An insisting drizzle falls over Istanbul. The sidewalks are full of holes that make walking people look like dancing inelegantly. Less than a week before the elections on November 1st and the rhythms in Istanbul are always the same.
Nevertheless, under the surface of these seemingly same pace of life in the big city of Turkey lies a dominant pessimism, a permanent fear, and an unprecedented anger.
‘I avoid taking the steamers passing the Bosphorus and the Metro. Everything can happen now. And when I cannot do otherwise I’m afraid,” says Burcu, a notary who works at the centre.
In the last period, especially after the terrorist attack in Ankara but also before, there is a growing psychology of fear which often reaches paranoia levels. A very large part of the population is nowadays afraid when going out and when talking about politics in public.
“I was told about someone who swore against Tayyip Erdogan and was immediately dragged to a police station. So I do not say anything anymore when I’m on the streets or in public places. There can always be somebody to call the police and I ‘ll find myself in big trouble,” says Savas, who has his own consulting firm.
These stories about citizens being arrested after criticising or insulting Turkish President are circulating more and more amongst his opponents and it is difficult to verify their real extent.
The bottom line is that today, people are afraid to talk, afraid to come into contact with the people around them. Not only political opponents of Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP but his supporters too.
“I was in a boat to cross on the Asian side of Istanbul and saw an elderly gentleman who had asked for a tea from the waiter, but it seemed that he could not easily stretch his hand so I helped him. But when I saw that he had under his arm an opposition newspaper I got afraid that he might start saying things against me and my headscarf and we would pick up a fight. Fortunately he did not say anything but I got scared,” says Nurhayat, a young scholar.
The mood of distrust and fear are skillfully cultivated by all politicians, but AKP has taken the lead by far.
Various conspiracy theories are now the main focus of the political discourse of Tayyip Erdogan and Ahmet Davutoglu. With the pro-government press to promote systematic references to obscure dark centers outside Turkey who want to bring the country into chaos and who cooperate with all internal and external enemies of the Turks.
Metin Gurcan, a commentator analyst at Al Monitor (http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/10/turkey-syria-isis-ankara-bombings-terror-cocktail-kurds-pyd.html) wrote that Ahmet Davutoglu has created a new concept in Turkish politics, the “cocktail of terror.” According to Gurcan, Ahmet Davutoglu said that “terror organizations all drink from the same glass” and that the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Islamic State and the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) “all want chaos in Turkey.”
“The cocktail concept was instantly popularized by the AKP elites and their friendly media as yet another attempt to put the PKK in the same basket as IS. With this new concept, they are able to lump together the Gulenists, leftist radicals, the Assad regime, some European countries, Iran, Russia, the United States and, more importantly, the leftist labor unions of Turkey and civil society. Thus, the propagation of the cocktail idea becomes a means of protecting AKP votes from being siphoned off to other parties,” writes Gurcan.
And he argues that, “this versatile recipe allows the AKP, especially President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to combat political opposition by hiding behind the state security bureaucracy, and to deflect personal criticisms against party members as criticism of the state and thus as a security threat.”
“That potent cocktail is designed to make the public begin to think that all those opposed to Turkey’s emergence as a power are united against the AKP,” writes Gurcan.
The deep political and social polarization is now poisoned even further by this psychology of fear and conspiracies, splitting the Turkish society among supporters of the AKP, who more or less consider all others as potential traitors, and opponents of the AKP, who believe that at any moment they can be arrested or even receive threats against their physical integrity by AKP people.
The drizzle continues persistently and now I walk down the streets from Pera to Karakoy, where the Golden Horn flows into the Bosphorus.
As I cross the narrow streets, I see around me many small coffeeshops, many of them don’t even having more than ten tables.
For some years now, such cafes are mushrooming in the wider area of Pera but also in some other central neighborhoods.
I enter one and I order a natural herb tea. Comfortable armchairs, urban decoration, soft classical music, homely atmosphere.
“All these coffee shops here are like oases in Istanbul’s madness. People resorting here to escape the noise, the aggressiveness and the radical change of aesthetic,” says Ayse Cavdar, a journalist and scholar specializing in Islamic dynamics in Turkey, who usually escapes in these kind of urban oases.
She also talks to me about the prevalence of the mob culture, a gradual “lumpenization” of the political and social life of the country, considering it also as one key factor in the proliferation of such urban oases, which have now been turned into shelters for some citizens.
Ayse Cavdar is far than being the only one who talks about a “lumpenization” in Turkey.
Veteran analyst Cengiz Candar wrote last week in Radikal daily that the political life of the country has been “lumpenized” during the days of the AKP.
According to the opponents of the AKP, one of the most typical representatives of this new mob culture promoted and sustained by the AKP, is the former head of the youth of the party and MP Abdulrahim Boynukalin, who had a leading role in the attack against the building of Hurriyet newspaper some weeks ago. Abdulrahim Boynukalin, who, after a fierce discussion within the party administration will not be a candidate in the upcoming elections, continues to make statements causing huge reactions.
“Mr. Boynukalın is not just Mr. Boynukalın. He is the typology of the devout youth Mr. Erdoğan passionately hopes to raise: Devout in rhetoric, militant in behavior, a part-time believer in democracy as a Muslim Brother could be, rigidly obedient to his sacrosanct supreme leader and a true patriot who “buys” his military service while weeping over our fallen soldiers,” wrote caustically a few days ago Burak Bekdil in Hurriyet.
The mob culture, the “lumpenization” of political life, is the most extreme expression of political populism and history has shown that this is a very dangerous phenomenon since it almost always ignites dynamics that are extremely difficult to control after a certain point.
The “lumpenization” of the politics in Turkey is a long process that originally started with the military coup of 1980 that created a very bad education system and systematically promoted the hate culture against intellectuals, says Emre Gonen, international relations professor at Bilgi University in Istanbul.
After the first decade of AKP rule, where class differences seemed to smooth down, during the last years there is a very visible re-emergence of sociological and class dynamics in the political front scene.
Ayse Cavdar, suggests that AKP leaderships have gradually created dependencies of the poorer classes from the wealthier ones through a complex system of welfare and charity funds, parallel to the state. This dependency and the new social hierarchy it generated were designed to improve the loyalty of lower classes to their ideology and party, argues Ayse Cavdar.
“Thus, AKP and Tayyip Erdogan contributed a lot to the formation of lumpen culture in Turkey generating those policies of dependency. Now, these dependent fragments of the society are the only ones represented in the AKP, because the AKP, especially in their local branches, is not the same with what it was 13 years ago. There are no excited youngsters for a “new Turkey,” for freedoms, for development and so on. You can see only those having a false self-confidence derived from their position of being a member of the government party. When you ask them what they think about any problem of the world and Turkey you’ll hear exactly the same sentences used by Tayyip Erdogan. Because they think they will lose their only chance of class mobilization if they say anything wrong.”
“This dependency creates lumpenism, and this is what is left to the AKP: a loyal, angry, greedy class. It is actually a cross-class group, it is a culture cross-cutting the society. There are small-size traders, workers, educated white-collars, poor people living on charity, chronic unemployed, many others. They have only one shared characteristic, and this is not religion; it is just a deep and hopeless dependency to the party,” explains Ayse Cavdar.
These sociological and class undercurrents could be seen as the seeds of a deep division within AKP, a division along class fault lines that are already visible through various manifestations of discrete but symbolically meaningful distances taken from Tayyip Erdogan and today’s AKP by historical leaders of the islamist movement as well as from islamist intellectuals. The former President of Turkey and one of the founders of AKP Abdullah Gul and the intellectual Levent Gultekin, just to name the two maybe more characteristic examples.
Nevertheless, the most deciding factor for the future of the party and of the wider Islamist/conservative movement will not be this kind of personalities but the middle classes.
“Although the emerging religious middle class still votes for the AKP, they are not supporting the party as they did in the first years. They still vote for the AKP because there is no alternative yet, and they scared when they think that a secular party might destroy their privileges. But if they find any alternative they will just disconnect themselves from this lumpenization of AKP,” argues Ayse Cavdar.
Bulent Somay, a sociologist at Bilgi University in Istanbul, puts forward a historical parallelism between Tayyip Erdogan and Louis Napoleon, later Napoleon the 3rd of France. Bulent Somay finds many similarities between these two personalities, and especially that both took distances from the middle classes and the bourgeoisie and went for the lower classes, the “lumpen.”
For Napoleon 3rd, the dynamics of the mob were tragic as they ultimately led to the disastrous war for France against Prussia in 1870.
Historical parallelisms do not anticipate either allows forecasts.
The elections, however, and the dynamics to follow after November 1, will show whether or not Tayyip Erdogan will go down on history like the Turkish Napoleon 3rd.
And they will also show how the sociological and class undercurrents in modern Turkey will impact the future of the AKP and the wider Islamic/conservative movement.
(A shorter version of this article was published in Greek in Politis daily on October, 24 2015)
roving correspondents 