Erdogan’s political fate may rest on his response to the earthquake

“For Erdogan, the next 48 hours will be definitive,” Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy told Media on Thursday.

Erdogan’s strongholds hit

“The average AK Party performance in those provinces has been above their national average,” he said, adding that AK Party provinces have generally received more support from the central government, in comparison to opposition-held ones.

The ten provinces that were most affected by the earthquake represent around 15% of Turkey’s population of 85 million and a similar proportion of the 600-seat parliament. During the 2018 vote, Erdogan and the AK Party won the presidential and parliamentary elections, respectively, in all of those provinces but one, Diyarbakir. That region voted for the pro-Kurdish HDP party, and its candidate Selahattin Demirtas, who ran for elections from prison.

One of the strongest to hit the region in more than 100 years, the earthquake has so far killed 19,000 in Turkey alone, where the toll is expected to rise.

In 1939, an earthquake of the same magnitude as Monday’s killed 30,000 people, and in 1999, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake in the country’s northwest killed more than 17,000 people.

For Turkey’s rulers, quakes have been gamechangers in the past. In what later became a defining moment for Erdogan’s ascension to power, the 1999 quake — and the slow relief efforts that followed — only added to the sense of disillusionment many felt toward the nationalist, secularist state in power at the time, analysts say.

After the 1999 earthquake, the state “collapsed like a house of cards,” Cagaptay told Media. “And that basically destroyed the ideological hold of the state over society.”

The government has particularly been criticized for its lack of preparedness to minimize damage from such disasters, said Ulgen, especially since the state has since the 1999 earthquake been collecting taxes aimed at sheltering the country from potential future disasters.

The Turkish opposition is already speaking out about the government’s perceived shortcomings in dealing with the tragedy.

Following a nationwide restriction on social media after the earthquake, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party said: “This insane palace government cut off social media communication.”

While there have been no official announcements to postpone the May 14 elections, some analysts expect Erdogan and the opposition to agree on a later date.

It’s unlikely that conditions in the impacted provinces will allow for the vote to be held, said Ulgen.

“It is going to be a very complicated thing to be able to even orchestrate elections in these provinces,” he said.