Will canal plan sink or save Erdogan?
Turkish president vows mega-project to create jobs in bid for re-election
From soaring bridges to a giant mosque to plans for the world’s biggest airport, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has used gargantuan building projects as an engine of growth and a signature way of leaving an indelible stamp on his nation.
As he campaigns for re-election Sunday, Erdogan has promised his most ambitious project yet: a canal that would bisect the country and create a Turkish-owned trade route, which he says would make Turkey a great power and leave a legacy for the history books.
“What makes Panama is the Panama Canal,” Erdogan told supporters at a rally in Istanbul last weekend. “Suez is the biggest source of revenue for Egypt. Let’s have a vote. God willing, the Istanbul Canal will be another fresh breath for our city.”
The election is shaping up as an up-or-down vote on how Erdogan has transformed Turkey during 15 years in charge. He has amassed sultanlike powers, jailed political enemies and trimmed civil liberties, even as average annual economic growth of 5 per cent has spawned and nurtured a middle class.
But the most obvious way Erdogan has left his mark stands before the eyes of any visitor: grandiose monuments and infrastructure investments in just about every town.
There are signs that the public is weary of Erdogan’s building mania.
The canal is the latest dividing line between those who see Erdogan’s projects as visionary and those who say the works are guided by an insatiable construction industry that has enriched his ruling circle, raising questions about his management of a faltering economy.
Erdogan called the election a year and a half ahead of schedule, hoping to beat the economic downturn nipping at his heels.
A once-fractured opposition has united against him, making it increasingly uncertain whether Erdogan will meet the 50-per-cent threshold to win outright and avoid a runoff against his top challenger.
Erdogan counts his building feats at virtually every election rally and warns that his opponents plan to tear down everything his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has built. The party “built 284,000 classrooms,” he declared recently in the town of Mugla, adding “Are you going to demolish them, too?”
He lists his big canal project at the top of his campaign posters. Not one shovel has been put in the ground, but Erdogan has vowed to begin construction immediately if he is re-elected as president and assumes sweeping new powers.
All of his megaprojects have been about creating symbols of his strength as he aims for a place in the pantheon of great Turkish leaders, from the Ottoman sultans to the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
But the 45-kilometre canal linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara — estimated to cost $15 billion, although critics say the figure is closer to $65 billion, and displace 800,000 people — has been dubbed his “crazy idea” since Erdogan conceived it seven years ago.
“It means crazy, wow, in a good sense,” said Mehmet Akarca, head of Turkey’s general directorate for press and information and an adviser to the president. “It will make money, and ships will use it, and they will pay tolls to use it.”
That is the hope, at least, though many doubt it will ever happen — or it will work if it does.
Environmentalists warn the canal would damage the ecosystem so much that Istanbul could become uninhabitable. Archeologists caution it would threaten a top-class Paleolithic site. Economists say the project is not financially viable.
“It’s like playing Moses,” said Serkan Taycan, an artist and opponent of the canal who has mapped the area that would be disturbed.
Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the Ankara director for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a research organization, credits Erdogan for building infrastructure that has helped Turkey’s rapid urbanization by linking cities to one another and to their suburbs. The construction sector has also provided millions of jobs to Turkey’s largely uneducated workforce.
“One aspect of the big projects is that they are generating growth,” Unluhisarcikli said.
But Erdogan’s opponents say his economic model is dubious, even corrupt.
Abdullatif Sener, a former deputy prime minister, has alleged that Erdogan’s way of governing is all about the profit that the president and his close circle can gain in kickbacks.
Sener was a co-founder of the Justice and Development Party, as was Erdogan, but he resigned from the party in 2008 because of corruption, he says, and is running for Parliament with the opposition Republican People’s Party.
“They don’t think about the concerns of the citizens,” Sener said of the government at a campaign rally in Aziziye. “They think about ‘How can I make my friend, my family, my close circle, my buddy richer.’ With this mentality, this country could not escape disaster.”