Like a man & like a madam (Turkish: Adam gibi & madam gibi): A
comparison that specifies the two different manners to be taken in
politics; identifying manhood with being trustworthy and womanhood
with being the opposite, affirming the former's role. Idiom.
The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's 2014 novel A Strangeness in My Mind, Mevlut, is a man who walks the streets of Istanbul at night for some twenty-five years selling boza, a popular fermented wheat beverage in Turkey. One night, he gets called up to an apartment in a wealthy and Westernized neighborhood of Istanbul — filled with the smell of rakı and laughter from a mixed group of men and women. Mevlut feels "poor and out of place" as he pours the boza for the guests in the kitchen. One of the men from the table calls Mevlut into the living room, and asks him in front of the others:
"'Are you a religious man?'
Mevlut knew by now that this question carried political connotations
in the wealthier households. The Islamist party, which was supported
mainly by the poor, had won the municipal elections three days ago.
Mevlut, too, had voted for its candidate — who had unexpectedly been
elected mayor of Istanbul — because he was religious and had gone to
the Piyale Paşa school in Kasımpaşa, which Mevlut's daughters were now
attending." (22)
The mayor Mevlut votes for in this fictionalized account is presumably none other than Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who ran for mayorship of Istanbul in 1994 as a candidate from the Welfare Party. Here, the protagonist represents an archetypal Erdoğan supporter: a working class religious rural migrant to Istanbul "who is attached to his traditions". (23) He votes for the candidate because he feels a certain affinity to the candidate's background. It is this background of being from Kasımpaşa that would earn Erdoğan a great deal of supporters throughout his political career.
There are various ways to explain the popularity Erdoğan holds amongst the Turkish population. Some of these explanations lay their ground on the economical success brought to the country under his governance while others strongly believe that the landslide success of the AK Party and Erdoğan was the direct outcome of the shared state of perceived victimhood felt by the conservative demographic. But there is also a romantic reason behind Erdoğan's rise to power: his use of the age-old narrative that he is the heroic protector of the oppressed against the oppressors.
It might seem classist to begin writing about one's political stance and governance style with his educational qualifications, but the importance of Erdoğan's past as the child of a lower income, conservative family cannot be denied. He uses this very identity as a means to gain an enormous following composed of people who mostly view him as their savior against external forces. He is, as shown by him choosing to present a character of being "Kasımpaşalı", a direct result of his own personal history — or at least the interpretation of that history that is made visible for the Turkish political electorate.
"Kasımpaşalılık", or being Kasimpasali, in this case, points to an idiom popularized in the Turkish political and cultural arena by none other than Erdoğan, even though many people long before him had used it. Before Erdoğan, the word held more of a class-centric meaning, as the name of a district that had a distinctive quality in its particular synthesis of being both a place for lower income people to live, and being so close to other, more splendent localities such as Beyoğlu and İstiklal Avenue, Harbiye and Elmadağ, Nişantaşı and Cihangir. It was not exactly somewhere that one would call slums, but it had the disadvantage of looking like one when compared to the highly-coloured neighbouring districts: a shadow at the edge of the lights of city life.
With Erdoğan, the wording started to become an umbrella term for not just a geographical reality in the metropolitan life of Istanbul, but also a lifestyle, an identity. For his followers, this meant being closer to "the people", a virtue they believed the "highbrow", political and intellectual elite of the country lacked in recent political history.
In the meantime, the segments of the population that did not support him saw his mannerisms and use of language as foul and hooligan-like. This quickly became the biggest dividing line between the left and the right in the country, as the main opposition CHP, started to narrow its target of listeners to that very same type of people that Erdoğan's supporters thought of as snobs and the real oppressors. Accordingly, the AK Party leader took advantage of the situation by setting his eyes on the smaller cities that had long been forgotten since Turkey's first attempts at industrialization in 1920s and 1930s, to build his supporter base.
The gap between two ideologies was a result of social aggressions posed onto those smaller city citizens and lower educated business owners. The latter of those qualifications, in its economical nature, was an inevitable outcome to the industrialization efforts of the earlier Turkey, mentioned above. The social divide between the rural and the urban segments of the population had sharpened drastically by the end of the 20th century. The significant economic development of western coastal cities such as Istanbul and Izmir was in sharp contrast to the largely neglected small towns and cities in Anatolian steppe. The existence of more job opportunities, more universities and a more lively street culture resulted in a migration trend from rural Anatolia to these major cities, especially Istanbul. As an outcome of these migrations the cities mentioned above became microcosms of the rural-urban divide.
Erdoğan, unlike those before him, had the clever tactic of tapping into a fragment of the population that was new and had been mostly dismissed in political discourse. This demographic was made of people like Mevlut, who had immigrated from Anatolian villages to major cities. Erdoğan presented himself to this demographic as a politician with a shared sense of personal history. Thus, when he appeared in political rallies as one of them who was there to save them, the massive applause he received was anything but shocking.
Erdoğan's personal background struck a chord with his supporters, it was as if his childhood was their childhood, too. He is the child of a low income family with conservative background. He has been born in a house with a heating stove. He has played football and even got told off by his father, who told him to stop running after meaningless dreams and find himself a real purpose in life. The simplest answer to the question of why voters support Erdoğan in huge masses doesn't lay in the economical success he brought to the country or the roads he built, it lays in the fact that he looks like them, he talks like them, he thinks like them. He is, for that part, a great example to how a narrative of normality could work in a high stakes situation.
This sense of "walking the same road together", as it is sang in Muazzez Abacı's famous song, creates a strong bond between Erdoğan with the population he seems to represent; and it also goes a long way in explaining various other political maneuvers. Most explicitly, he uses "us" and "them", as mentioned in the earlier chapter on Erdoğan's political discourse, in a creative way to build up a heroic narrative.
Us, of course, means the ones like him, and he champions himself as their warrior against many evils. Kemalist mindset is one of those evils, and in later years of his governance, Europe becomes another. They are a danger to the lifestyle he represents, one that is already in jeopardy after years of being controlled and stepped on. He fights his wars in such a poetic way, that it wouldn't be overreaching to think that years later, his creation of his political persona will be even more similar to the creation of a fictional character. The already under-way production of this literary character can be seen through the many nicknames Erdoğan and his followers see fit for him, such as Reis ("Chief") and Uzun Adam ("Tall Man"). These epithets create a clear contrast between Erdoğan and older politicians in his position. For example, his height is a very important part of his public image as it sets him aside from the much shorter presidents of Turkey's past — and his imposing physical presence makes it easier for others to identify him on a visual level.
Being from Kasımpaşa also had its seeds in the abstraction of traditional manhood, an idea that was adopted by the majority of Turkish people for several reasons. For once, it was a very Anatolian character that was bearing comparison with those of ancient heroes. But it was also very much a familiar trope for many people. For some people, Erdoğan reminded them of their father, for others, their husbands and for many, themselves.
In fact, when looked at the numbers, the triangle of connections between Erdoğan, manhood and fatherhood becomes even clearer. In a research report of theirs published in 2017 and titled "Fatherhood and Its Determinants in Turkey", Mother Child Education Organization (Anne Çocuk Eğitim Vakfı, AÇEV) points out that there are six types of fatherhood in the country based on qualifications such as care, control and closeness; echeloned on a spectrum that goes from "authoritarian manhood" to "modern manhood". (24) Two most relevant groupings to our subject here are traditional and new traditional fatherhood, which hold, in order, 35 and 28 percentages of the focus group. Erdoğan, in this scenario, serves as the perfect portrayal for the majority of Turkish men who have children, as he has the same type of authoritarian nature that those two groups have. He is also secluded and protected against change, with a temper that is usually uncontrollable.
Last but not least, the traditional patriarchal manhood was a persistent motif in the Republican decades of Turkish cultural production, with Turkish Yeşilçam movies promoting masculinized protagonists of integrity and charisma, often from downtrodden backgrounds, who would eventually triumph. Erdoğan was the David to the Goliath that was the Kemalist Turkish state — tragically deemed as a pariah for his conservative beliefs in a secular state. He was agonized yet resolved; he would keep the letters sent to him from his prison days, and recite the same poem that got him convicted, years later, to a new and much stronger audience.
Erdoğan's perfect use of this complex identity benefited him in many ways, and the charismatic picture gave him a female following among conservative demographics that no politician could ever dream of: they came in groups and built their own organizations in support of him. While his machismo was just another reason for the liberals or more marginalised groups, such as left-leaning women and LGBT+ people, to find him undesirable, it only made him turn into an even bigger public figure for the major percentage of voters. This like a man/like a madam comparison, made by Erdoğan, represented the notion that there was only one way to do politics, and it was the true way, and it was the man's way.
"We will give this fight by not tottering through left and right, but
walking directly to our aim," he said at the opening of Ankara's
high-speed train station in 2016: "If we win, we will win like men and
if we die, we will die like men. Let Allah give us the chance to fight
this fight in a way that is worthy of our martyrs and veterans." (25)
Even this very quote is a great example of his way of keeping himself very close to the ones that listen to him, even subduing the physical distance between himself and his listeners. He is a part of the people, from the people, and for the people. He seems genuine, not just because of the way he talks but also because of the way he smiles or even cries — the emotions he puts up, as captured by cameras, do not seem like masks: they are real tears, that redness on his forehead is there because he is angry, and his voice trembles because it is an important moment. He seems not to filter his thoughts, which makes his political persona seem authentic to the millions that follow him.
Indeed, Erdoğan is the protector — the father — of Turkish identity, albeit a new one, created after his rise to power through small but certain steps, opposing to Atatürk's secular version, aligned closely with the country's Ottoman past and its Islamic heritage. Erdoğan is Kasımpaşa to Atatürk's Pera, the arabesque music to his waltz, the Ak Saray to his Çankaya. It is no surprise then, that, Erdoğan never uses the word "Atatürk" ("Father of the Turks") when referring to the founder of modern Turkey, but instead uses "Gazi Mustafa Kemal", undermining Mustafa Kemal's role as the father of the nation.
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Eyy! (Turkish: Eyy!): Most frequently used call for the political
opponents or any opposition group leader, sometimes a newspaper, a
news broadcaster — or a novelist. Used as in "Eyy CNN, eyy [The]
New York Times". Sound.
Erdoğan's patriarchal public persona gives him a chauvinistic character in his dealings with foreign institutions, which adds to his domestic support.
One of the most pivotal instances that led the world to see Erdoğan's newly found offensive nature against European nations after years spent on building better relations with them was at the 2009 Davos World Economic Forum. There, his criticism of moderator David Ignatius for not giving him as much time as the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, in the "Gaza: Peace in the Middle East" talk became a memorable moment in Turkish history, with his signature phrase "One minute!" committed to public memory. (26) Following this, the Palestinian conflict and later the Syrian crisis quickly got their places in Erdoğan's talking points, to no one's surprise, as the Davos scandal had the ability to make him even more famous in the polls thanks to the national media coverage depicting him as the "knight that slayed the dragon", and the "lone man that stood against the bullying of European barbarians". Whether the reaction he gave at that forum was intentional or not, the positive effect it had over then-Prime Minister's reputation clearly pushed him towards creating a more nationalistic portrait for himself in the years to come.
Another example of his confrontational advances against Western institutions came in 2015, when Erdoğan told the US based liberal newspaper The New York Times to "know its place" because of the critical editorial the paper published after the first election where the AK Party did not have the power to become the sole governing party since its founding. He said,
"[...] Some international publications and ones with already dodgy
records in our country too, advertise this allyship [between
oppositional factions]. New York Times comes and talks about me,
'There is oppression in Erdoğan's Turkey'. What oppression is there?
Know your place. Since when are you reaching your tongue out here from
the United States? These are used to managing the other side of the
world from ten thousand kilometers away. There is no Turkey like that
anymore. There is a new Turkey now." (27)
Just one day after he called out the New York Times, Erdoğan once again showed his claws to Reuters by blaming the international news organization of doing the very same thing, meddling with Turkey's internal politics and creating a version of events that works in favour of malice centers, some internal and external powers working against the Turkish republic.
This is not to say that Erdoğan's change in political stance was a momentary, 180 degrees turn; or even that it was a completely self-imposed agenda — but the reality of his ever-adjusting machinations when it comes to building a self image cannot be denied either. His impulsive attitude in times like the Mavi Marmara crisis, which was the disastrous attack by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound aid ship that left eight Turks and one Turkish-American dead, the Gezi Park Protests, or even more recent events such as the "Tulip Crisis" between Turkey and the Netherlands show a clear motif of chauvinistic encounter with Western power.
The most clear illustration of this tendency can be seen in his conversation with the United States President Bush back in 2007.
"At the beginning of our meeting, I told Mr. Bush that 'if you're from
Texas, then I am from Kasımpaşa.'[^2] I told him that Turkey's
patience and endurance was not there anymore. 'We have no more
tolerance', I said. I emphasised that the PKK terror had to end.
'Barzani, or Turkey? Make a decision,' I said." (28)
This was a part of then prime-minister Erdoğan's speech at AK Party's central executive committee assembly, where he was talking about his earlier meeting with US president George Bush. After his comparison between the state of Texas and Kasımpaşa, his hometown, one of the members asked whether or not Bush had any knowledge on Kasımpaşa. Erdoğan's answer was a simple one, and funny enough to raise a laugh among listeners. "He has learned. Now he knows."
It was one of, if not the most, successful campaign strategies in modern politics because it was so simple. A simple formulation that put Western countries in the position of big bad wolves was a safe bet, especially when told in a style reminiscent of old and glorious days of the Ottoman Empire. In the later years of the AK Party's rule, the West started to be portrayed as corrupt and degenerate, hypocritical and cowardly; unworthy of Turkish people who were modest, moral, honest and good. Erdoğan's way of building a perspective was a typical example of Occidentalism, demonizing a whole civilization and geography for the sake of one's own ambitions.
Erdoğan's role as a leader of paternalistic nature can be seen in both his dealings with domestic and international entities. On the domestic front, his background as a Kasımpaşalı has helped him garner an enormous amount of popular support from a segment of society that was previously underrepresented in Turkish politics. Furthermore, his chauvinistic tone in his relations with European and American institutions portrays him as a leader who is standing up to Western imperialism, which, again, earns him respect in the eyes of the Turkish electorate. Erdoğan, as evidenced by many cases, is highly aware of his perception in the eyes of the people and capitalizes on his background through these patriarchal interactions.
