Is This the End for Erdoğan?
Since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks killed nearly 60,000 people across Turkey and Syria in February, the Turkish town of Pazarcık has stood as an example of the failures of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule.
When I visited in April, modern apartment blocks were still abandoned, with deep cracks or gaping holes where whole walls had been sheared off—reminders of how shoddy construction, often the result of corruption, made the disaster’s toll worse. Rubble had been cleared in some places, but work to replace the collapsed buildings had not begun. Only about half the town’s pre-quake population remains, the rest having fled or perished. Shops had reopened in the buildings that weren’t destroyed, but the sidewalks were largely deserted; inflation in Turkey topped 85 percent last fall, thanks largely to Erdoğan’s monetary policy.
The two crises—the earthquake and the economy—have left Turkey’s strongman leader in what might be his weakest political position yet after nearly 20 years in power. Ahead of Turkey’s presidential election tomorrow, Erdoğan several points behind
