People hold placards as they protest against Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after the government blocked access to Twitter in Ankara on March 21, 2014. (Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images)[/caption]
The ad the Justice and Development Party (AKP) commissioned for the local elections on March 30 shows a man walking up to a huge steel flagpole and cutting the metal wire inside so that the massive Turkish flag at the top slowly begins to slide down. The voice-over begins with lines from the national anthem: “Friend! Surrender not my homeland to ignoble men! Shield it with your body!” and we see the shadow of the flag falling across a city, a barber’s shop, a university lecture hall, a field full of farmers, across a doorway where a middle-class woman weeps with emotion, across a landscape of bare fields where a Kurd stands. And then everybody starts running—the barber, the students, the farmers, the middle-class woman, the Kurd—across fields, through Ankara squares and posh Istanbul streets, the crowds swelling, people vaulting over hedges, launching themselves around sharp corners, rushing in their thousands across the Bosporus Bridge, some of them even diving into the water and swimming, until they reach the foot of the flagpole. “I have always lived free and I always will. / No madman will chain me up! I defy them,” says the voice, and the crowds begin to climb up on to each other’s shoulders higher and higher, until a young man is able to reach up and grasp the severed wire. He pauses, looks around, savoring the moment (like Ulubatlı Hasan, the soldier who raised the first Ottoman standard on the battlements of Constantinople in 1453, he is assured now—surely—of a place among the Immortals) and then jumps, and the weight of his falling body pulls the flag back to the top of the mast again.
Cut to a picture of the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “The nation will not yield. Turkey will not be defeated,” we read. The slogan fits the film quite well. But the slogan the AKP used in the past fits it better: “No stopping! Ever onward!” Because for all the director’s efforts to portray this rush to save the Turkish flag as something that unites the entire country (the weeping lady is a stereotype of a staunchly secular ‘Republican auntie,’ while the Kurd in the field is praying—geddit?), the underlying message is divisive. A vote for the AKP is a vote for Turkey. Everybody else is an enemy, “ignoble” and a “madman,” as the national anthem puts it.
Polarization has been the name of the AKP’s game for three or four years now, going back at least as far as the constitutional referendum of 2010, picking up speed in the aftermath of the mass protests last June, and reaching unprecedented levels since hostilities between the government and its former ally, the Fethullah Gülen movement, became public last December.
Think of an insult, any insult, and you can be pretty sure the AKP has used it against its opponents in recent weeks. The prime minister has described the Gülen movement as “assassins,” “leeches,” a “tumor,” an animal whose “lair” he will destroy, worse in its “lies, slander and dissimulation” than “Shi'ite Muslims” (a comparison described this week as “shameful” by the Iranian Ayatollah Shirazi). Zafer Çağlayan, meanwhile, a former AKP minister forced to resign because of allegations of corruption, had this to say about it: “The people see clearly the mentality we are fighting against. I would understand if a Jew or an atheist or a Zoroastrian did this. The trouble is the people doing this claim to be Muslim.”
But this is nothing compared to the prime minister’s reactions to the death after 269 days in a coma of a fifteen-year-old boy who was hit in the head at close range by a police tear-gas canister during the Gezi Park protests in June last year. Berkin Elvan was an Alevi from a majority-Alevi district of Istanbul that—like a fair few Alevi districts—has its fair share of radical Left-wing groups. He may or may not have taken part in protests in the preceding days, but he was shot while popping to the local shop to buy bread for his mother. Passers-by say he was empty-handed. Huge crowds turned out for his funeral.
The AKP’s former minister for Europe called them “necrophiliacs.” The prime minister’s first comment was that the death would not affect the stock market. And on March 14, two days after the funeral, he got the crowd at an AKP rally in the city of Gaziantep to boo Elvan’s mother.
“How are the police supposed to know how old somebody with a mask on his face and a sling in his hand and ball-bearings in his pocket is?” he asked. “It is interesting: his mother says, ‘My son’s murderer is the prime minister.’ Now, I know about love for a child, but I couldn’t understand why you threw those carnations and ball-bearings [they were marbles] onto your son’s grave. Why did you [he uses the informal sen form] throw the ball-bearings? What message are you giving?”
Elvan’s father, and the father of a twenty-two-year-old nationalist who was murdered on the day of the funeral, allegedly by an extreme Left-wing group, consoled each other and jointly appealed for calm. The prime minister wasn’t having any of it. In the same speech, in a reference to the ineffectual head of Turkey’s secular main opposition party, the Republican People's Party, he called the twenty-two-year-old’s murderers “Kılıçdaroğlu’s executioners.”
The secular-minded columnist Kadri Gürsel says the prime minister and his party’s “negative campaigning . . . betrays the government’s desperation,” its lack of a positive message to give voters. The same could perhaps be said of Turkey’s closure of Twitter on March 20, hours after Erdoğan, speaking at a rally in the northwestern city of Bursa, implied the social networking site was part of an international plot against him. “We’ll root the lot of them out,” he said. The international community “will see the power of the state of the Republic of Turkey.”
Oddly, though, it is far from certain that any of this is damaging the AKP’s prospects. Polls in Turkey are notoriously untrustworthy, but all the signs show only a slow drop in the AKP’s share of the vote over the past year. It seems that Turkey has not quite seen the back of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan yet.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
