Day 10: Winding Down

Today was our last full day in the Seferihisar area with Zeynep. We planned a day at the beach, but the sky was overcast and the water cold, so we didn’t go for a swim. We spent most of the day at a beach cafe in Sığcık with Zeynep’s friend Ezgi, talking about life in Turkey and elsewhere.

On this trip, we’ve kept to well-developed areas and spent time with secular social-democratic people. From our narrow slice of Turkey it’s easy to consider it a country and culture very much like our own. We have great mobile Internet, ATM and credit cards work fine, air conditioning is common, there’s lots of newer cars on the well-paved roads.

But Turkey as a whole has a different flavour. 42% of the country is now living in poverty. Inflation has been rising steadily and large-scale economic activity has been stagnant.

When I heard the poverty statistic, I asked if the Turkish President Erdoğan was someone who was promising to help poor people. He and his political party have a lot of strong support from the lower economic strata of Turkey.

The answer I got was “no.” Erdoğan has been enacting more elitist policies and reducing taxes on luxury goods. So then why, I asked, was he so popular? The answer I got was that he has been inflaming nationalist and religious rhetoric through conspiracy theories and propaganda. He (fairly typically for a right-wing politician these days) blames foreigners and secularists for the ills of the country, while taking credit for anything positive, even if it happened before his rise to power. Combine that with widespread political imprisonment, deep control over the judicial system, and non-subtle election tampering, and you have a self-perpetuating dictatorial regime.

There are, at least, some signs of cracks in the established power structure. His party lost a major election in Istanbul. The election was overturned due to “irregularities”, and a do-over was rescheduled for June, but they might well lose that one too. There’s a lot of dissatisfaction and recognition that he’s turning Turkey into a regressive dictatorship, and people are acting on that.

But the future is especially unpredictable, and things could get worse before they get better. I’m glad I got to come here now.