In his shop surrounded by ruins, Latif Dalyan offers inexpensive tracksuits to survivors of the February 6 earthquake that struck southern Turkey. Despite the general destitution, he refuses to blame the head of state.
"If anyone can lift this country, it's Recep Tayyip Erdogan," said the 58-year-old trader from Kahramanmaras, the city closest to the epicenter of the disaster which killed at least 50,000 people. "May God give every country a leader like him."
This fervor contrasts with the anger and pain that was expressed after the disaster, a tremor with a magnitude of 7.8 followed by countless aftershocks, which devastated hundreds of thousands of homes.
The chilled survivors heard their relatives calling for help for hours in the rubble and accused the authorities of having delayed dispatching help.
But little by little, the anger ebbs, giving way to a fatalism that benefits the president, to whom the province had given three-quarters of its votes in the last ballot, in 2018.
This attitude is hampering the hopes of the opposition, which hopes to end 20 years of control by Erdogan and his party, the AKP, in the presidential and legislative elections on May 14.
"Nobody is perfect, no government", points out Latif Dalyan. "Anyone can make mistakes."
The director of the Konda polling institute, Aydin Erdem, came to the same conclusion after his surveys in the devastated areas.
"Our studies deny the decline in votes for the ruling party due to events," he told Turkish media this week. "The electorate has rather consolidated around the camp of their choice."
While his opponents accuse President Erdogan of dragging down the economy and silencing all criticism, the slow relief operations seemed to offer the united opposition a chance to capitalize on this discontent.
But Cem Yildiz does not see it that way: this 34-year-old CHP (main parliamentary opposition party) deputy admits that he has hardly campaigned so far. For him, any electoral process risks appearing immoral and counter-productive to a grieving population.
"We are not going to campaign with people in pain," he explains near the container which now serves as his party's headquarters. "We visit them to help them, but we don't ask them to vote for us."
Its collapsed main office, the CHP, the party of Turkish state founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has moved into a liberal area of the predominantly conservative city.
The men kill time in a cafe near the scene of a neo-fascist attack on socialists and Alevi Kurds in 1978 that killed around 100 people.
CHP activist Mustafa Akdogan remembers those troubled times with a bad feeling.
"Democracy, human rights and above all the rule of law have completely disappeared for four or five years," said the 67-year-old retired professor. "That's why these elections are so important."
But this self-imposed self-restraint leaves him less confident of victory than he was before the disaster. "We had momentum before the earthquake," he said. "Now I'm not sure."
The city and province of Kahramanmaras had a population of over one million before February 6. Who knows how many today.
Along the deserted streets, tents welcome families seated in front of the ruins of their homes.
Yasemin Tabak, a housewife in her forties, recalls that President Erdogan promised them to rebuild their house. "People just have to be a little patient," she notes with a smile.
"May God protect our government" abounds his tent neighbor, Ayse Ak.
But two other women who contemplate from the heights of the city the void, where previously stood buildings, are more circumspect.
"It's mainly that people are afraid to say anything against the government," says the youngest.
"They will never speak to you in front of the camera, nor give you their name. I too am afraid".
05/04/2023 10:58:21 Kahramanmaras (Turquie) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
