In the aftermath of the Turkish earthquakes, the offices of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party in Kahramanmaraş were deserted, the front doors tied together haphazardly with a cable.
A board bearing the party logo and the words “AK parti” was propped against the broken glass door to prevent intruders. In the window, office furniture was piled high, evidence of a cleanup after two powerful quakes shook the city and much of south-east Turkey, jolting an area traditionally considered a bedrock of support for the AKP.
Nearby residents said they had seen little of the local AKP officials after the disaster. “They escaped!” joked Mehmet, who declined to give his full name, perched on a sofa inside a furniture and homewares shop. Sparkling pots and pans sat next to new fridges, destined for the homes of people trying to rebuild their lives in an area where the cemetery had been enlarged to accommodate thousands of bodies after the quakes.
“We reopened this shop a week after the earthquakes, and we haven’t seen them since,” Mehmet said. “This city is the AKP’s castle but I haven’t seen any of them around here, not even next to the rubble.”
Turkey goes to the polls on 14 May, three months after multiple quakes killed more than 46,000 people and displaced at least 1 million people from the country’s south-east. A tight race between Erdoğan and the main opposition candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, is expected.
Mehmet said he was ready to vote for the AKP’s opponents, despite the party’s decades of popularity in Kahramanmaraş. “If a donkey ran on the AKP ticket in this town it would win, despite all the corruption and nepotism they bring. But I’ve never voted AKP and I don’t think I ever will. Whoever is powerful and runs against them, I will vote for them,” he said.
After two decades in power, Erdoğan is often perceived as more popular than his party, yet the earthquakes, whose epicentres were beneath the AKP’s heartlands where the party routinely swept at least 70% of the vote, threaten to upend public support for both.
In Kahramanmaraş and nearby Nurdağı, some voters expressed cautious support for the AKP, but more were angry at a lacklustre government response to the earthquakes and doubted Erdoğan’s promises of rapid reconstruction. Many suggested their previous discomfort with criticising the party had been rapidly displaced in the aftermath of the disaster, emboldening them to speak more openly.
Several residents directed their ire squarely at the AKP mayor of Kahramanmaraş, Hayrettin Güngör. Billboards bearing Güngör’s smiling image had been defaced outside the local municipal offices, with chunks torn from his face.
“We thought he was dead in the days after the earthquake. Then we saw him on television,” said one resident, Muhammed, a former longtime supporter of the Nationalist Movement party, far-right coalition partners of the AKP. “This is about more than the mayor, he was always unpopular, but this was another nail in the coffin.”
Others felt differently, notably Osman, a lifelong AKP voter, who also declined to give his full name. “The party has always protected us,” he said, chatting to a friend outside his clothes shop in a small part of town that showed less visible quake damage. Several AKP officials including Güngör had come to check on him, he said, astonished that others had not seen them.
“There were some irregularities in the first couple of days after the earthquake. But afterwards everything was fixed,” he said.
The president’s promises that everything would be rebuilt within a year did not land quite so successfully, however. “It’s impossible to rebuild this city in one year. I don’t believe those numbers are correct,” Osman said. “For this city to get back on its feet will take maybe two years. We shouldn’t make the same mistakes with reconstruction, it’s too early to start rebuilding.”
His feelings about reconstruction did little to change how Osman may vote. “See this chair?” he asked, opening his arms to point at a beige plastic seat behind him. “If that chair was the AKP candidate, it would get elected here,” he said.
The nearby town of Nurdağı, once a network of broad streets bordered by extensive new construction, had been almost entirely levelled. All that remained in the town of 40,000 were the skeletons of the once fresh concrete construction, including a white and tan tower that bore several gaping holes and the name of the local AKP mayor, Ökkeş Kavak, recently arrested and imprisoned as part of an investigation into illegal construction.
“The mayor was here with us since the earthquake until he was detained,” said Ibrahim Koprülü, who had nothing but praise for Kavak and his AKP, pulling out his phone to display pictures of a visit by the official. “He asked us if we needed anything. He was here from the first day. The party was very supportive, and they are still coming.”
Staring at the destroyed building that still bore most of Kavak’s name, a man who gave his name only as Ergün made tea with his wife outside their tent across the road from the destroyed AKP offices in Nurdağı. The powerful quakes had torn chunks off the outer building, shattering a glass window that once bore a full-size poster of Erdoğan. An adjacent window imprinted with an AKP poster and the words “Together, to new goals” was broken.
“There was no help, no state,” said Ergün. “The poor were the ones who supported us. The state didn’t help as much as the people did. There’s no such thing as a state here.” He and his wife, Filiz Demircan, said they expected to keep living in their tent long after the elections in May, but joked that they expected aid deliveries to dry up after the ballot takes place.
“I voted for the AKP before but God damn them,” Ergün said. “People who vote for them now are immoral. God forbid, now I have to vote for the leftists. All my life I voted for rightwing parties. But now I will vote for the leftists. Even if they run a donkey as a candidate, I will vote for the donkey.”
