President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ultra-loyal conservative base is dotted with old Fiat cars and yellow tulips in the Turkish city of Bayburt, which is poised to extend his two-decade rule until 2028.
In the first round of Turkey’s presidential election on May 14, Beybert’s voters gave Erdogan a comfortable hand.
80 percent of voters there voted for Erdogan, the highest vote share in a single province, giving him 49.5 percent of the national vote and strong favorites in Sunday’s runoff vote.
“To know Baibert’s heart is to know Turkey,” said Orhan Ates, a member of parliament for Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AKP party in a parallel parliamentary vote.
“Are you ready to re-elect our president?” He knowingly asked the passers-by.
Ates, a 47-year-old optometrist, makes impromptu appointments with patients on the street and hands out prescriptions on scraps of paper to a man wearing old shoes.
“I started as a shoe seller, I became a professor of medicine, people see in me what we see in Erdogan,” Ates told AFP.
“He talks to everyone, not just the elites,” Erdogan said.
– ‘Big Family’ –
“We are a big family here and Erdogan is a part of it. He is as strong as our palace,” said provincial AKP official Hasi Ali Polat, referring to the city’s centuries-old stronghold.
Residents who spoke to AFP said they had remained loyal to Erdogan, resisting attacks by foreign forces, as Baibert had fought against Russian invaders in the 19th century.
“We are nationalists and conservatives and we love Erdogan,” said the 26-year-old university graduate, who spoke at his father’s shop in Darhan Bayen.
“What people want is a strong leader,” he said, admitting that he likes a “new face” but condemns Kemal Kildaroglu, the leader of the secular opposition, as “weak.”
Muhammed Emre Temur works in the construction industry – a sector that has seen unprecedented growth under Erdogan – and refuses to see Turkey’s deep economic crisis as a reason to leave the presidency.
“Erdogan built his own ships, his own weapons, his own planes,” said the 19-year-old, who earns 10,000 liras ($500) a month.
“You won’t vote for ‘cucumber’ because of the price of onions,” he said, using a patronizing term to refer to Erdogan’s secular rival, Kemal Kilidaroglu.
– Favor in return? –
Beybert, located between the Black Sea and the Palandöken mountains, is Turkey’s least economically productive province and its least populous, with only 84,200 inhabitants.
But it was a stop on the ancient Silk Road that carried trade between Asia and Europe, an era of prosperity that many locals long to recover.
Bayan pointed to Erdogan’s unabashedly Islamic-based policies, subsidies to farmers and construction of dams to aid agriculture.
“There is a whole system and nobody wants to lose it,” he told AFP.
“It would be nice if he (Erdogan) rewarded us in return, built us a factory, gave us jobs,” added Yusuf Yolku, an insurance worker in his 50s.
Bulent Hacihasanoglu said at the clothing workshop that some people in small villages were too afraid to choose differently “for fear of being blacklisted.”
Hacihasanoglu still openly supports Kilicdaroglu and his promise to “return to parliamentary rule”, which ended Erdogan’s 2017 constitutional referendum and swept the presidency.
But Yolku insisted that Bayburt’s people had always been loyal, saying there had been “no incident” in the province during the 1980 military coup and the massive anti-government protests that rocked Turkey in 2013.
al/ach/imm/zak/pvh