Four months ago I moved to Istanbul and found a room in Cihangir, a gentrified neighbourhood near to Taksim and Istiklal, the city’s main commercial drag in Beyoğlu, a district on the European side of Istanbul. Though I only realise it now, the move from one edge of Europe to the other did come with a certain amount of culture shock. On one of my first nights, a friend brought me to a Kurdish-owned bar. Listening to men and women speak Turkish and Kurdish, smoking cigarettes with guiltless pleasure, I felt as if a Western white ignorance beamed from my skin and clung to my bones. I knew little about the Kurdish region – about its Indo-European language or its people’s long history of oppression by the Turkish state – but could sense that association with it carried left-wing cachet. When a month later, a group was flying out to eastern Turkey for Nevroz, the Kurdish celebration of the traditional Iranian New Year, I went along out of a sense of duty to cultural capital. In Diyarbakir I spent the weekend in a state of near-permanent embarrassment, and acquired a miserable cold listening to speeches I didn’t understand in a field with a hundred thousand Kurds. My embarrassment was most acute with our host, a Kurdish anarchist who enjoyed reminding me that I lived in barista-packed Cihangir. (A few months later during a visit to Istanbul, he would point to me and tell someone: ‘O Cihangir; O capitalist’ [translation: ‘He’s Cihangir; he’s a capitalist’].)
Gradually, as the months passed, I began to feel less conspicuously ignorant here. I started learning Turkish, and came to feel at home in a tiny patch of streets near Taksim, through long nights going from bar to bar with Billy, a school friend who has been here for a few years. For a while, every weekend a Friday or Saturday night would spill over into the next day, as if only by staying restless longer than the streets could you find some closure. Knowing no one else at first, Billy’s group of friends are my first point of contact. All of them have spent some of the summer of 2013 in Gezi Park, and had got to know what tear gas tastes like. The party that speaks to this experience is The People’s Democratic Party (HDP), formed in 2012 as a prominent Kurdish party joined forces with a polyphony of left-wing parties, trade union organisations, LGBT-rights groups and groups representing ethnic minorities such as Alevis and Armenians. These groups previously fielded independent candidates, none of them having had enough support to pass the 10% voting threshold required to enter parliament as a party. Secular, anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist and pro-Kurdish, the HDP were born out of the need to coherently oppose the neo-liberal and Islamist rule of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party).
From the beginning of May, the streets gain an extra layer of noise: political party vans play catchy jingles through muddy speakers, every neighbourhood street sags with political bunting and house-sized faces of government politicians gurn from billboards. I start to get some sense of the vast complexity of Turkey’s political landscape beyond the safety of nights in Beyoğlu, with their memories of Gezi and open arms for all sexualities and genders. With every day that brings the Sunday 7th June general election closer, the city’s collective tension levels seem to rise.
Thursday 28th May
I get a message from a friend who works at the Dublin social media news agency Storyful, asking if there’s anything going on in Gezi Park, so I walk up to check. Though a cloud hangs over Istanbul, the sun is shining on Taksim and Gezi. It is quiet, green and park-like. This day two years ago, fifty environmentalists began a sit-in against plans to replace one of Beyoğlu’s few remaining green spaces with a shopping centre and luxury apartments, in the architectural style of an Ottoman military barracks. It was a very Erdoğan project: pro-capital, anti-social and indulgent of a personal nostalgia for pre-World War I Ottoman Turkey, when Istanbul was the capital of an Islamic empire. When the protests grew from 50 people in Gezi to 3.5 million across Turkey, it was the culmination of six months in which Erdoğan seemed to go out of his way to alienate as many citizens as possible: calling out kissing in public, increasing restrictions on abortions, implementing a ban on alcohol sales after 10pm, removing the Turkish flag from the logo of the national assembly, imprisoning public figures for criticising Islam; the list goes on. In the context of Turkish democracy, the temporary realisation of an Occupy-style horizontal society in Gezi Park was perhaps less historic than protestors crossing deep political fault-lines in the name of a common enemy. For the first time in Turkey’s political history, groups as opposed as Kurds and ultra-nationalists could be found on the same side.
Walking back through Taksim Square towards Istiklal, I pass the ever-present loitering dozen-or-so policemen. When Erdoğan first came to power, Islamists and liberals alike lauded him for putting an end to a long history of military interventions into state politics. Gradually, however, he has replaced the autonomous military with a militant police force of his own. Around Taksim, the role of the police seems overwhelmingly to be to suppress political dissent. Laws against smoking inside and selling off-license alcohol after 10pm are mostly ignored, as are the Syrian and Kurdish children who beg money from passers-by and the drug trade flourishing a few minutes walk away in impoverished Tarlabaşı. But a minimum of three buses of police – armed with rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray – attend every peaceful protest. For May Day, a traditional day of protest here, the streets around Taksim Square and Istiklal close for the day, barricaded and guarded by hundreds of police from the early hours of the morning.
Friday 29th May
At a goodbye dinner for a friend, my Turkish teacher laughs in my face when I suggest she join me at a meeting of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party). She says I will get punched in the face. I affect self-righteous disapproval at her political close-mindedness, but am slightly hurt, and worried that I might actually get punched in the face. Emine was born in the AK Party stronghold of Konya in southern Anatolian Turkey, and raised a Muslim. At 13 or 14, ‘the light came’, and she stopped believing. When I tell her I was raised by two non-believing parents, her response is to envy my ‘purity’. I have never thought of it like this before.
Her father votes for MHP, the ultra-nationalist party whose sign of allegiance is to raise the right hand and form the shape of a wolf by joining thumb and middle fingers. Political beliefs aside, she says, he is a sweet man, and she avoids letting him know that she votes HDP. When he pushes her too much on the subject of marriage, she tells them she has a Kurdish boyfriend, and that ends the conversation.
Saturday 30th May
Before the AK Party rally, I go to a HDP rally nearby. In the quiet of the train on the way there, I watch a man standing alone and holding a HDP flag upright in the carriage. He wears a forced half smile, and inside I imagine his nerves to be fluttering. Only a few of the other passengers on the train look like HDP supporters. I look at a group of head-scarfed women, spot some prayer beads on the hands of a few men. Pulling into the train’s penultimate stop, the slowing windows reveal dozens of HDP supporters lined up to board the train. As the doors open, an ovation begins, and either from within or without the whole carriage fills with the sound of clapping. A few of the newly boarded start up a chant: ‘Biz’ler, HDP, Biz’ler Meclise’ (‘We are HDP, We are going to the parliament’) – chanted in two bars of five beats, as mnemonic as a football chant. The man holding the flag is surrounded now, and the tension in the carriage dissipates in the noise of chanting. Some of the passengers whose political allegiance I couldn’t guess have broken into smiles, joined in the chanting or begun filming with smartphones.
When I arrive at the AK party rally later, an airshow is underway – Turkish fighter jets perform somersaults and leave jet trails across the sky. Having just listened to hours of political speeches at the HDP rally, and I feel the unexpected relief of being entertained. The sun has come out, there is grass to stand on and there are planes to watch. With the great majority of women wearing headscarves, it is indeed nothing like the Turkey I am used to from Taksim and Cihangir. But I do, slightly, feel I understand AK party’s success a bit more: religious dress aside, my fellow onlookers strike me as ordinary members of the global capitalist majority – interested in a nuclear family, clean clothes and a good smartphone. Erdoğan and the AK Party came to government at a moment of economic despair and were in charge during 13 years of record economic growth, even as the global economy foundered. For their lower-to-middle class religious electorate, they offered material improvements to quality of life, as well as a justice narrative of sorts, giving Islam pride of place in Turkish politics following decades of exclusion thanks to militarily enabled secular rule. Later on, as Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu orates on stage, a vast Turkish flag is passed through the crowd. Being under it as it passes over reminds me of being in a particularly happy festival tent: everyone is bathed in red light and smiling, and for a moment I stop worrying about being found out and punched for not being an AK Party supporter.
Friday 5th June
At a HDP rally in Diyarbakir, two bombs explode, killing four people and injuring over 100. This is the third bomb attack on HDP this month. HDP party co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş calls for calm. Erdoğan gives out that he tried to call Demirtaş to offer condolences but that he wouldn’t answer. In the media whirlwind of election season, the deaths become political currency before the blood has dried.
Sunday 7th June, Election Day
By six o’clock, the country’s 47.5 million votes are cast, as an astonishing 86.49% of eligible voters turn out. We watch the results come out in a bar near Taksim, where the election-day ban on alcohol means it’s one small upstairs room with the windows covered, the air thick with tension and smoke and every seat taken. When the result is confirmed around half eleven, the result is better than any of HDP’s supporters had dared to hope for, as they get 13.12% of the vote, and the same amount of seats in parliament as the third-placed MHP party. In large part thanks to HDP’s gender quotas, Turkey now will now have more women in parliament per capita than Ireland. Turkey’s Kurdish population will have significant parliamentary representation for the first time in their history. Erdoğan’s AK Party still gets the most votes but fails to get a majority for the first time in its party’s history. Erdoğan’s hopes of getting the overall majority needed to give executive power to his presidential office are dashed. The bar’s owner turns the election coverage off and puts on an Erdoğan ‘Staying Alive’ parody. Ding-dong, the witch is dead. On the streets outside, people dance and drink until the early hours of the morning.
In the week after the election, there is a certain sense of anti-climax, as parties struggle with coalition talks, and the dreaded possibility of a return to the voting booths rears its head. Meanwhile, the Turkish lira falls to an all-time low, and analysts predict an impending economic crisis for now ‘politically unstable’ Turkey. It turns out the Erdoğan years of unprecedented economic growth were built on a credit-fuelled construction bubble. In what would be a cruel irony, the new coalition government might find itself at the reins of economic crisis just like the one that preceded Erdoğan’s first election victory in 2001. In the meantime, I look forward to sending this in and temporarily returning to political ignorance. Beautifully, the sound of election vans is nowhere to be heard in the streets.
Words & Photos: Jamie Leptien
