Erdogan Rising

I was there with my translator and her friend, who had run a café in the grounds of Surp Giragos, the largest Armenian church in Anatolia, until fighting between local PKK militants and the Turkish security forces enveloped it. He closed up and left his café in December 2015 and had not been back in the ten months since, but a colleague who had been able to get into the curfew zone to check on the church had taken photos for him. It was not so much the loss of his business that made his hand tremble with grief and rage, but what had been done to Surp Giragos. He held up his phone to show me photos of the camp kitchen that the soldiers had set up under the soaring gothic arches of the nave and the Atatürk portrait they pinned up in place of the icons.

It was at that moment that a gaggle of close protection guards, the same guys in olive and black who had accompanied Yıldırım, filed in and fanned out on both levels of the han. The bubbling conversation hushed as if someone had turned down the dial, then the governor walked in and took his place at a breakfast table. Slowly the chatter returned, but we stopped talking about the church and the war that had ravaged the districts just behind these thick old walls and stuck to banal small talk for the rest of the morning.

But the portraits in the public corridors of Aksaray, Erdoğan’s thousand-room palace, show the other side of the man at the top of the clique that rules Turkey. He is still in suits and dark glasses but now in the world’s misery spots rather than the halls of power, kissing the hands of old women in headscarves or surrounded by adoring African children.

The president’s loyal insiders – and often even his opponents – insist that such personal warmth is genuine. One lower-level bureaucrat working in the presidency tells me that in meetings, Erdoğan makes sure everyone has a glass of tea in front of them before he starts. An adviser insists that he berates Turks to have at least three children only because he cares about them as he would his own family. The head of the foreign investment board, who was personally appointed by Erdoğan, says people see the president as their father.

Turks who have met Erdoğan in person say time and again: he is funny. But his instinct to bring an iron fist down on those who oppose him politically is a bona fide part of his personality, too.

‘What I know from his life and his family is that he is not concerned on a macro level,’ a former aide told me. ‘He may cry and help a person but if you tell him that there are thousands of people gathered there, he sends somebody to bust them. A thousand people is something political. The other is something humane.’

Foreign diplomats paint a similar picture. For sure Erdoğan can be charming, and they agree his personal warmth is real. But they also say he can be obstructive and caustic, especially when he feels he is not getting his way or being treated with respect.

‘I don’t find him particularly funny, but he definitely has a presence,’ said one. ‘He was quite warm. He was always patting me on the back. To be this successful you must have something and he absolutely does. He has a very magnetic personality, which does not really come out. He always seems very angry and harsh in his public speaking. But he does not seem like that in private.’

Another, who had personally felt the force of the president’s fury several times during his posting, said there are two Erdoğans: ‘the diplomatic, polished guy who wants to make friends and is trying to act to his capabilities in order to influence others. This is the nice Erdoğan. Then there is the tough, awful Erdoğan. And you never know which one is going to show up.’

Outside the country, Erdoğan’s mercurial and often bullish personality wins him more detractors than fans. But inside Turkey – which is, at its heart, an Eastern country even if it often assumes the veneer of the West – it is seen as his biggest attribute.

‘One of his strongest points is that he is genuine in both doing right and wrong,’ a former adviser tells me. ‘He is very transparent, and that’s a good thing in Turkey. He does not conceal anything. He speaks his mind, and this is why he makes so many mistakes. He sometimes says absurd things. But he is not a European politician in that sense. He is more like a guide figure, like a politician of the Ottoman times.’

The speechwriter

The photo Hüseyin Besli has chosen for the wall of his Istanbul office is a classic of the genre. Erdoğan is smiling, shaded and waving, dressed in a black greatcoat and surrounded by his entourage. It is the new Tayyip in the new Turkey – a place where he is firmly in charge. But with his Marlboro reds, diamond-patterned sweater and tired and sagging grey face, Besli himself looks like a relic of the old – more like an ageing shopkeeper or a minor bureaucrat than the architect of a revolution. His shoulders hunch forward and his smile is resigned. The way he sucks his cigarettes through his own moustache – a little longer than Erdoğan’s and just as grey – suggests a deep sadness. Maybe he is just lost in his thoughts.

We meet in his writing room, a neat, wood-panelled attic in an old Balkan-style house, nestled in the heart of a bubbling district in Asian Istanbul. The streets of Çengelköy are narrow and cobbled, lined with family-run grocers. The district sits on the banks of the Bosphorus, at a point where the land juts out to gift it a panoramic view of the first of the three suspension bridges with the outlines of the mosques of Istanbul’s Ottoman centre in the hazy blue background. The din of a Monday evening rush hour leaks in through the huge window by Besli’s desk as I settle into one of his comfy leather chairs. Revving motorcycles and shouting shopkeepers blend with the wail of the sundown call to prayer. His floor-to-ceiling shelves are packed with books on religion and politics. There is a sticker of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Rabia hand, a four-fingered salute with the thumb tucked under, pasted onto the window, and that Erdoğan portrait is the first thing you’re confronted with as you walk in the door.

Besli chain smokes and occasionally apologises as he breaks off to answer his phone. He says he is sure that I won’t represent his words properly, because the foreign journalists never do.

‘Then why did you agree to speak with me?’ I ask.

‘Because I am polite,’ he laughs.

But I suspect he also craves some recognition for the years he spent moulding the image of the most powerful man in Turkey.

It was in 1974, when Besli was in his mid-twenties, that a tall and striking young man walked into one of his meetings. The National Salvation Party (Milli Selâmet Partisi or MSP) was one of the few overtly Islamist organisations in Turkey at that time, and Besli was head of its youth branch. The country had just undergone its second military coup, and a mushrooming street war between leftist and nationalist youth gangs had sent the murder rate soaring. The rival factions were shooting and stabbing each other to death on the streets and in the university campuses. The MSP stayed outside the violence and the factionalism, meeting to pray, plan and organise. It was a tactic that bore fruit. Throughout the 1970s, the MSP won places in two coalition governments despite never winning more than 12 per cent of the vote, largely thanks to the hopeless fracturing of the non-Islamist parties.

In 1974 Erdoğan, aged twenty-one, was leader of the MSP’s local branch in Beyoğlu, his home borough in inner Istanbul. Besli, a couple of years older, remembers him as a charismatic guy who could already work a room. ‘I don’t remember where I first heard Erdoğan speak, but I remember that he was great, even back then,’ he says. ‘He could make himself heard. When he spoke, people felt sympathy with him.’

Within two years, Besli’s term in office had ended and Erdoğan was elected his successor. They were the young bloods in a party led by the middle-aged and nerdish professor Necmettin Erbakan, who was pursuing an agenda beloved of Islamists since the late Ottoman era. Erbakan insisted that Turkey’s ills could be blamed on foreign meddling and Western influence, and that the cure was to turn it back towards Islam and build relations with the Muslim world. The nefarious secular elites who ruled the republic had done her a disservice by taking her into NATO and cosying up to Europe; what was needed was a revival of strong Islamic morals, population growth and rapid industrialisation to bring Turkey’s living standards up to those of the West.

The establishment was rattled. The army stepped in, launching the third coup of the republic in 1980.

The MSP, like all the other parties, was shut down by the generals. But young Erdoğan’s rise continued. In 1985 he became Istanbul chair of the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP – which replaced the MSP), and then stood unsuccessfully as their candidate for the mayorship of Beyoğlu in 1989. In 1991 he ran for parliament for the first time – and although he won, had to hand his seat to another parliamentary candidate due to the party’s preferential voting system. None of these setbacks discouraged him. That same year Besli began working as Erdoğan’s speechwriter, assembling the strategy that finally propelled him to the Istanbul mayor’s office in 1994. Erdoğan has never conceded victory at the ballot box since.

‘Our struggle was not so much about power, it was about a cause,’ Besli says, when I ask him what drove them to continue even when so much was stacked against them. ‘When you have a cause, you don’t give up just because you’re not in power. And when you’re a man of fate, you tell yourself that you have to struggle and the result will not be defined by you. You do what is necessary and leave the rest to Allah.’

We are twenty minutes into our conversation, yet it is the first time God has been mentioned. I can’t tell whether it is deliberate; however, when I later ask Besli what their biggest hurdle has been, he admits it was the fear and scepticism of Turkey’s secularist voters. He refers to them as the generation raised by the republic, brainwashed into rejecting their faith and their Eastern traditions in favour of a false affinity with the West. But he also says that a key part of his strategy with Erdoğan was to keep religion away from their image, so that they could broaden their appeal beyond the narrow, pious support base the MSP had commanded. When Erdoğan entered the mayor’s office, he signed a paper promising that no one would lose their jobs because of their political affiliations or be forced to adhere to Islamic rules. On the job, he won respect for his party’s technocratic efficiency.

Erdoğan’s early conciliations in the mayor’s office quickly gave way to a more combative tone. During a rally in the eastern town of Siirt in 1997 he read out a poem that blended nakedly Islamist metaphors with militaristic nationalism: ‘The mosques are our barracks, / The minarets our bayonets, / And the faithful our soldiers.’ The judicial system – dominated by Kemalists – seized the opportunity to take Erdoğan back down to where they believed he belonged. The mayor of Istanbul was sentenced to ten months in prison for inciting religious hatred. And he had already left the Refah Party, which was closed down anyway only eleven months later. But jail time proved the best image boost Erdoğan could have dreamed of.

Jail time

In 1999 the future Turkish president joined Johnny Cash and Tupac Shakur, and released an album from prison.

Bu şarkı burada bitmez (This Song Does Not End Here) – is a 35-minute compilation of Erdoğan reading poetry over a soundtrack of lilting Turkish melodies. Produced by Ulus Music, a label specialising in ‘introducing to the world the richness, colour and variety of Turkish music and same time making sure that the whole world can take advantage of our cultural preciousness’, the album remains widely available on CD and cassette on Turkish second-hand trading websites.

By the time the glamorous 43-year-old mayor of Istanbul broke with Refah and was sent to jail, he had already started an aggressive spin campaign to reinvent himself as Turkey’s number one Islamist. In the eleven months between his conviction and the start of his jail term, Erdoğan called his first major press conference. As mayor of Istanbul Erdoğan had almost always refused to speak with foreign journalists. Now, he needed the media to reboot his image for the world stage. So he invited a group of correspondents based in the city for a slap-up lunch at an upmarket restaurant serving hearty Ottoman-style food.

‘Why are you meeting with us now?’ asked one of the more cynical correspondents.

Erdoğan turned in surprise to his assistant, a pleasant young man who had always relayed his boss’s rejection of interview requests with an apologetic air. ‘Why didn’t you tell me these journalists have been wanting to meet with me?’ he berated the unfortunate bureaucrat.

It was, says one of the correspondents who was at the lunch, a transparent attempt to save face. ‘A charm offensive,’ was how another described it.

As the court case against Erdoğan dragged on, Istanbul city council turned its website into a protest page featuring messages of support and a link to the full text of his defence statement. By the time his appeal failed and he was finally sent to prison in March 1999, he had built a reputation as a free-speech crusader with a legion of loyal personal supporters. Before he was jailed he was allowed to attend Friday prayers at the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul for a final time. Huge crowds came to pray alongside him, and formed a convoy to escort him to Pınarhisar jail, north-west of Istanbul. When he was released in July 1999, having served only 119 days of his ten-month sentence, thousands turned out again to greet him.

The ad man

Erdoğan was not the only Islamist mayor to have been imprisoned in Turkey at that time. In 1996 şükrü Karatepe, the mayor of Kayseri in central Anatolia and also from the Refah Party, had told a rally that his ‘heart was bleeding’ because he had been obliged to attend a ceremony honouring Atatürk. Convicted of insulting the eternal leader in April 1998, a week after Erdoğan’s conviction for inciting religious hatred, he had a one-year sentence slapped on him and was sent straight to prison with no time for appeal. But Karatepe did not have a marketing genius behind him – and he was forgotten as soon as his cell door slammed shut.

Erdoğan, meanwhile, was working with the best in the business.

‘Even when Erdoğan was forbidden from engaging in politics we were engaged in communication campaigns. There was a political ban on him but we were trying to do as much as the law allowed,’ says Cevat Olçok, the bearded and sharp-suited director of Arter, Turkey’s first political marketing agency. I am sitting across from him at a huge desk in the agency’s minimalist-industrial-style Istanbul offices in April 2018. The clean lines of the shelves behind him are ruined by Ottoman-style knick-knacks, books and framed pictures of Erdoğan. Pride of place, though, goes to the photos of his brother, Erol, and nephew, Abdullah, both killed on the Bosphorus bridge by coup soldiers on 15 July.

Erol Olçok, who founded Arter with Cevat, first worked with Erdoğan as a spin doctor in the Istanbul mayoral election campaign of 1994. He was raised in a poor and religious family in the Anatolian town of Çorum and, like Erdoğan, had graduated from religious high school. But instead of entering the clergy like most of his peers he went to art college – the first from his village to take advantage of higher education.

‘I will never forget the day I first passed the Bosphorus,’ Erol later said of his first day in the city in 1982.

In 1986 he graduated with a degree in art history and started working in advertising. It was a relatively new and rapidly expanding sector; prime minister Turgut Özal, the first elected leader after the 1980 military coup, was opening up Turkey’s economy and Turks were becoming consumers in the Western style. After working with a number of commercial agencies Erol started Arter in 1993, and a year later was contracted by Erdoğan. Such was the bond that developed between them that, having won the Istanbul mayoral elections, Erdoğan appointed Erol Olçok his press adviser.

‘Erdoğan never stopped marketing himself,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘We were making greetings cards from him for religious holidays and important dates for the country. When he had the political ban, his motto was “this song does not finish here”. We designed the poster for everybody in Turkey. There was a huge demand for it. It was in every city in Turkey.’

Arter’s iconic poster was the namesake of the later album of poetry: a picture of Erdoğan in profile, speaking from behind a podium with a Turkish flag in the background. At the top, his name. At the bottom, that slogan – a statement. And other than that, nothing else: no party logo, no symbol and no explanation. None was needed. Erdoğan had become a brand.

The rebels

As Erdoğan was serving his jail term, a separate group of young renegades was calling for change from within the Refah Party. These rebels, like Erdoğan, had grown frustrated with Necmettin Erbakan’s way of doing politics. From cosmopolitan, professional backgrounds, they included Bülent Arınç, a suave lawyer of Cretan heritage, and Abdullah Gül, a former economist at the Islamic Development Bank. Gül stood as candidate for the leadership of Refah in 1997, hoping to reform the party from within. He was narrowly beaten – but a few months later the party was closed down anyway.

‘We had many successes with Refah. But later on, the political landscape changed and we started to make mistakes,’ Gül tells me in the huge drawing room of his Istanbul palace. ‘There was a convention and I became the candidate. I was talking about democracy, I was talking about fundamental rights, about human rights and saying that if the rhetoric is not good in politics we have to adopt the correct policies. The party was very authoritarian at the time. There was no chance for me yet I was about to win. It was a shock. The party was then closed by the constitutional court without justification … I was trying to save the party.’

As had happened so many times over the decades, Refah reformed under a new name, the Saadet Partisi (Felicity Party). But the new guard led by Gül did not join them – instead they split and formed a new grouping. They started their public relations drive with a rally in Kayseri, Gül’s home city, and followed it up with a tour of Turkey. And they had attracted a star – Erdoğan, recently released from prison and with a soaring reputation. Gül had lobbied the European Parliament to oppose Erdoğan’s jail sentence and personally approached him to join his new party once he was released. The soft-spoken technocrat says he had no issue with handing over the top position in the party he had founded to the most charismatic Islamist Turkey had ever produced. The demand for him to do so came, he says, from within the ranks.

‘We all decided to make Erdoğan chairman. His popularity was higher,’ Gül says.

The Arter team came as part of the Erdoğan package – and so they got to work on the new party’s branding.

‘We worked on the name, the logo and corporate identity,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘Erol was the leader in all these things. We made additions to the party’s manifesto, and we worked on the name. There were many ideas for that: one of them was the Genç Partisi [Young Party]. They did not like it. Then there was Beyaz Partisi [White Party] and from that it became Ak [meaning pure]. It became AK Partisi because Turkey needed a clean page. All the political establishments were tired, and the society was not getting what it wanted. But the people in this party were clean and wise – this is why we proposed AK Partisi.’

As Arter revved up the spin, speechwriter Hüseyin Besli was working out who the Turkish people actually were – and how the newly hatched AK Party might win their votes. Such polls are unremarkable in most developed democracies, but in Turkey the entrenched system had ensured that power always lay in the hands of the secular elite. They would vote one way and the religious masses would vote another and, ultimately, the army and other facets of state would decide how the country should be run. There had seemed little point in any political party trying to effect change. But that’s what Erdoğan’s team did and continues to do – obsessively.

‘We did comparative studies of the Turkish people, and of the dynamics of the previous coups and the reasons why they had happened,’ Besli says. ‘We found out what people’s reactions to the coups were, and then we considered all the information we had gathered. We wanted to avoid anything that might lead to such events in the future. Today, Erdoğan says we are not the ones who founded the AKP – it was the people. Our main motto was to be the voice of the voiceless. We really understood what people wanted.’

Abdullah Gül credits the expanding television coverage of parliament and political debates in the mid-1990s for Refah’s, and then the AKP’s, growing success.

‘Before politics happened in meetings. Politicians were talking with people and then coming here’ – to Istanbul and Ankara – ‘and living and doing things differently,’ Gül says. ‘When TVs started to show parliament, people started to monitor their representatives. In the village they were supporting someone, and then seeing what they were doing in parliament. We were addressing their feelings. We were being live broadcasted. The first live broadcast started in the 1990s. It was one of the contributions to Turkish democracy. Before, political allegiance was just a tradition that was passed on. Now it is more transparent. Refah got rooted in the country in the 1990s. People listened on TV. They saw that we were addressing their feelings. This is how everything was restructured.’

Turkey’s economy was also creaking by the time the AKP launched in 2001; the currency was slipping into hyper-inflation and unemployment rocketing towards 10 per cent. All the existing parties were tarnished with corruption, incompetence or both. The logo Erdoğan and his team eventually plumped for to represent their new party was the light bulb – a symbol of hope in dark times. And to fit with the letters A, K and P, they came up with a full and generic name – the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party).

Soon, the AKP was the most talked-about party in Turkey. A secularist newspaper columnist said it should be pronounced as its letters – A-K-P – rather than as ‘Ak Party’, as the marketers had intended. It is still a point of contention today – and a great way of determining a Turk’s feelings about the party. Every time I say ‘A-K-P’, Cevat Olçok pulls me up.

‘Ak Partisi!’ he snaps, without irony.

‘When it started, the goal was to make AK Partisi … a brand in Turkey and the world,’ he continues. ‘This was said at the foundation. AK Partisi: a world party. Seventeen years have passed. You will see AK Parti everywhere in Turkey, and always with a corporate identity.’

In November 2002, only fifteen months after it was officially launched, the AKP won an outright majority of seats in the parliament. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), one of the major international election monitors, was glowing in its opening assessment of the poll. It wrote in its final report:

The 3 November elections for the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) demonstrated the vibrancy of Turkey’s democracy. A large number of parties campaigned actively throughout the country, offering the electorate a broad and varied choice. The sweeping victory of opposition parties showed the power of the Turkish electorate to institute governmental change.