A nostalgia piece: Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality elections from Dalan to Erdoğan (1984-1994)

Mayoral candidate Hüsamettin Cindoruk at the Şark Kahvesi

The year is 1984, and I am a student at the Istanbul Faculty of Political Sciences. My friends and I frequently visit the Şark Kahvesi in the Grand Bazaar. Prices haven't skyrocketed like they have now. The September 12 regime had ended, and ANAP had come to power in the elections held in November 1983—thanks to the veto system. Local government elections were about to be held. For the first time, a truly multi-party election was to take place in Turkey. Municipal and provincial general assembly elections.

As we were sipping our tea, the place suddenly became chaotic. A rather large group of politicians filled the coffeehouse. The person we saw in front of us was Hüsamettin Cindoruk. Demirel's trusted man. He had been nominated as the DYP's Istanbul Provincial Chairman for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. I remember a significant hand-shaking session taking place with his populist, man-of-the-people attitude. We watched the event with looks that suggested we didn't care about him or his party.

We were most angry at Kenan Evren and Turgut Özal for well-known reasons. There was a slight sympathy for Demirel and his team. Cindoruk was the lawyer for the Democrats on Yassıada.

The magazine Yeni Gündem had just started being published and was beginning to release interviews; a later interview would also be conducted with the lawyer Hüsamettin Bey. After long years of dictatorship, we were reading such publications with the joy of a democracy festival in those days. Everyone who opposed the order established by September 12 agreed with the "rule of law" struggle waged by Demirel. Prime Minister Özal, on the other hand, was in a state of brazenness, claiming, "We didn't impose the bans."

SODEP rally at Saraçhane Square

We, the students of the Istanbul University Faculty of Political Sciences, saw Necdet Calp's party as having the approval of Kenan Evren and did not like it; we supported Erdal İnönü's Social Democracy Party (SODEP). With the enthusiasm provided by the freedom of assembly that came years later, we went to the SODEP rally. Previously, an indoor meeting where İsmail Cem was also a speaker had been held at the Pera Palace, and we had gone to that as well. In that meeting, where questions were collected in writing, Algan Hacaloğlu had not read my question. I remember us chanting, "SODEP voters hand in hand... Korel Göymen to duty" at the rally.

Professor Korel Göymen had been nominated as the mayoral candidate from SODEP. We liked the professor. But our people did not. For us, Korel Göymen was a very good candidate. In terms of his appearance, education, and speaking style, he was a typical republican elite. He was an associate professor and had studied public administration in England. To use current terminology, the professor's GPA, ALES, LES, and language scores were very high. But he was a candidate who would be eliminated in the interview.

Erdal Bey was also there. Even though the party chairman, physics professor Erdal İnönü, and the Istanbul candidate Korel Göymen gave "lecture-style" speeches, our enthusiasm was far ahead of the speeches. I remember returning from the rally with quite a bit of joy.

When the ballot boxes closed, the result was, of course, a disappointment for us. Özal's man, Bedrettin Dalan, had won the election. Another source of our sadness was that, far from reducing Özal to a level that would put him in a crisis of legitimacy, our people had increased their support for Özal even further. Dalan was an engineer who graduated from the ITU Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, electrical department. He was a politician whose gaze I had always been uncomfortable with back then.

As a result, SODEP emerged from these elections as the 2nd party both in Istanbul and across Turkey. In the first real election of the new democracy era, the national will had shown a red card to the opposition parties within the parliament, not to Özal.

Necdet Calp's Populist Party, the chief of staff of İsmet Paşa, and Sunalp Paşa's MDP, sponsored by Kenan Paşa, had fallen to the level of being below the threshold. The most important result of the elections was this: the real opposition parties were not represented in parliament.

Bedrettin Dalan, Istanbul's first metropolitan mayor

I recently attended a panel at Yeditepe University. I ran into the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Dalan, in the cafeteria wearing a captain's hat. When he looked at me with a smile, I gave a slight nod. The negative feelings I had felt toward him in the 80s must have passed. During the Ergenekon/Balyoz conspiracy cases, they wanted to arrest him just like Professor Haberal. I think he had to live abroad for 5 years—receiving cancer treatment.

Dalan's mayoralty passed in the Menderes style. He did not implement administrative court decisions. He built pile roads on the coasts without caring about the judiciary. Arnavutköy, Sarıyer, Üsküdar-Harem, and others. Dalan was the 80s version of the modernization-by-destruction logic that Menderes started in the 50s.

These were the years when the first studies of international capital, which has now completely taken over Istanbul, were being conducted and the sovereigns clustered around ANAP began to discover sweet rent areas.

The garden of the Çırağan Palace, which remained derelict as a result of a fire during the Constitutional Era, was being used as Beşiktaş's Şeref Stadium with makeshift steps. Such a magnificent place could not remain so idle. It had to be brought into capitalism. Dalan transformed Çırağan into a hotel, now used for wealthy Middle Eastern weddings, by opening creative-destructive gaps in its walls.

The mayoralty of ENT specialist Prof. Dr. Nurettin Sözen

The inventor of the metropolitan municipality law is Özal. He could have privatized local governments just as he privatized education and health; he was a man with that mindset. But he must have been hesitant because there was a Constitutional Court in Turkey at that time.

The 80s passed with Özal's "from the actions" and "middle class fairy tales" with his pen in his hand. The truth of the matter was that it consisted of surrendering the Atatürk republic to savage capitalism. There was one more thing he constantly talked about: statism. This meant a state committed to Atatürk's revolutions, the rule of law, and public enterprise. Özal was interpreting these founding principles as iron curtain country customs.

Özal felt the need to make a maneuver in the face of the rising wave of democracy after 1984. With the referendum trick in 1987, he wanted to politically bury his "older brother" Demirel. He was not successful. When the political bans were lifted, the old ones returned to the field. The entire equation of politics changed. The 1987 elections showed that everything had changed in Turkey.

However, when Turkish capitalism, which could only be managed under military dictatorship conditions, began to stumble, Özal held the strangest referendum in our political history to move the local government elections forward by six months. The result was the harbinger of 1989. Özal's proposal was rejected with 64% of the vote. He should have resigned for the sake of political ethics. Of course, he didn't. There was only one politician in Turkey who would resign in the face of such a result: Bülent Ecevit. Özal acted as if he didn't care about the event with his "alaturka" politician attitude.

When Özal's move to change the constitution and move the local government elections forward was rejected, it became certain that the elections would be held in March 1989. Meanwhile, our SODEP had merged with the Populist Party and had gained legal personality under the name SHP (Social Democratic Populist Party). Erdal İnönü had been elected party chairman and had entered parliament in the by-elections. Demirel had also been in parliament since the 1987 elections.

General local elections are considered a vote of confidence for the government. The way to overthrow the government is to succeed in reducing the vote rate behind it to the limits of its representative legitimacy. This could have been the way to force Özal into early elections.

Besides this, something strange happened in this election. Özal changed the election law to ensure that not the names of the mayoral candidates but only the political party logos appeared on the ballot paper. This actually meant that the voter was unaware of the person they were voting for. This was a very anti-democratic attitude. Meanwhile, our creative-destructive mayor Bedrettin Dalan interpreted this decision as an attempt to trim his rising charisma. He responded to this operation by the Prime Minister with strange newspaper advertisements. He was acting as if there was a Bedrettin Dalan Party autonomous from ANAP.

After losing the election he entered with great self-confidence, he left ANAP. He founded the Democratic Center Party. When his party could not show any presence, he joined Demirel. He was elected as an Istanbul deputy in 1991. Dalan would try his luck one more time in 1994 as the Istanbul mayoral candidate of the DYP under Çiller.

In the old Turkey, a political life was experienced where economic trends could radically affect election results. The first concrete example of this is the vote rate received by the Ecevit Government in the 1979 by-elections. While the CHP under Ecevit's leadership was a party that managed to get 42% of the vote in the 1977 elections, when it failed in the face of internal security and economic problems—in the 1979 by-elections—its vote rate fell to 20% and Bülent Bey resigned. The second example was the defeat ANAP faced in the 1989 elections. The ruling party's Turkey average had fallen to 21.80%. In the face of this extraordinarily important result, Demirel said the following to Özal: "You cannot be in power with 21.80%. Even if you are in power, you cannot be powerful. You have fallen to one-fifth. Resign." Özal had ignored this call. It had become clear that the election was not a general election, but a local election.

Not only did Özal ignore the invitation to resign, but despite this lack of representation, he ascended to Çankaya in place of Evren, relying on the ANAP majority in parliament, and carried out the first attempts of the de facto presidential regime by appointing Yıldırım Akbulut as prime minister.

I was an HTR lecturer on the Bosphorus during Özal's prime ministry and Dalan's mayoralty. I was also doing my doctorate at the same time. Our five years had passed with them. The municipal elections were approaching. The elections were to be held in March 1989.

I saw them as the men of capital and was getting angrier every day. I can even say that my old anger toward Demirel had gone and been replaced by a sympathy—which I did not voice in public. The letter he wrote to Kenan Evren in the nature of a "lesson on the rule of law and democracy" had translated my feelings. The salary raise Özal gave to the academic staff had caused hesitation in some friends. They even liked the Dalan municipality. They were saying things like, "The man is doing things against the law, but he is working." For me, what was important was the correct political stance. This was to position myself directly against these two actors who were products of September 12.

Our vote would, of course, be for the left. That is, the Social Democratic Populist Party as of that date. I liked Erdal Bey's democratic attitudes and jokes. The side I liked the most was his facial expression that said, "I am doing this because you need me, it's not really my concern." It was really like that. More importantly for me, he was the son of İsmet Paşa. He was the trust of the Gazi, and it was our duty to vote for the People's Party (SHP), whose arrows turned upward while hiding among olive branches.

Ultimately, the SHP's candidate became an old-style CHP member: Nurettin Sözen. Sözen was an ENT professor at Cerrahpaşa Medical School. Although his facial expression reminded one of CPSU politburo members, he was well-intentioned.

The SHP won the 1989 municipal elections. That is, the candidate I voted for. The reason for this was not the candidate's magnificent political performance. It was Özal capitalism "squeezing the people like a lemon." The SHP had reflected this reality on its election posters.

Before touching on Professor Nurettin Sözen's mayoral performance, I would like to say a few words about the election results. The first remarkable point was the fact that ANAP had regressed in Istanbul. Dalan's policy autonomous from Özal had not worked. The party's vote rate had fallen to 26%.

Another interesting event was that Özal's former finance minister Vural Arıkan was the DYP's candidate. After ANAP came to power alone, the first political friction with Özal was experienced with Vural Arıkan. Prime Minister Özal applied the "ministerial dismissal," a new political institution in the 1982 constitution, to Arıkan for the first time. President Kenan Evren dismissed him from the Ministry of Finance upon the prime minister's request. I think this was the first ministerial dismissal in our political history. The second must be İsmail Özdağlar. After an unsuccessful party-founding (Citizen Party) experience, Arıkan switched to the DYP, Özal's alternative. It emerged in this election that the DYP was ANAP's rival on the right. The DYP became the third party in Istanbul with 13.5% of the vote.

On the left, Ecevit's DSP had remained below the threshold with 8.5% of the vote in the 1987 general elections, and millions of votes had gone to waste. This time, it showed a serious success in the Istanbul elections with Mukbil Zırtıloğlu. (12%)

The religious right had reached its pre-September 12 representation base again, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finished the election in 2nd place with a 23% vote rate as the Refah Party's Beyoğlu district mayoral candidate. In this environment of division, Nurettin Sözen was elected Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor with 36% of the vote.

This election was the first election in my life where I thought I changed the result with the vote I cast. The next morning after Dalan was toppled, while I was going to class by bus on Demirel's bridge, I felt like a member of the front that saved the city from occupation.

Let's come to the mayoralty of Nurettin Sözen, who was elected with my contributions; I liken the professor's mayoralty a bit to that of the Atatürk-era governor-mayor Muhittin Üstündağ. Well-intentioned but within the bureaucratic state tradition. A public administration approach far from the populism that right-wingers are very good at.

Of course, this style severely disturbed the interest groups. The capital, which greedily benefited from the city's growing rent during the Dalan period, did not miss any opportunity to attack Sözen. The "mainstream" media of the old Turkey also constantly hit Sözen.

However, Sözen was the mayor who planned the infrastructure of public transport methods such as trams and subways, and even started the implementations. He took steps such as reducing the Ayaspaşa Park Hotel construction to the limits of zoning law.

The ancestor-loving politicians of the AKP era only said, "I am offended by these friends" to those who erected skyscrapers rising behind the sultanate mosques—with the licenses they gave themselves. Sözen did what the law required.

Returning to Sözen, I must say that the professor was a bit unlucky. When he came to office, the city's water resources were at their limit. The water stocks in the dams were barely managing the situation. When extreme lack of rainfall caused water cuts during the years Sözen was in office, the right-wingers had their day. Issues about ritual ablution began to be talked about, and words like "İsmet came, luck was cut off" from the single-party era rhymes began to be remembered. Attempts such as bringing water from Yalova with large balloons and firing rain bombs were enough for the right-wing public to mock Sözen thoroughly.

I think what finished the SHP and Nurettin Bey was the cleaning workers' strike. Personally, I am of the opinion that mining and cleaning workers are the labor segments that deserve the highest wages. Despite very serious increases being achieved in collective bargaining negotiations, the union went on strike. It was this strike and the mountains of garbage that caused our people to flee from the SHP at lightning speed. When the strike ended, the SHP (it would be correct to read this as the People's Party) was crossed out once again with a thick red pen.

Another event was the İSKİ scandal. In the "scandal that could be considered a drop in the bucket" when compared to the dimensions of the magnificent scandals of the Turkish right, a love affair had also been exposed. Ultimately, although Sözen ensured that the event was referred to the judiciary instead of trying to cover it up, he could not escape being under suspicion.

Now, even after so much time has passed, Sözen is remembered for thirst and mountains of garbage. No one remembers him as an administrator who cares about compliance with the law and gives the highest wages to cleaning workers. However, when the "men of the nation" took over the municipality, they gave the cleaning work to subcontractors and solved the problem wholesale with workers they employed at precarious minimum wages.

The real crux of the matter regarding Nurettin Bey was this, I think: Nurettin Bey represented the bureaucratic state tradition in his mind. This understanding did not make the work of interest groups that seized the city's rent easier; it made it difficult. The era of tenders obtained with easy favoritism and licenses obtained with a phone call had been left behind. It did not serve the interests of the urban bourgeoisie, which had fattened up with ANAP, and the greedy tradesmen-contractors rising in the slums. That was the real issue.

Our ENT specialist mayor was trying to protect the city's law—in the style of a physician who treats his patient a bit harshly—but it was in vain. I cannot pass without telling a memory about this. The comment of a taxi driver I took near Sultanahmet is still in my mind today. After Sözen passed the public transport project (metro) decision from the municipal council, he had started to implement the project. For this reason, the route of the taxis had become a bit circuitous. The taxi driver, referring to the public transport project, had said "Nurettin logic" with irritability. The short summary of Turkish right-wingism is hidden in these words. Daily interests are always above long-term public interest.

1994 municipal elections

These elections were the elections that determined Turkey's fate for the last 30 years. First of all, it would be correct to evaluate the pre-election period. ANAP had fallen from power in 1991, the SHP-DYP coalition could not do any meaningful work—when Turgut Özal passed away—Demirel was elected president, and all the stones in the center-right and left had been displaced. Çiller and Mesut Yılmaz had turned into demagogic actors of the center-right who consumed each other.

Upon Erdal Bey's decision to "I am leaving politics now, I am bored with this business," a process of long congresses and changes in general chairmanship was experienced on the left. Meanwhile, factors such as the re-establishment of the CHP's legal personality, the party remaining in Deniz Baykal's hands, and DSP chairman Ecevit's hatred of Baykal further increased the fragmentation on the left. The number of parties competing with each other on the left had now increased to three: SHP, DSP, and Baykal's CHP.

In my opinion, the core cadre of Islamism was the tradesmen, small industry, and commercial capital that looked at the opportunities of the center with appetite. This capital was being blocked by the comprador bourgeoisie in the metropolis. Although these dynamics found more free development opportunities in the provinces, they still could not exceed the limits of small and medium-sized capital. Erdoğan, who was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, was also born and raised in a neighborhood very close to the city's Levantine center. His willingness for a political career lies in the fact that he lived in a region very close to the old hegemony as a space. Erdoğan was elected mayor with a weak representative rate. 25%.

Several factors can be put forward that allowed Refah to win the election. Let's start with the right first. The political legacy of the Democratic Party and the Justice Party could not be shared by the new chairmen of ANAP and DYP, and the two parties were consuming each other. On the left, there were three parties competing with each other.

The largest party of the left, SHP—with Erdal Bey's good intentions— had made an election alliance with HEP in 1991. Erdal İnönü, with Demirel's word, thought that the problems created by the Kurdish reality could be solved with representation in parliament. This representation opportunity turned into a separatist demonstration at the very oath-taking ceremony. This was followed by the massacre of reserve officer students in Tuzla being interpreted by Hatip Dicle as a "state of war." These attitudes were met with anger in the SHP base. As will be remembered, Ecevit's DSP would always be the rising party after this.

Returning to the 1994 municipal elections, a new person had to be found who would win the Istanbul Mayoralty for the heavily battered SHP. And one was found. This new name would be Ömer Zülfü Livaneli. Although Livaneli lost his interest in active politics over time, he was very interested in left-wing politics, including party leadership. Livaneli has a charisma in the secular segment—which I don't like much. It was thought that the election could be won thanks to this.

Polls showed that ANAP candidate İlhan Kesici, who still appeared as the party of big capital (Istanbul bourgeoisie) against the DYP, or Livaneli could win the election. But the media wind was being used to inflate Livaneli's sails. Meanwhile, the newly re-established CHP also fielded a candidate. This was an old '68er: Ertuğrul Günay. Very ironically, Günay would later become an AKP deputy and Minister of Culture. Ecevit's DSP nominated Bayrampaşa Mayor Necdet Özkan.

These elections were an election where media direction was significantly effective. As the election day approached, polls began to herald that Livaneli had regained the credit the SHP had lost and would finish the election ahead with 28% of the vote. These results even turned into full-page newspaper advertisements.

There were two more surprise candidates in this election. The first of these was ANAP founder and former mayor Bedrettin Dalan. This time, Dalan would compete in Çiller's ranks. The MHP's candidate was a quite interesting name. This name was Ahmet Vefik Alp, an internationally renowned architect and urban planner. Alp's candidacy from the MHP had nothing to do with his closeness to nationalist circles. Alp would explain his MHP candidacy by saying, "I had thought about other parties too, but these friends offered first. I accepted." Looking from today, I guess he became the best candidate.

A table I encountered shortly before the elections made me suspicious. Still, I didn't pay much attention. I fell into the middle of a surprisingly large group of protesters on the Ümraniye-Üsküdar road. The crowd had paralyzed traffic. These people were the urban poor. They were chanting slogans with great enthusiasm: "Mayor to Istanbul, Tayyip Erdoğan." These were the people of the new neighborhoods that had grown around the old Istanbul. The crowd was demanding the center of the city. They wanted to eat gözleme and saç kavurma, and drink tea in Çelik Gülersoy's elitist Turing facilities in Çamlıca. What they wanted happened. They are eating under the line signs chosen by Mehmet Şevki Eygi and taking pictures. I have no objection to any of this. This is what democracy is in a place. However, they have been in a delusion for thirty years: They are even poorer and think they are in power. They are not.