Over the past two days, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been heavily criticized for how his government handled the response to the strong earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria on Monday, killing thousands. Erdogan has been accused of not having reacted quickly enough, by swiftly sending the necessary aid to the affected territories, and in general of not having been sufficiently prepared for such an event, despite the fact that his country is notoriously very exposed to earthquakes and despite other similar disasters occurred in the past.
The protests against Erdogan have come both from the people who live in the most affected cities and from his political opponents, in a particularly delicate period due to the political elections that will be held in mid-May in the country: Erdogan’s position, which will stand again for a new mandate as president, was already considered in the balance before the earthquake, above all due to the large increase in inflation in the last period and the significant drop in the value of the Turkish lira. Also for this reason it seems that the leader is trying to hide and repress dissent against him.
On Wednesday, Erdogan went to the areas hit by the earthquake for the first time to meet the displaced: speaking with the journalists present, he admitted initial problems in managing relief, limiting them, however, only to the first day and attributing them above all to the difficulty of reaching the affected areas by the unavailability of roads and airports. He then added that “things are improving” and promised that new houses will be built where some have collapsed, assuring that “the state is doing his job” and that it has mobilized all the resources in his possession.
– Read also: What makes the area between Turkey and Syria so prone to earthquakes
Various testimonies collected by international newspapers among displaced people denounce the absence of interventions in many cities throughout the day on Monday (the earthquake had occurred after 4 in the morning), with ordinary people forced to fend for themselves to look for survivors under the rubble. On Monday, several displaced persons engaged in searches said that the voices of people alive under the rubble could still be heard who could have been saved, some of whom would have died waiting for help.
On social networks, some local television services have been cited as attempts at censorship in which displaced people complained in front of the cameras about the lack of aid, directly blaming the government, but were interrupted shortly after by the presenters or somehow avoided.
Also unwelcome was the fact that Erdogan waited until Tuesday to hold a press conference in which he declared a state of emergency for three months in the 10 provinces most affected by the earthquake and announced that the government would allocate the equivalent of 4.6 billion euros for interventions. On that occasion, Erdogan gave a rather animated speech, in which he described the opposition’s criticisms as “fake news and distortions” and announced that the government would prosecute those who try to cause “social chaos”. Shortly thereafter, two journalists came under investigation for criticizing the government’s handling of the earthquake response.
The accusations of Erdogan’s political opponents instead focused more on what he could have done preventively, since he was continuously prime minister of the country from 2003 to 2014 and then president until today. After another 1999 earthquake in Turkey, in which 17,000 people died, a tax was instituted that was supposed to finance disaster prevention and the development of adequate emergency services for the future: Erdogan’s government has never adequately explained how they are that money has been spent, and these days the topic has been mentioned by many.
Erdogan’s party, the AKP (short for Justice and Development Party), found political legitimacy in the early 2000s right after the previous government’s failure to deal with the 1999 earthquake: part of Erdogan’s propaganda in the years he insisted on underlining the success of his governments in the reconstruction of the affected areas, also due to the close relations with the European Union, which had greatly assisted the process.
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Turkey expert journalist Asli Aydintasbas wrote that “as Erdogan’s power expands (and Turkey’s European dream fades), the government’s interest in respecting of European safety standards has eroded»: thus a long-awaited anti-seismic legislation promised after the 1999 earthquake was approved only in 2018 (even if there had been some laws approved even earlier). The new earthquake seems to have exposed negligence of this kind that had been accused of Erdogan in recent years.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main opposition party in Turkey, has openly said that “if there is one person responsible for this, it is Erdogan”, adding that his government “has not prepared for an earthquake in 20 years”. Kilicdaroglu is seen as a likely candidate from a broad coalition of parties (ranging from centre-left to right) that will side against Erdogan in May’s elections. The elections will be held right at the end of the three-month state of emergency wanted by Erdogan in the territories most affected by the earthquake.
