Andrew Finkel

Andrew Finkel is an Istanbul-based journalist who has lived in Turkey since 1989

Wednesday

Andrew Finkel

Erdogan is desperate

From our UK edition

There is such a thing as governing for too long. After about ten years in post, politicians’ once natural feel for the nation’s pulse instead starts to rub the electorate the wrong way. Thatcher, Blair and de Gaulle all saw their time run out.  What about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? He has led Turkey since 2003 as prime minister and since 2014 as president. This Sunday, he will try to defy political gravity.  Opinion polls don’t suggest a clear outcome in the Turkish election. They suggest that no presidential candidate will get 50 per cent of the vote in the first round on Sunday, and that Erdoğan’s principal and not overly charismatic opponent, the former servant Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has a decent chance of pulling ahead in the second.

Wednesday

Andrew Finkel

Could Turkey’s earthquake bring down president Erdogan?

From our UK edition

Turkey is now wrestling with shock and grief and with the dawning realisation of just how large a task it will be to rebuild in the wake of devastating natural disaster. It is also struggling with an uncomfortable truth – that the quake has, with vicious accuracy, sought out not only weaknesses in the earth but fault lines within society itself. Ankara must cope with the criticism that it failed both to plan for a disaster and to react when it struck.   I wrote the above paragraph nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of an earthquake near Istanbul which claimed at least 17,000 lives. And yet it remains cruelly apposite in the tide of devastation and recriminations that have followed the twin earthquakes earlier this month.