Hakan Tanriverdi has a simple message for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan days after Turkey suffered its worst disaster in generations: “Don’t come here asking for votes.”
The earthquake that killed more than 21,000 people across Turkey and Syria came at one of the most politically sensitive moments of Erdogan’s two-decade rule.
The Turkish leader has proposed holding a crunch election on May 14 that could keep his Islamic-rooted government in power until 2028.
The date gives his splintered opposition little time to hammer out their differences and agree on a joint presidential candidate.
Whether that vote can now go ahead as planned remains to be seen.
Erdogan has declared a three-month state of emergency across 10 quake-hit provinces. The region is still digging out its dead and many are living on the streets or in their cars.
Campaigning here seems out of the question.
But there is also a political dimension that is deeply personal for Erdogan.
The earthquake struck just as he was gaining momentum and starting to lift his approval numbers from a low suffered during a dire economic crisis that exploded last year.
Tanriverdi’s bitterness is a bad sign for Erdogan in a province where he handily beat his secular opposition rival in the last election in 2018.
“We were deeply hurt that no one supported us,” Tanriverdi said of the government’s earthquake response.
Source: Punchng
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