Erdogan Rising. Hannah Lucinda Smith
Gül says. ‘When TVs started to show parliament, people started to monitor their representatives. In the village they were supporting someone, and then seeing what they were doing in parliament. We were addressing their feelings. We were being live broadcasted. The first live broadcast started in the 1990s. It was one of the contributions to Turkish democracy. Before, political allegiance was just a tradition that was passed on. Now it is more transparent. Refah got rooted in the country in the 1990s. People listened on TV. They saw that we were addressing their feelings. This is how everything was restructured.’
Turkey’s economy was also creaking by the time the AKP launched in 2001; the currency was slipping into hyper-inflation and unemployment rocketing towards 10 per cent. All the existing parties were tarnished with corruption, incompetence or both. The logo Erdoğan and his team eventually plumped for to represent their new party was the light bulb – a symbol of hope in dark times. And to fit with the letters A, K and P, they came up with a full and generic name – the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party).
Soon, the AKP was the most talked-about party in Turkey. A secularist newspaper columnist said it should be pronounced as its letters – A-K-P – rather than as ‘Ak Party’, as the marketers had intended. It is still a point of contention today – and a great way of determining a Turk’s feelings about the party. Every time I say ‘A-K-P’, Cevat Olçok pulls me up.
‘Ak Partisi!’ he snaps, without irony.
‘When it started, the goal was to make AK Partisi … a brand in Turkey and the world,’ he continues. ‘This was said at the foundation. AK Partisi: a world party. Seventeen years have passed. You will see AK Parti everywhere in Turkey, and always with a corporate identity.’
In November 2002, only fifteen months after it was officially launched, the AKP won an outright majority of seats in the parliament. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), one of the major international election monitors, was glowing in its opening assessment of the poll. It wrote in its final report:
The 3 November elections for the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) demonstrated the vibrancy of Turkey’s democracy. A large number of parties campaigned actively throughout the country, offering the electorate a broad and varied choice. The sweeping victory of opposition parties showed the power of the Turkish electorate to institute governmental change.
But the OSCE also noted some serious flaws in the system. The AKP had won just 34 per cent of the vote but taken almost two-thirds of the seats in parliament. The only other party to take up seats was the CHP – a result of Turkey’s arcane election rules, which state that only parties that tally more than 10 per cent of the vote can enter parliament. The votes of those that fall below the threshold are distributed between those who have reached it.
Erdoğan, though chairman of the victorious party, could not take up one of its seats – his criminal conviction barred him from taking public office. Abdullah Gül became prime minister, but the AKP immediately began gathering cross-party support for the law barring Erdoğan to be changed. Gül served for just five months before stepping aside for Erdoğan in March 2003. Some within the party were unimpressed.
‘No one was expecting me to resign, even Tayyip Bey [a Turkish honorific, roughly Mr Tayyip],’ says Gül. ‘Everything was going very well. There was a lot of pressure, but I did not think it would be ethical for me to stay. [Erdoğan] was chairman of the party. It was an ethical matter. I thought it would be better for me to leave [the prime minister’s position].’
By April 2018, when I meet Cevat Olçok, Arter has stuck with the AKP and vice versa for seventeen years, through ten election campaigns and countless other publicity drives – and now the loss of their founder and visionary, Erol Olçok. Under him, they took their AKP formula international, working on political campaigns in northern Cyprus, Iraq, Georgia, Egypt, Malaysia, Albania, Macedonia, Libya, Tunisia and Ukraine. They also take on other work in the commercial sector.
But for Erdoğan, their number one client, Arter has always gone above and beyond the role of spin agency: Erol Olçok even stage-managed the grandiose society weddings of the president’s children. It was he who commissioned the song about Erdoğan for the 2014 presidential elections – and convinced his boss of its merit.
‘The mathematics of our campaign was like this. Our hero was Erdoğan,’ Erol Olçok later said. ‘Then Mr Erdoğan called me to his side. He said, “Is it too late to say this song is very personal and it would not be right to use it?” I said to him: “Mr Prime Minister, this song has nothing to do with you. This song is for the people who wish to express their love for you. This is their statement.”’
Set to the rhythm and tune of the dombra, a pounding Turkic-style war song, the lyrics still echo around the Erdoğan rallies I go to five years on: He is the voice of the oppressed, the lush voice of a silent world! Recep Tayyip Erdoğan …
‘Erdoğan is a genius in regards to political communications and so was Erol,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘They knew … how to touch people and understand their feelings. They were a match.
‘Erdoğan and his party came to get rid of the old order. They widened Turkey’s perspectives and horizons. He gave us self-confidence. Now we have much bigger dreams. We will build our own electric car. We are building our own fighter jets and tactical helicopters. We are the seventeenth biggest economy in the world. We were the most expanding country in this year’s G20. Erdoğan is realising Turkey’s dreams. This is why he is a great brand.’
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