On Feb. 8, two days after major earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria, the situation in Kahramanmaraş was emotional and tense.
“Where is the state?” Ahmet Çiçek asked, echoing a common phrase at the time. He spoke while watching rescue crews try to locate his family members in mounds of rubble.
“Is the state coming here last? There are no tents, no food, no toilets,” Çiçek told Turkey recap. “We are angry.”
The state actually did come that day. Pres. Erdoğan visited Kahramanmaraş, escorted by security teams that jogged along with his car convoy, though not everyone in the crowd of onlookers reacted positively.
“It is not because of the pain of the people [that he’s here],” a bystander commented. “There is an election coming up. They came for their own advertisement.”
Those were the public sentiments more than two months ago. Now, much of that initial fury seems to have disappeared.
Following extensive interviews in both Kahramanmaraş and Hatay, some of the hardest hit areas, Turkey recap observed voting preferences changed less than originally expected, and voting day logistics remain widely under-developed, with potential impacts on regional voter turnout and election integrity, more broadly.
Continue reading at Turkey recap