I will try to analyze the results of the local elections held on March 30 through the Istanbul mayoral elections won by the current prime minister 20 years ago.
By the end of the 1980s, notable political scientists Çaglar Keyder and Ayşe Öncü published an important article on Istanbul. The piece discussed the grave problems of the city, including the issues of planning, transportation, drinking water and unplanned urbanization and concluded that Istanbul was out of control and unmanageable. Despair was the main theme of the piece written by the two as the central inference of the article was that Istanbul as a city was unmanageable.
The publication period of the article coincides with the period when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was preparing to become the Istanbul mayor. Before the elections of 1994, garbage in the city accumulated on the streets due to a labor strike and almost no house had potable water as the existent water supply network could not satisfy Istanbul's demand. The city was suffering from the increasing population and urban management was unable to solve any of these problems.
Surprisingly, Erdoğan from the Welfare Party (RP) won the mayoral elections of Istanbul. It is possible he laid the foundations of his present-day managerial success during his Istanbul mayoral period. He disciplined, in his own words, "the human and money management" in a short time.
The Istanbul Municipality began to stand out for procuring more income, making more investments and overcoming more problems. The successes of the Istanbul Municipality started to be related to the successes in the Anatolian municipalities.
The charismatic personality of Erdoğan also affected the emergence of those success stories. All those proceedings constituted the background that led to today's Justice and Development Party (AK Party) administration. Those conditions have, in the long run, prepared the AK Party administration.
When Erdoğan became the prime minister of the Republic of Turkey in 2002, he immediately encountered the bureaucratic structure of the state. The Ankara bureaucracy, designed not to work, had the following philosophy: "Governments are temporary, bureaucrats are permanent."
Thus, the Ankara bureaucracy assumed "the politicians are passengers, while they are the innkeepers." To take swift action, the prime minister had to fight the unwieldiness and resistance of the Ankara bureaucracy. If the prime minister did not have his Istanbul experience, he may have yielded to bureaucratic inertia. "That is the reality of state bureaucracy," he would have said. He transformed his capabilities stemming from his Istanbul experience into a new approach in Ankara.
With his experience as the mayor of Istanbul, the prime minister developed the approach of deciding quickly with a few people, removing the barriers to investment, and accelerating when necessary the state mechanism with legal arrangements.
He managed to govern the inert state mechanism with metropolitan dynamism.
Istanbul, which had grave problems when Erdoğan came to office, is one of today's global cities. It is the Turkish center of culture, art, sport and tourism and one of the most discussed and intriguing cities of the world, receiving more and more tourists every year. World-renowned artists prefer Istanbul for their most prestigious presentations and Kadir Topbaş, the threeterm mayor of the city, is also president of the United Cities and Local Governments.
The prime minister, who gained his first management experience in Istanbul, was the indisputable winner of the last local elections. While the Istanbul he left behind became a global city, the prime minister won all elections since the day he established his party. I think that the experience of taking Istanbul in an unmanageable condition and turning it into a manageable city has its own role in all those successes.
About the author
İhsan Aktaş is Chairman of the Board of GENAR Research Company. He is an academic at the Department of Communication at Istanbul Medipol University.
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