Erdogan Democracy Means One Man, One Fridge in Turkey Election
By Ben Holland
March 3 (Bloomberg) -- Tekin Geze got a free refrigerator and a washing machine two weeks ago, courtesy of the Turkish government. They’re stowed, still wrapped in cardboard, in the only corner of his mud-brick shack that doesn’t leak.
Geze, who is unemployed and hasn’t paid electricity bills for six months, has little to put in either machine. He says he depends on neighbors’ charity for food; his 4-year-old daughter plays bare-legged in the winter cold.
In the run-up to March 29 local elections, Geze, 26, is one of thousands in the eastern province of Tunceli to benefit from an aid program that the opposition calls political bribery and Turkey’s election board says is against voting rules. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is loosening the purse strings after fighting off efforts by generals and prosecutors to oust his administration in the past two years.
“The government’s trying hard to make sure there’s no erosion in its support, and that means spending a lot,” said Serhan Cevik, an economist at Nomura International Plc in London. “But there’s a library-full of studies showing returns on this kind of election-related spending are very low.”
Erdogan, 55, is departing from the International Monetary Fund-backed prudence that helped him preside over record growth in Turkey’s $700-billion economy since he came to power in 2002. The global crisis has arrested that expansion. Industrial output fell 18 percent in December, the most since records began in 1986, and unemployment rose to a four-year high of 12.3 percent.
Half the Budget
In Tunceli’s capital of the same name, a largely Kurdish city ringed by mountains, the governor’s office has spent about 5 million liras ($3 million) on the appliance campaign, said Oguz Alp Caglar, the centrally appointed provincial deputy governor. The entire municipal budget, which covers salaries for 200 people plus services such as the fire brigade and street cleaning, is only twice that.
“In 2009, a television and a fridge aren’t luxury goods, they’re basic necessities,” Caglar said. “The timing has been a problem, but people know we’re above politics. You can’t shut down the state’s functions just because there’s an election.”
About 48 million Turks are entitled to vote on March 29 to choose mayors and municipal assemblies in Turkey’s 81 provinces. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party may get between 40 and 45 percent, more than its three nearest rivals combined, according to a survey commissioned by New York-based economic research firm Medley Global Advisors LLC. The study, carried out last week, had a margin of error of 1.5 percentage points.
Tunceli province, population 80,000, often bucks the national trend. In 2007’s parliamentary election, when Erdogan was re-elected with the biggest nationwide victory in four decades, it was the only province not to elect a single Justice Party lawmaker.
Better Services?
Cihan Acikgoz, the Justice candidate for mayor of Tunceli city, says he will win because people will vote for better services. The appliance handout has nothing to do with the Justice Party, and won’t affect the election because the civil servants distributing them aren’t telling anyone how to vote.
“We’ll teach people to fish, not give them fish,” Acikgoz said.
In Tunceli’s Ataturk neighborhood, a square of freshly painted concrete apartment blocks at the city’s edge, three trucks loaded with ovens, fridges and vacuum cleaners pull up. They’re immediately surrounded by about 30 residents trying to find out if their names are on the aid list. Mustafa Aktar, a local official, dispatches porters to haul the units upstairs and fields complaints from people upset that they received fewer appliances than their neighbors.
‘Free and Fair’
The handouts breached the constitutional requirement for elections to be “free and fair,” Turkey’s electoral board ruled on Feb. 7. The board asked prosecutors to investigate, and an inquiry began on Feb. 11, CNBC-e television reported. There’s no question of canceling the election results in Tunceli, the board’s chairman, Muammer Aydin, told reporters Feb. 27.
“It’s an open case of bribery, against all the rules of democracy,” said Onur Oymen, deputy head of the opposition Republican People’s Party, in a phone interview.
Addressing lawmakers in parliament on Feb. 10, Erdogan praised the Tunceli campaign and said his government had distributed aid to the needy throughout its six years in office, not just at voting time.
Average per-capita income almost tripled during Erdogan’s six years in government, to about $10,000 a year, and inflation fell below 10 percent for the first time since the 1970s.
Now, Turkey faces its first recession since 2001, according to the IMF, which forecasts a 1.5 percent contraction this year. The budget deficit widened almost sixfold in January from a year earlier, to 3 billion liras. Current transfers, which include money given to municipal authorities, jumped 40 percent to 7.2 billion liras.
Washer Aid
“There’s a logic to spending more in a crisis, and it’s right to help the poor people,” said Refet Gurkaynak, a professor at Bilkent University in Ankara and a former Federal Reserve economist. “But who decided that the way to help them was to buy them a washing machine?”
IMF demands for tighter curbs on local-government spending are a key reason why its loan talks with Turkey stalled, Erdogan told Sabah newspaper in an interview published Feb. 25. The negotiations on replacing a $10 billion loan that ended in May have been on hold since Jan. 26.
Erdogan said on Feb. 27 that the IMF placed “unacceptable obstacles” to a new accord. Turkey doesn’t need the IMF’s money, though an agreement remains possible, he said.
The premier, who has spoken at rallies in more than 20 cities in the past three weeks, is seeking to remind his unelected opponents how popular he is with the Turkish public, economist Cevik said.
Legal Challenge
Since its 2007 landslide, the Justice Party, which has roots in a banned Islamist movement, has faced repeated challenges from its secularist opponents. In July a lawsuit filed by the top prosecutor to ban Erdogan and his party for inciting religious fundamentalism failed by one vote in the 11- member Constitutional Court.
In Tunceli, Nuri Balci, a 40-year-old unemployed man, watched a porter carry his new refrigerator up the stairs to his apartment and said it won’t make him support the government.
“They’re trying to affect the election, but it won’t work,” he said. “We won’t sell our votes for fridges.”
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