Homeownership was part of Erdoğan’s vision for a modern, consumer-driven middle class. To accelerate the construction of more housing, the A.K. Party continued to have developers use private companies to inspect their projects. Istanbul’s greatest natural and historical assets—its silhouette, its lush forests, its Bosporus, its ancient streets—became Erdoğan’s personal surplus. The skyline filled with huge cranes and towers, and the streets rattled from jackhammers at all hours. The Istanbul municipality had a master plan, created under the leadership of Hüseyin Kaptan, an urban-planning professor. It included the establishment of ecozones to protect northern forests and water reserves. But in 2011, during his reëlection campaign, Erdoğan started talking about what he called his “crazy project,” Kanal Istanbul—essentially, a second waterway that would be built toward the west of the city, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, cutting European Istanbul in two. He also announced plans for a third airport, in northern Istanbul, which meant constructing runways in an area of high winds and migrating birds. All this expansion required more highways, more metros, more malls, more apartment buildings, more roads, and another bridge over the Bosporus. The contracts for much of this development went to the Gang of Five. Kaptan resigned in protest.
Turkey’s construction boom was, in many ways, effective. In the first decade of Erdoğan’s rule, the country’s G.D.P. per capita tripled. The Economist touted the “Turkish model,” writing that the A.K. Party had “boosted the country’s standing and shown that the coming to power of pious people need not mean a dramatic rupture in ties with the West.” The Brookings Institution called Turkey “arguably the most dynamic experiment with political Islam among the fifty-seven nations of the Muslim world.”
Cartoon by Liza Donnelly
In 2012, Erdoğan announced another mega project: a shopping mall in the style of old Ottoman military barracks, in Gezi Park, a patch of green space in Taksim Square, the crowded center of Istanbul and the heart of its boozy night life. On May 28, 2013, a group of young environmental activists sat in the park to protest the project. After police tried to clear the area, the protest grew into an uprising of hundreds of thousands of people in more than seventy cities. Erdoğan was furious, and he responded with a police crackdown that resulted in eleven deaths and thousands of injuries and arrests. The protests were a genuine threat to him: they involved not only the youth but also middle-class families who had grown sick of overdevelopment and were outraged by the government’s use of violence against peaceful protesters.
Then, that December, a series of audio recordings were released on social media by former allies of Erdoğan’s, followers of the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who occupied key positions in the judicial system, state ministries, the national media, the education system, and the national police. (Gülen denies involvement in the release of the audio.) Erdoğan and the Gülenists had begun falling out over a range of political issues. The recordings—of Erdoğan, one of his sons, and his ministers—revealed to the public that Erdoğan was granting private construction permits on public land in exchange for bribes. On one tape, Erdoğan, after learning of an unsatisfactory bribe, tells his son Bilal, “Don’t take it. Whatever he has promised us, he should deliver it. . . . What do they think this business is? But don’t worry, they will fall into our lap.” (Erdoğan has said that the audio is fake.)
“The spell was broken with the Gezi protests,” Osman Can, a former judge on the Constitutional Court and a member of the A.K. Party’s central executive committee between 2012 and 2015, recalled. “With the corruption revelations, an era of anxiety began. There had been an ambience of ‘Everything will be fine, everything is under control.’ Now they began to fear. The fear was existential.” Thousands of Gülenists were fired from their posts, beginning a hollowing out of state institutions. Mücella Yapıcı, a member of the Chamber of Architects in Istanbul, who had participated in the Gezi protests, received an eighteen-year prison sentence for aiding an attempt to overthrow the government. Tayfun Kahraman, the executive-board chairman of the Chamber of Urban Planners and the head of the Department of Earthquake Risk Management and Urban Renewal in Istanbul, who had also spoken out during Gezi, received a similar sentence. In 2013, a pro-Erdoğan newspaper published the headline “The Authority of Architects and Engineers Is Over.”
When I first visited İskenderun, three weeks after the earthquakes, the city still had no running water. Mountains of rubble had replaced streets, and the buildings that still stood were badly damaged. İskenderun was completely dark at night. Everywhere, people were leaving, heaping pickup trucks with stoves, mattresses, mops, and buckets—even front doors torn off their hinges. People slept in tents in parks and on roadsides.
Near the site of a collapsed primary school and church, I met three engineers, one American and two Turkish. They told me that pinpointing the specific reason each structure had collapsed would require a thorough investigation. An expert would have to assess the quality of concrete and rebar; whether the support columns on the bottom floors of the building had been removed to make more commercial space, as is common in Turkey; and if the foundation had been laid deeply enough.
Yet authorities had begun detaining hundreds of people involved in construction all over the region. On a plane, I met a judge who told me he thought that every one of them was guilty.
In 2019, Ekrem İmamoğlu defeated Erdoğan’s handpicked candidate for mayor of Istanbul. Three years later, he was sentenced to prison for insulting the Turkish state.
But Turunç, the former village mayor, didn’t think the workers alone were to blame. “The municipal governments that were allied with the government did not receive any supervision,” he said. “The bids were made entirely on the basis of personal connections.” He went on, “The zoning plan determines the floor area, and the town council determines the zoning plan. The real crime takes place before the contractor goes to work. Why didn’t this study take place? Why didn’t the ministry warn people, why didn’t the municipalities ask experts? Something was wrong from the beginning. The state officials are responsible for this. And, instead of resigning or taking action, they are arresting a lot of men.”
Kimyon spent the weeks after the earthquakes tending to his beloved, broken city. İbrahim Akın, a friend and a political ally, told me, “When you go into the street with him, and people say, ‘Ercüment, brother, we need this,’ he responds immediately.” Kimyon and Akın surveyed the wreckage. “This is the result of the construction sector’s desire to build on every empty space it finds downtown,” Kimyon said. “But we were somewhat luckier than Antakya”—an hour away—which was now “a dead city.” Kimyon’s aunt, who is ninety-four, lived in an apartment above a hotel in İskenderun which had collapsed. She was presumed dead after the earthquakes, but three days later, when rescue teams sent in dogs, she was pulled out alive. Kimyon’s brother, who was in a wheelchair, lived in a building complex, called İnci Kent, that Kimyon had worked on almost thirty years before. İnci Kent was damaged in the earthquakes, and Kimyon arranged for his brother’s care in a nursing home. And Kimyon, as always, talked to the local press, went on TV, and gave interviews to online publications. “We ignored the existence of the seismic fault,” he told one Web site. “Society’s value judgments have disappeared—rent seeks profit. They have destroyed the concept of public interest.”
Turkey’s Earthquake Election
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