In recent days, after the terrible earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been heavily criticized mainly for two reasons. The first was the slowness of the rescue efforts, which are still showing a certain inefficiency after a few days. The second concerned instead the incapacity (or unwillingness) shown in the last twenty years by your government in adapting houses, condominiums and public buildings to the safety standards necessary for a country where earthquakes are strong and frequent. On the contrary, the Turkish parliament in which Erdogan and his allies have always dominated has repeatedly approved building amnesties to bring illegal buildings into compliance, and the anti-seismic legislation was brought up to the most modern standards only in 2018.
Added to these accusations are those (not addressed directly to Erdogan) of corruption and negligence: many of the buildings that collapsed in the earthquake had been built in the past decades, and therefore did not comply with anti-seismic standards, but many that were built also collapsed in recent years, when Turkish building regulations required strict standards.
These enormous problems have some specific causes, such as delays in anti-seismic legislation, political decisions to approve amnesties and negligence or possibly corruption of the construction companies that built the collapsed buildings. But they also fit into a broader context, in which the Turkish economy in recent decades has been driven by a large building development, which has been the engine of Turkish economic growth and has played a role in Erdogan’s political successes, but it is been both uncontrolled and speculative.
To give an idea of how little things have changed, just think that accusations very similar to those made today against Erdogan were made against the then Turkish government in 1999, when a devastating earthquake killed almost 18,000 people just east of of Istanbul. The next day, the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet carried a front-page headline: ‘Murderers! Once again rotten buildings, once again thieves, once again unscrupulous builders». (Today, Hürriyet is owned by an industrial group very close to Erdogan, and is no longer making aggressive headlines against the government).
Twenty-four years ago, as today, the Turkish government was accused of not doing enough to secure Turkish buildings in a notoriously earthquake-prone area. Erdogan was in opposition, and the government’s failure contributed to the success of him and his party, the AKP. Erdogan was elected prime minister a few years later, in 2003, promising among other things new and stricter anti-seismic rules and to bring the dilapidated buildings of many regions up to standard. Since then he has always remained in power, until 2014 as prime minister and then as president.
Erdogan’s government has not been completely immobile. He claims, among other things, to have structurally strengthened more than 3 million homes over the past 20 years, and has indeed tightened earthquake regulations, albeit belatedly. But it wasn’t enough.
The numerous amnesties approved over the years by the Turkish parliament have contributed to weakening any attempt to bring Turkish buildings up to standard: amnesties are obviously very popular, and were often approved in the vicinity of elections. The last amnesty dates back to 2018 and allowed builders to pay a fine to avoid having to bring their buildings up to standard according to the safety standards in force. The builders who paid the fine were many, and the government agency that deals with building safety estimated that about half of the buildings in Turkey (13 million apartments) were not up to standard. Furthermore, the fact that many buildings built in recent years have also collapsed shows how negligence in construction has continued even recently, despite the more stringent anti-seismic legislation.
The main reason why Turkish administrations at all levels have always been very lenient towards the construction sector and its negligence is that the massive construction development has been the great engine of Turkey’s economic growth in recent decades.
This is not just a Turkish feature, of course. The real estate sector is one of the foundations of every country’s economic growth, as well as its crises: just think that the great global financial crisis of 2007-2008 began after the bursting of a real estate bubble in the United States. Furthermore, in developing countries, the construction sector is often used as a tool for quick and easy growth, because it has the benefit of both increasing a country’s GDP and generating personal wealth and social stability for people who buy or rent. a new house. For this reason, the growth of the building sector in developing countries is often tumultuous and uncontrolled, with little respect for environmental, urban planning and safety regulations.
A huge and recent example of these phenomena is China, where the real estate sector has a large influence on economic growth. In 2009, in the Chinese province of Sichuan there was a terrible earthquake measuring 7.9, which caused almost 70,000 deaths. Even then there was huge controversy over the dire state of the buildings and the fact that the central government had not done enough to prevent damage.
In Turkey these phenomena have expressed themselves in a very decisive way. In 2016, for example, the weekly Economist noted how building speculation in Turkey was out of control: between 2012 and 2014 the percentage of bank loans destined for building construction had gone from less than 50 per cent to more than 70 per cent, also causing cases of abuse.
Erdogan’s government has in many ways favored these phenomena. For example, it transformed TOKI, the state housing agency, into a body that works through partnerships with private developers. The result was that often, in order to start the works and under pressure from the builders, the authorizations for the construction of new buildings were granted lightly. “There’s a cycle: I give you public land, you build, and then we share the benefits. It’s a great way to favor your friends,” a Turkish economist told The Economist in 2014.
Corruption also played a role in these processes. The large property development firms are among Turkey’s most powerful and wealthy, and have been involved in numerous scandals. Some of these have also touched people very close to Erdogan, even if they did not end in convictions.
