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Erdogan Rising. Hannah Smith Lucinda
Читать онлайн.Название Erdogan Rising
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008308865
Автор произведения Hannah Smith Lucinda
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
By the time the glamorous 43-year-old mayor of Istanbul broke with Refah and was sent to jail, he had already started an aggressive spin campaign to reinvent himself as Turkey’s number one Islamist. In the eleven months between his conviction and the start of his jail term, Erdoğan called his first major press conference. As mayor of Istanbul Erdoğan had almost always refused to speak with foreign journalists. Now, he needed the media to reboot his image for the world stage. So he invited a group of correspondents based in the city for a slap-up lunch at an upmarket restaurant serving hearty Ottoman-style food.
‘Why are you meeting with us now?’ asked one of the more cynical correspondents.
Erdoğan turned in surprise to his assistant, a pleasant young man who had always relayed his boss’s rejection of interview requests with an apologetic air. ‘Why didn’t you tell me these journalists have been wanting to meet with me?’ he berated the unfortunate bureaucrat.
It was, says one of the correspondents who was at the lunch, a transparent attempt to save face. ‘A charm offensive,’ was how another described it.
As the court case against Erdoğan dragged on, Istanbul city council turned its website into a protest page featuring messages of support and a link to the full text of his defence statement. By the time his appeal failed and he was finally sent to prison in March 1999, he had built a reputation as a free-speech crusader with a legion of loyal personal supporters. Before he was jailed he was allowed to attend Friday prayers at the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul for a final time. Huge crowds came to pray alongside him, and formed a convoy to escort him to Pınarhisar jail, north-west of Istanbul. When he was released in July 1999, having served only 119 days of his ten-month sentence, thousands turned out again to greet him.
The ad man
Erdoğan was not the only Islamist mayor to have been imprisoned in Turkey at that time. In 1996 şükrü Karatepe, the mayor of Kayseri in central Anatolia and also from the Refah Party, had told a rally that his ‘heart was bleeding’ because he had been obliged to attend a ceremony honouring Atatürk. Convicted of insulting the eternal leader in April 1998, a week after Erdoğan’s conviction for inciting religious hatred, he had a one-year sentence slapped on him and was sent straight to prison with no time for appeal. But Karatepe did not have a marketing genius behind him – and he was forgotten as soon as his cell door slammed shut.
Erdoğan, meanwhile, was working with the best in the business.
‘Even when Erdoğan was forbidden from engaging in politics we were engaged in communication campaigns. There was a political ban on him but we were trying to do as much as the law allowed,’ says Cevat Olçok, the bearded and sharp-suited director of Arter, Turkey’s first political marketing agency. I am sitting across from him at a huge desk in the agency’s minimalist-industrial-style Istanbul offices in April 2018. The clean lines of the shelves behind him are ruined by Ottoman-style knick-knacks, books and framed pictures of Erdoğan. Pride of place, though, goes to the photos of his brother, Erol, and nephew, Abdullah, both killed on the Bosphorus bridge by coup soldiers on 15 July.
Erol Olçok, who founded Arter with Cevat, first worked with Erdoğan as a spin doctor in the Istanbul mayoral election campaign of 1994. He was raised in a poor and religious family in the Anatolian town of Çorum and, like Erdoğan, had graduated from religious high school. But instead of entering the clergy like most of his peers he went to art college – the first from his village to take advantage of higher education.
‘I will never forget the day I first passed the Bosphorus,’ Erol later said of his first day in the city in 1982.
In 1986 he graduated with a degree in art history and started working in advertising. It was a relatively new and rapidly expanding sector; prime minister Turgut Özal, the first elected leader after the 1980 military coup, was opening up Turkey’s economy and Turks were becoming consumers in the Western style. After working with a number of commercial agencies Erol started Arter in 1993, and a year later was contracted by Erdoğan. Such was the bond that developed between them that, having won the Istanbul mayoral elections, Erdoğan appointed Erol Olçok his press adviser.
‘Erdoğan never stopped marketing himself,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘We were making greetings cards from him for religious holidays and important dates for the country. When he had the political ban, his motto was “this song does not finish here”. We designed the poster for everybody in Turkey. There was a huge demand for it. It was in every city in Turkey.’
Arter’s iconic poster was the namesake of the later album of poetry: a picture of Erdoğan in profile, speaking from behind a podium with a Turkish flag in the background. At the top, his name. At the bottom, that slogan – a statement. And other than that, nothing else: no party logo, no symbol and no explanation. None was needed. Erdoğan had become a brand.
The rebels
As Erdoğan was serving his jail term, a separate group of young renegades was calling for change from within the Refah Party. These rebels, like Erdoğan, had grown frustrated with Necmettin Erbakan’s way of doing politics. From cosmopolitan, professional backgrounds, they included Bülent Arınç, a suave lawyer of Cretan heritage, and Abdullah Gül, a former economist at the Islamic Development Bank. Gül stood as candidate for the leadership of Refah in 1997, hoping to reform the party from within. He was narrowly beaten – but a few months later the party was closed down anyway.
‘We had many successes with Refah. But later on, the political landscape changed and we started to make mistakes,’ Gül tells me in the huge drawing room of his Istanbul palace. ‘There was a convention and I became the candidate. I was talking about democracy, I was talking about fundamental rights, about human rights and saying that if the rhetoric is not good in politics we have to adopt the correct policies. The party was very authoritarian at the time. There was no chance for me yet I was about to win. It was a shock. The party was then closed by the constitutional court without justification … I was trying to save the party.’
As had happened so many times over the decades, Refah reformed under a new name, the Saadet Partisi (Felicity Party). But the new guard led by Gül did not join them – instead they split and formed a new grouping. They started their public relations drive with a rally in Kayseri, Gül’s home city, and followed it up with a tour of Turkey. And they had attracted a star – Erdoğan, recently released from prison and with a soaring reputation. Gül had lobbied the European Parliament to oppose Erdoğan’s jail sentence and personally approached him to join his new party once he was released. The soft-spoken technocrat says he had no issue with handing over the top position in the party he had founded to the most charismatic Islamist Turkey had ever produced. The demand for him to do so came, he says, from within the ranks.
‘We all decided to make Erdoğan chairman. His popularity was higher,’ Gül says.
The Arter team came as part of the Erdoğan package – and so they got to work on the new party’s branding.
‘We worked on the name, the logo and corporate identity,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘Erol was the leader in all these things. We made additions to the party’s manifesto, and we worked on the name. There were many ideas for that: one of them was the Genç Partisi [Young Party]. They did not like it. Then there was Beyaz Partisi [White Party] and from that it became Ak [meaning pure]. It became AK Partisi because Turkey needed a clean page. All the political establishments were tired, and the society was not getting what it wanted. But the people in this party were clean and wise – this is why we proposed AK Partisi.’
As Arter revved up the spin, speechwriter Hüseyin Besli was working out who the Turkish people actually were –