a Westerner’s ears, then some time spent in the Middle East might bring you round. Travelling and working as a woman in the Arab world can be infuriating at best, scary at worst. I have been heckled, grabbed, groped, patronised and scorned during my time working in Arab countries – simply because I am a woman –though I would like to pay tribute here to my scores of male colleagues and friends in that part of the world who do not fit the stereotype, and who have often saved me from those situations. In Turkey, women seem simply to sigh inwardly at embarrassingly clichéd chat-up lines, and learn how to deal with machismo displays of jealousy and the constantly hungry stares from men. What they don’t sigh at but have to bear is the appallingly high, and apparently rising, rate of domestic violence and killings of women at the hands of their male relatives. Yet in the secular neighbourhoods of Turkey’s western cities at least, women can live almost as freely as they do in the West. I can go running, Lycra-clad, in the morning, and hit bars and clubs wearing mini-dresses at night in Istanbul. Atatürk’s admirers would credit that to him – whether that is true or not.

Atatürk’s fan club is secular (at least politically if not always privately), relatively wealthy, educated, well-coiffed and decidedly less spiky to deal with. In short, they are almost the mirror image of the Turks who turn out for Erdoğan. During Kılıçdaroğlu’s long walk, a joke goes around that his supporters who can’t be bothered to walk alongside him are sending their drivers instead. The people who turn out to what has become known as ‘the justice rally’ look like professors, writers and engineers. There are large groups of middle-aged women who arrive on chartered coaches from faraway cities, cackling between themselves at crude jokes as they walk to the parade ground. I watch sweet old retired couples in matching JUSTICE T-shirts walking hand in hand along the corniche. These people belong to the same Turkey as the old ladies with fur coats and small dogs who live in my 1960s apartment block, clinging to their crystal tumblers of whisky, their cigarettes and all the former glamour from those heady days. There is no horror-show dental work on display here.

‘Aaaaaah, we’re among the beautiful people!’ says Yusuf, a Turkish photographer who is firmly of this world, even though it pains him to admit it. When I really want to needle him I call him a ‘White Turk’, the lazy label for this half of the country. It refers to the elites, the secularists, ‘those people who sit by the Bosphorus sipping on their whiskies’, as one of Erdoğan’s staunchest allies once put it, with a visceral sneer of disgust. The president is proud to represent the other half of Turkey – the poor, the religious, the marginalised. ‘Your brother Tayyip is a Black Turk!’ he once roared in a speech to his faithful. Whenever I call Yusuf a White Turk, he rolls his eyes and huffs a little. But he never denies it.

The walk down the corniche to the Maltepe parade ground, where Kılıçdaroğlu will take the stage, has the air of a genteel Sunday stroll. The white-clad masses lick ice creams and pause for tea in the kitsch waterside cafés. There is a happy, easy hum of conversation – I pick up snippets of holiday stories, and of updates on how the children are doing at university. There is less venom here than at Erdoğan’s rallies – but also less sense of drive and direction. These people lost control of Turkey fifteen years ago, but they still wear the easy nonchalance of power. Meanwhile Erdoğan’s supporters are still full of the scrappy aggression of the underdog. Old habits are hard to give up.

Kılıçdaroğlu, the bureaucratic grey man, has always made an easy target for ridicule. During his rallies Erdoğan plays videos showing the state of Turkey’s hospitals in the 1990s, when Kılıçdaroğlu was head of the state health department. Admittedly they were terrible back then, full of filthy wards and mind-numbingly long queues. The crowd boos whenever Kılıçdaroğlu’s face pops up on the screen. And as Kılıçdaroğlu begins his walk, Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım – a Erdoğan loyalist to the bone – mocks him.

‘Why don’t you use our high-speed trains?’ he baits, highlighting the sleek new rail link, one of the government’s vote-winning projects.

But by the time Kılıçdaroğlu nears Istanbul Erdoğan is spooked. As thousands of Justice March supporters file past the neo-Soviet-style billboards for the upcoming coup commemorations it becomes embarrassing for Erdoğan: this inadequate rival, stealing his thunder? And so he starts accusing him of tacitly supporting both Gülen, the alleged ringleader of the coup attempt, and the PKK – a known terrorist organisation – through this endeavour.

‘Politics in the parliament has become impossible, so I’m taking it onto the streets. They can’t cope with my free spirit,’ a suntanned and fit-looking Kılıçdaroğlu tells me, back in his Ankara office five days after he has finished the march. With so few trusting the ballot box, these rally turnouts have become the new battleground.

Each time the politicians call their legions to the streets, fierce debate breaks out over the numbers. The CHP claims two million attended Kılıçdaroğlu’s Justice Rally; the office of the Istanbul governor (a government appointee) counters, saying the real figure was 175,000.

Meanwhile, the government’s claims for its own rallies – generally held in the purpose-built Yenikapı parade ground on the European side of Istanbul – always stretch into the millions. At the post-coup ‘Unity Rally’, they claim five million. At a pre-referendum campaign meeting, despite the large gaps in the crowd, they say one million. When I write in my report for The Times that the figure appears to have been inflated, pro-government journalists howl in protest. One accuses me of being a Zionist trying to destroy Erdoğan. The headline in the rabidly loyal newspaper Sabah screams that ‘millions’ turned out on the bridge for the coup anniversary. But even the Sabah journalist loses faith by the first paragraph, revising the figures down to ‘hundreds of thousands’.

For perhaps the first time ever, Istanbul’s Office of the Chamber of Topographical Engineers finds itself in the position of political referee. It weighs in with a statement on the justice-rally numbers, couched in rather different language to the usual Turkish rhetoric:

The rally area of Maltepe is approximately 275,000 square meters. Participants were also located in an area that was closed to traffic, which is around 100,000 square meters. So citizens took part in the rally over a space covering 375,000 square meters … In estimating the participant number, it is usually accepted technically that three to six people are located per meter square, so it can be stated that at least 1.5 million joined the ‘Justice Rally’. Experts say that considering the fullness of the rally area, this number could even be as high as 2 million.

My own back-of-a-fag-packet calculations concur: the areas of the Maltepe and Yenikapı parade grounds are roughly similar, while the part of the bridge where Erdoğan’s coup commemoration was held is not large enough to hold more than 200,000.

‘They don’t inflate the numbers, they just make them up!’ Yusuf says, our calculations hieroglyphing pages of my notebook.

Mehmet the street hawker doesn’t need mathematics.

‘I spend my life in crowds and I know the size when I look at them!’ he says. ‘There were at least three million at the Justice Rally. They were lying when they said a hundred and seventy-five thousand.’

So, yes, Kılıçdaroğlu has boosted his image beyond anyone’s expectations. Yet over his shoulder looms the man who really called out the party faithful: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The rivals

If you have ever read Daphne du Maurier you might recognise Erdoğan’s relationship with the blue-eyed blond. Just as the unnamed narrator of Rebecca obsesses over her husband’s dead first wife, it is easy to imagine how the thin-skinned Erdoğan, desperate to establish his own place in history, spends hours fretting over the continuing popularity of his biggest rival.

You could forget that Atatürk is no longer with us. He is so present in Turkey that you might expect him to pop up at a rally, or be interviewed on TV. Like the Queen, his face is so familiar it becomes difficult to see it objectively. Right now, he is the only person who might wield more power than Erdoğan. He is definitely the only one whose picture you will see more often as you travel around Turkey. Erdoğan’s face, always twenty years younger in photos than in real life, looms large from the banners strung between apartment blocks in conservative neighbourhoods. But it is Atatürk who hogs Turkey’s limelight.

It helps that he was photogenic – a natty dresser who instinctively understood the power of the camera at the exact moment the camera was becoming ubiquitous. Each stage of Atatürk’s career – officer, rebel, war hero, visionary – together with his transformation from conventional Ottoman gentleman to twentieth-century statesman and style icon, is represented in a series of classic images.

Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara, can probably be classed as his fanbase HQ, but you will find miniature shrines around every corner and underneath almost every shop awning. In his earliest portraits and photographs he looks like any other stiff-backed Ottoman officer. But in later images Atatürk swims, dances and flirts with the lens, dressed in finely tailored clothes and smoking monogrammed cigarettes. There is the famous silhouette of him stalking the front lines at the Battle of Gallipoli, deep in thought with a finger on his chin and a fez on his head. There is another of him in black tie and tails dancing with his adopted daughter, sleek in her sleeveless evening gown. There is the one where he stares directly into the lens, his cigarette in one hand and the other in his pocket, a Mona Lisa smile on his lips. There he is in a nerdish knitted tank top, teaching the newly introduced Latin alphabet to a group of enthralled children. The list goes on …

I like to try to guess the character of any individual Turk through the picture they display. Whenever I see a military Atatürk pinned up behind a counter I imagine the owner to be a patriot who looks back on his own military service with pride and warmth. If they have opted for a besuited and coiffed Kemal, I wager them to be pro-Western intellectuals. If, as in one meyhane (a traditional rakı-and-fish restaurant) close to my flat, the walls are plastered with various portraits from the start of his varied career to its end, I guess them to be full-blooded Atatürk fanatics.

My own favourite is the picture pulsing with such life and humour that the first time I saw it, hung behind the cash register of an Istanbul bakery, I yelped in delight. It is a colour photo of Atatürk on a child’s swing, aboard a pleasure steamer on a trip to Antalya. It was taken three years before his death, and he is not a well man. His sunken bright eyes and his receding blond hair, his pallor and stout middle betray his love of drink; he would die from cirrhosis of the liver aged fifty-seven. Yet he is grinning so widely you can almost imagine him whooping as he flies. A second, less famous frame taken minutes before or after this one shows him standing on the swing with a young child peeping between his legs. This, I thought, is a personality cult I could get with – and a personality cult is what it is. Insulting Atatürk or defiling his image can still land you with a prison sentence, or at the very least the probability of a beating from the nearest Atatürk devotee. Back in 2007, under Erdoğan’s government, a court decided that all of YouTube should be blocked because it carried a few videos deemed insulting to Atatürk. The ban stayed in place for two and a half years.