Four days after Turkey’s worst earthquake in decades, Hakan Tanriverdi sends a simple message to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan: “Don’t come here to ask for votes.”

In four days, more than 21,000 bodies were removed from the rubble, including those killed in neighboring Syria. The crash comes at a critical juncture for the Turkish head of state, who expects to remain in power after this year’s elections.

Prime Minister from 2003 to 2014, President since then, the irremovable Mr. Erdogan confirmed at the end of January that presidential and parliamentary elections would be held in Turkey on 14 May.

The short time frame that interferes minimizes the chances of the Turkish opposition to agree on a common candidate. Although some do not rule out that the elections will be postponed due to the elements.

A three-month state of emergency has been declared in 10 earthquake-hit provinces. Authorities estimate that 13.5 million Turks were directly affected by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake on Monday.

Residents continue to search the rubble for survivors, but more often than not, they find nothing but bodies. For those who survived, there are icy roads. Or, for the more fortunate, their cars.

For the Turkish president, the situation seemed favorable. After falling in the polls last year due to the financial crisis and skyrocketing inflation (over 85%), his ratings are slowly recovering.

But it cannot be ruled out that the lack of effective disaster management in the first days after the earthquake by his government could reverse the trend.

“What hurt us deeply is that no one helped us,” says Hakan Tanriverdi. In Antiyaman, the capital of the province of the same name where he lives, in 2018 Mr. Erdogan won with characteristic ease. But five years later, many residents are complaining about the deadly slowness of search and rescue efforts and an acute shortage of equipment.

“I didn’t see anyone until 14:00 on the second day after the earthquake,” that is, 34 hours after the main earthquake, shouts Memet Yildirim in annoyance. “No state, no police, no army. Same for you! You left us to our fate.”

The head of the Turkish state on the eve of Wednesday acknowledged the presence of “gaps” in the reaction of the authorities. But he hopes to regain the advantage. On Tuesday, he attended a meeting of disaster relief agencies in Ankara and then toured the earthquake-hit areas for two days. However, he did not go to Antiyaman.

“Why was the state absent on such a day? Where are the foundations of Turkish democracy?” volunteer Hedige Kalkan protested. “People are pulling their bodies out of the rubble with their own means.”

The scale of the disaster, the fact that it occurred over a vast area, parts of which have been removed, and the fact that the earthquake occurred in the midst of a wave of bad weather, would, however, make search and rescue operations very difficult. any country is extremely complex.

Mr. Erdogan was warmly welcomed by hundreds of earthquake victims in −carefully choreographed– television broadcasts during his tours. In one of them, the cameras focused on an elderly woman crying on his shoulder.

Wiesel Gultekin would not treat his president like that. One of his relatives was crushed by the rubble, his legs were pinched. “We talked until morning. I could pull it out with a simple drill (…). But, unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything with my bare hands.”

During the ensuing second strong earthquake, “his whole body was crushed (by debris) and he died.”

AFP journalists saw construction equipment and members of rescue teams, especially foreign missions, near collapsed buildings in Antiyam districts on Thursday.

This is more than enough to calm Hakan Tanriverdi.

Trapped, they were left “in (mortal) agony in the cold,” he says. “Isn’t it a sin to let people die like this?”

Source: RES-IPE