I've been hearing more and more really scary shit about how Turkey is handling the aftermath of this earthquake. From strangling communications used, among other things, by people trapped to tell rescuers they're alive, to preventing the movement of people internally, a general lack of mobilization of emergency resources that were supposed to be in place and paid for by a specific tax after the last devastating quakes.
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Yeah and I'm not about to pretend that it doesn't happen in Russia or the US because I agree or disagree with the parties in power, or with their political projects. The turkish state is under the private interests of Erdogan's family and their cronies in the AKP. Their control of the media reflects that. Their nation building ambitions are far from a country like China's. It's a standard representative democracy living through a breakdown of law and living standards. That's what is at stake in Turkiye, not a fantasy where the Turkish president is some sort of far sighted Dengist beset by his enemies.
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So is Erdogan's government so catastrophic that he's making it easy for leftists to take over, or is he a far sighted leader at the head of 'good governance'? Which is it?
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And frankly I just disagree.
like, this is just not a thing that is happening in Turkiye. not sanctioning russia is not that.
Fair enough, we can agree to disagree and we'll see how things progress there I guess. Its possible that his coalition will lose the elections, in which case we can see what the alternatives are.
Erdogan won't lose the election. His core supporters are religious conservatives and older people, that wins elections by itself. But the opposition is too fractured, more interested in their narrow political projects than pragmatic politics. The only thing that unites them is a desire to restore judicial independence and the parliamentary system. Besides that, the opposition is more likely to criticize it's own heroes - either because they don't conform to every party's ideals or didn't in the past. Essentially, the group is so heterogeneous that anyone who displays a modicum of political acumen. Plus, the opposition relies too much on young voters and we know how that turns out.
The real question is what will happen when Erdogan dies and wether the AKP will even survive without him. Every one of his heir apparents turned out to be failsons in law so it's a coin toss.
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I mean, Erdogan's clique is largely responsible for worsening the disaster and profitting massively from collapsing building standards. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The Turkish state was reformed in order to maximize the pillaging of the commons and to destroy all opposition. Turkiye is a tax farm for prospective owners of european passports. But the state controls the media and the media is already doing perception management. I don't see that being dismantled unless the AKP itself ceases to exist. Too many old people and religious conservatives trust Erdogan because of his good governance in the parliamentary period.
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Very specifically the better times they lived through under the old AKP and the parliamentary system.
The corruption is rather blatant and out there. It's not really a matter of convincing anyone. Not per se.
People are conscious of their identity and the political projects that they support. Turkiye also has a complicated history going back to the ethnic cleansings of muslims from the balkans, through the armenian genocide, and the francophile secularist junta's efforts to attack the kurdish identity and religious groups. The latter turns to be the 'lower caste' of the country if you go back 2 generations or so. So in any event the different political parties are all competing and contradicting one another, playing by the rules of political action. And of course people don't necessarily trust each other. Erdogan manages to create a solid demographic out of mainly socially conservative religious people, and pretty much purged the state with the help of the gulenists. So he has free run of the country. And the freedom to pillage as much as he wishes.
What state control of media does is kill any discussion that can undermine that. But ultimately the person who thinks a CHP government is gonna even manage to outlaw the veil is gonna see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe. There's a meme in Turkish internet where a young person comes up to a street interview and says they work 50 hours a week, have no money, eat every other day, has no prospects, wishes he could flee the country. Then an old person comes by and asks if they have a smartphone. If they do, then they are whiners and things are actually good. Thing is, those people aren't privileged boomers either. They are often poor, poorer than the suburbanites. But they are religious and they are completely captured by state media. They are also loyal to Erdogan. So it's easy to spin things in ways that mean Erdogan is not at fault and should still deserve their vote.
Just want to thank the two of you for a very informative conversation.