Erdogan's future rests on Istanbul mayoral poll

Engin Bayrak owns a hardware store near the shores of the Golden Horn waterway, where ferries connect the European and Asian sides of this vast city of Istanbul.

He has witnessed for himself the vast improvements in services over the last decade as prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party reshaped this city in their image. “Clean water, reliable electricity — things we take for granted now — we didn’t have this before,” Bayrak said.

Even so, he says, now that a corruption scandal has exposed the dark side of the city’s steady growth, he will no longer support Erdogan or his party, known by the initials of its name in Turkish, AKP, in coming elections. “It’s what came after this that has ruined this city,” he said. “The crazy projects are not crazy, they are greedy projects. While we got a few basic amenities, the government and Erdogan got rich. They built an empire on our land, without asking for our permission.”

The capital of Turkey may be Ankara, but the beating heart of the country is Istanbul. Now that a corruption scandal has engulfed the prime minister’s inner circle and imperiled Erdogan’s hold on power, the spotlight is shifting to the coming race for mayor. The contest will be held in March, and Erdogan’s secular and liberal opponents have looked to the election as the first step in challenging him at the ballot box.

Bayrak’s comments may not represent the majority’s views. There are still plenty of religiously conservative voters who seem, for now, to be willing to overlook the corruption allegations. But the comments reflect a growing unease among Istanbul residents about the ramifications of the AKP’s time in power that Erdogan’s opponents hope will reverberate come election time.

Historically, the mayoralty of Istanbul has offered an important route to national power. This holds true not only for the mayor, including Erdogan, who once led the city and used the position as a springboard to the post of prime minister, but also for the party that secures the office. Istanbul, with roughly 15 million people, represents nearly 20 per cent of the country’s total population.

“Istanbul is the path to power in Turkey,” said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “You can put the country of Austria in it and still have room for a few other European countries,” he added, referring to Austria’s population.

The hope that Erdogan’s opponents have in wresting control of Istanbul from the AKP rests on Mustafa Sarigul, the candidate put forward by the main secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, the party of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular founder of modern Turkey. Sarigul is currently the mayor of the city’s Sisli district, a bustling business center that some refer to as the “Manhattan of Istanbul,” with its designer boutiques, including Prada and Chanel, and expensive restaurants.

As a politician, Sarigul seems straight out of central casting: charismatic, energetic, with a good head of hair and who, as a young man, married into the family of an important, secular politician. In an interview, Sarigul hinted at the importance of Istanbul in the secular opposition’s ambitions to govern Turkey once again. “Our first target is Istanbul,” he said. “We are only talking about Istanbul right now.”


Development issues

Sarigul’s opponent is not Erdogan, of course, but Mayor Kadir Topbas, a member of the AKP who won the last election, in 2009, with 44 per cent of the vote. But Erdogan looms large in the race, not least because as prime minister he has often acted like the mayor, having a personal hand in local development issues, including the decision to raze Gezi Park and build a shopping mall. That move set off waves of antigovernment protests last summer.

The urban landscape of this city has long been a canvas for Turkey’s governing elite, but experts say none have so aggressively sought to alter the city’s fabric as the AKP has. New shopping malls seem to sprout like weeds, and construction cranes now seem more of a fixture in the skyline than the mosque minarets.

The contest for mayor of Istanbul will be a reckoning as citizens weigh the improvements in their own lives against the revelations of vast wealth accumulated by government officials and well-connected businessmen — not to mention worsening traffic that has grown with all the development.

Zehra Hocaoglu, 33, who works at a soft drink company and lives in the largely secular neighborhood of Besiktas, acknowledged the improvements the AKP had brought to the city but said he had become increasingly uneasy about the mixture of religion and politics during Mr. Erdogan’s time in power. “We live in a secular country,” he said. “We want to live this way. I will vote for Sarigul.”

But for the pious here, who were oppressed under past secular governments, Erdogan’s rise to power created a heady sense of having a seat in power that they will not easily forsake. “I used to have to take my head scarf off to attend my classes,” said Sevim Ergun, an English teacher, speaking as she rode the ferry to the Asian side of Istanbul. “But this year I was able to attend without taking it off.”

Meanwhile, Erdogan is in open warfare with one of his former allies, Fethullah Gulen, the popular Muslim preacher who lives in exile in the United States. Many of Gulen’s followers are in influential positions in Turkey’s business sector, the news media and, significantly, the judiciary and the police, where they are said to be leading the corruption investigation.

Erdogan has responded by purging the police of Gulen followers and trying to exert more control over the judiciary. An open question, though, is whom the so-called Gulenists will support in the election. A number of experts say they could back Sarigul in an attempt to threaten the AKP’s hold on Istanbul.

It remains unclear whether that could be enough to rally this city’s conservative voters, who will weigh their own economic advancements against the corruption allegations, and tilt the election. “Right-wing voters are pretty much stuck between their wallets and their conscience,” said Ersin Kalaycioglu, a professor of political science at Sabanci University in Istanbul. But an AKP loss in Istanbul, experts say, would jeopardize Erdogan’s ambition to become president later this year in the first national vote for that office, along with his oft-stated goal of presiding over Turkish politics until 2023, modern Turkey’s 100th anniversary.

“Last May, before Gezi, there was little doubt that he would comfortably win the presidency,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the head of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a research organization. “Today there is nothing clear about the future of Turkish politics.”