AK, not quite OK: Turkey’s elections

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. On March 15, Cyclone Idai slammed into Africa. It was a shockingly strong storm, causing untold damage across the continent's south. But the immediate effects of natural disasters are not always the most worrying. We pay a visit to Mozambique, where the task of rebuilding has been delayed by the imperative to survive. And a slightly confusing Three weeks after America went on to Daylight Savings time, Europe caught up yesterday. But why risk the confusion at all? We look into the past and the doubtful future of the practice. First up, though, the AK Party of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan first came to power in 2002. It's won every national and local election since then. But yesterday marked the first significant blow for the akp. While Mr. Erdogan claimed victory in key municipal elections, his party also suffered severe setbacks. It lost its grip on the Turkish capital, Ankara. And the result in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, is in question. The elections were widely seen as a referendum on Mr. Erdogan's leadership and took place against a backdrop of economic downturn. In August last year, Turkey entered a currency and debt crisis. The lira lost as much as 40% of its value against the dollar. Today the economy is still ailing, inflation is high, and unemployment rising.

Turks today woke up to two different realities. In one reality, the reality spun by the pro government media, this was a big success for the ruling AKP and its nationalist partners because the pair managed to get A combined, you know, 51, 52% of the popular vote and managed to secure most provinces in Turkey.

Piotr Zalewski is the Economist's Turkey correspondent.

But the other half of Turkey woke up the news that this was a huge upset for the opposition.

Well, I mean, which of those is closer to an accurate representation of what we're seeing?

Well, it's a mix of both. You could say that this was the most recent of the AKP's 11 consecutive election victories. But the ruling party has now lost five of the country's six biggest cities, including Istanbul, the country's economic engine, and Ankara, the capital. The reason why I say that the country woke up to two different realities is that the government has yet to concede that it has lost Istanbul. And many AKP supporters, supporters seem to be convinced that they've actually edged out the opposition, which does not seem to be the case. This was one of the most hotly contested races in maybe Turkish electoral history. And the opposition candidate right now seems to be ahead by just over 12,000 votes. I think the number might be 18,000.

This is a kind of surprise advance for the opposition, which I understand hasn't been very strong in recent years. I mean, who are the sort of power brokers in the country's politics right now?

Well, right now it's actually the Kurdish voters which helped the opposition to victories in Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere, and the nationalist partners of the akp, which are holding together this coalition that erdogan engineered in 2016 and that gives him a majority in Parliament. But this has been a major triumph for the opposition, which has had to deal with much less media coverage than the governing party and which has had the odds stacked against it in this election.

Well, if the opposition was kind of kept on the back foot by the ruling party and fought to those odds, that seems to speak to a pretty widespread discontent with Mr. Ederan's leadership. I mean, why has he been losing support?

That has largely to do with the economy and the fact that Turkey has now dipped into recession. Unemployment numbers are rising. The inflation has reached 20%, and food prices have been particularly affected by inflation in Turkey. And that's something that registers with especially working class voters and AKP supporters. The government has taken quite drastic measures to try to reduce food inflation. But those measures have not really worked. And another problem facing the country is the devaluation of the lira, which dipped to all time lows last year, then recovered amid a diplomatic crisis with the US but has lost value in dollar terms since the start of, and particularly in the weeks up to the election.

Do you think all of those economic problems are a result of the AKP's economic mismanagement?

Part of it has to do. A small part of it has to do with the crisis in relations with the US and sanctions that the Trump administration imposed against Turkey. But the bigger part is self inflicted. You know, this is an economy that has been running on borrowed time for quite some time now. And I think right now Turks are beginning to pay the price of an economy that was heavily dependent on foreign debt. It's Turkish consumers and Turkish companies that find themselves in most trouble. Turkish companies right now are sitting on over $200 billion worth of $ denominated debt. And with the lira now approaching 6 to the dollar, that spells major trouble. If you're a company that took out debt when the lira was at three to the dollar a few years ago, and you're now facing a lira that's at 5.7 to the dollar, you are obviously in major trouble.

And so what do you think is the way out of these economic troubles? And I guess more to the point, do you think that the parties who have made big gains today represent that kind of change?

We have to keep a sense of perspective that this is a major symbolic loss for akp, but it doesn't affect the balance in parliament. It doesn't affect the fact that Erdogan is still president, armed with a constitution that gives him almost unlimited executive powers. So it's still going to be down to Erdogan to make the tough decisions. One of those tough decisions would be whether to go to the imf. And Erdogan has so far excluded any possibility of going to the imf. But the debt burden on Turkey is such that it's hard to imagine the country getting through this bump without an IMF program. And I think what outsiders will be expecting in the next weeks or so is first of all a new economic program and B, a decision as to whether Turkey will go to the imf.

But I mean, do you think the gains that we've seen among those opposition parties represent a kind of turning of the tide against the AKP that people recognize economically sort of which side their bread is buttered on?

I think it's a result that Emboldens the opposition. It doesn't represent a watershed moment or that huge reversal for Erdogan. Like I said, he still has a parliamentary majority with his nationalist allies and he still commands a plurality of the vote, as this election also showed. But it is maybe something of a yellow card from Turkish voters and it is signed that disaffection with Erdogan, the economy and the way that he has ruled the country is increasing.

Piotr, thank you very much for your.

Time and thanks for having me.

Two weeks ago, Cyclone Idai brought destruction across southern Africa.

Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi have suffered one.

Of the worst weather related catastrophes in.

The history of Africa.

The death toll has reached 900 and is still rising. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. More than two and a half million have been affected by the disaster.

We have all seen the heartbreaking images. Raging waters, people stranded on rooftops, schools.

Hospitals and homes in ruins.

Mozambique was the hardest hit. Rising floodwaters formed an inland ocean larger than New York, Chicago, Washington and Boston combined. And Mozambique's fourth largest city, Beira, was.

Nearly obliterated, where 90% of buildings have.

Been damaged or destroyed.

We need food, we need clothes, we need shelter, because here we don't. Have food.

No food, no food.

Amid huge shortages, desperate survivors fight for food and supplies. Help is on the way. But a second disaster is looming. Reports of cholera and malaria have begun to emerge.

Beira is a pretty major city in Mozambique. There's half a million people who live there. It's a busy built up city, but its main role is as a major port for the region.

Erin Conway Smith is Southern Africa correspondent for the Economist. She's just come back from Beira.

The cyclone basically hit Barra right on. It was a very, very fierce storm. People that I spoke with couldn't recall anything like that before. It blew roofs off. It knocked down walls of people's homes and buildings, knocked down trees. But then there was a secondary stage to the disaster in the days that followed when rivers in the area began to swell and burst their banks and there was massive flooding.

So what's the situation on the ground right now in Beira?

The floodwaters are starting to dry up and you can see people beginning to rebuild, putting new roofs on houses, cleaning up the debris that's everywhere. I visited a beach in Beira where there were men who owned boats calling, looking for survivors who were trying to get back over to particularly badly hit area called Buzi to check on their homes. You know, worried that there's absolutely nothing left. And then Others that were coming to Barra finally able to escape basically from their homes.

So you've been speaking to some of the survivors. What are they telling you?

That's right. I spoke with an interpreter to Julieta Musaka, who's the mother of two young girls from Barada in Buzi district, that area that was very badly hit by the cyclone. She was stuck in her home for about two weeks, feeling increasingly desperate, completely cut off from the outside world because of the flooding, and had finally managed to find a boat that would take her to Bera, where she could then seek some aid. She told me that where she's from, there were no houses. They were all knocked down in the storm and the floods. No trees, nothing left. And she was saying that people really need food, they need housing, they need clothing, the children at the school need books.

So if some of these people are entirely cut off, how have they been coping? How have they been surviving?

Giulietta said that she and her kids had survived for five days, eating coconuts. And a bag of rice that got wet from the floods. Other people we spoke to, for example, a woman named Casilda Domingos, who we met at a primary school that had been turned into an emergency shelter for people who lost their homes, said they were sleeping on the floor. And she really said that she had no idea what to do next, Just wait for the government to help.

And has that help been forthcoming?

Not really. People that we spoke to basically were saying the same thing. Is anybody helping that they've had no support.

And that's just a matter of it being too overwhelming a disaster.

It is certainly a massive disaster. I think any government would struggle to cope with such a thing. But there is an amount of frustration with the response by Mozambique's government. Some people I spoke with wondered if the slow response is because Bera is a city that's governed by an opposition mayor. I mean, the day after the storm hit, the president went ahead with a state visit to the kingdom of Eswatini. He did come back, you know, cut the visit short a day later and has since visited Bera. But Mozambicans at the same time were quite confused on Wednesday, when the president announced he was going to be giving a live televised address to the nation. Everybody expected it would be about the disaster. And instead, when they tuned in, it was rather sort of happy news that the pope would be visiting in September.

So the national government is coming up short. What about international aid?

International aid was slow to reach the area. A major problem was that the main highway that connects Barra with the rest of the country, had been cut off by the storm and it was sort of difficult to get things in. But now the aid is picking up. You really can see the relief operation taking off.

And so what's been happening as people are essentially waiting for these aid efforts.

To get underway, People are basically doing whatever they can to help themselves and to help others in their community. I met one guy named Paolo Alfredo Niema, and he is one of the people who is helping to fill that gap. He owns a boat and he has been taking survivors back and forth between Barra and Buzi. And I met other people as well that are just pitching in and trying to repair roofs and find building material and doing whatever they can to put their lives back together.

And there are reports already emerging that in the meantime, you know, as we often see after natural disasters, that there's sort of these secondary effects like outbreaks of cholera and malaria. What are you hearing about that?

There is a huge concern about the threat of waterborne diseases right now. And a lot of the focus of the relief work is on trying to prevent a huge outbreak. Relief workers I spoke with have been actually anticipating the threat and are scaling up things like water and sanitation teams and bringing in vaccinations as well as. Another really important thing in the long term will be the issue of hunger. More than 400,000 hectares of crops were washed away. And this has happened right before harvest. The harvest is around April and May. So what are these people going to do for food until the next harvest next April? So when I spoke to the World Food Program, they were saying that they're working on a strategy of longer support for people, basically subsistence farmers who have lost their crops, that we're going to be feeding them through the next year.

And so are there any sort of wider lessons we can draw from this? I mean, is it a lack of preparedness or is this just now the way of the world?

It's a really difficult situation. I mean, Mozambique has a long, low lying coastline on the Indian Ocean and it is very vulnerable to floods and in particular rising sea levels. And then as we saw with this tropical cyclone, when you have a very intense storm, it really isn't prepared at all. People are so vulnerable. So there's going to need to be something done to strengthen the infrastructure along this coast to make it more resilient in future. But Mozambique is also an incredibly poor country and one of the poorest in the world. It's done little to contribute to climate change to what is causing the rising sea levels and the warmer ocean temperatures that are leading to more intense storms. So it's bearing the brunt of that, yet has done nothing to add to it. So there is a really big question as to who should pay to help rebuild. What kind of help can be provided to Mozambique to make it a more resilient place that is less vulnerable to severe storms going forward.

Aaron, thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

In 2016, Matteo Renzi, a former Italian prime minister, lost power after a failed constitutional referendum. Now his country is governed by an alliance of new wave populists and ultra conservatives. A world apart from Mr. Renzi's centrist ways. In this week's the Economist asks our interview show, he chats with my colleague Anne McElvoy about migration, Brexit and European leadership.

EU deserve great leader and Angela absolutely is a great leader in the council, in the commission. I don't know. She denied this possibility for the moment. We will see also for the future. But Angela is absolutely weak. Spain is in trouble for election. Italy and Poland is in the hands of populist. UK is inside Brex, inside the EU is in the tunnel, is staying in the tunnel of Brexit. The real leader today is Macron, despite Giles Jean. I think Giles Jean will help Macron to present himself as the leader of defence in Europe.

The Economist asks is out every Friday. If you live in most American states, you have been living in the future. Europe has only just switched to Daylight savings time and now some Europeans are out for revenge.

Time has often been used in a political way by government as a way of unifying countries.

Bill Ridgers edits Espresso, the Economist's daily morning briefing and he has been watching the clock.

China is probably the most famous example of this. Mao in 1949 unified that vast country which actually spreads across five or six time zones into a single time zone as a way of bringing the country together to be a sort of unifying force.

And these days we have a sort of time based unification in the form of Daylight savings time. How did that come about?

It had been mooted actually for centuries. Benjamin Franklin was one of the first people to suggest it back in the 18th century. But really it started during the First World War. Three of the big powers, Germany, France and the UK, thought that by moving the clocks forward an hour in the summertime, it would save energy, it would save coal and that would help towards the war effort. There's now about 70 countries which change their clocks in the summer, mostly there in Northern America and in Europe but time has passed.

A continent scale war isn't around. Does that argument still stand up?

No. I think people think that the energy saving aspect of daylight saving is no longer true. There are some positives towards it. People think it might, for example, mean higher consumer spending because you have an extra hour of sunlight in the evening to go and do your shopping. But it is incredibly unpopular now in Europe. The EU did a survey of citizens across the block. Some 5 million people responded. It's about the biggest response the European Union has ever had to one of these surveys. And overwhelmingly over 80% of people said they would like to see daylight savings scrapped.

So why do people feel so strongly about it, do you think? What don't they like about it?

I think there's a few things. People don't like it because it has been associated with some health risks. It's not conclusive the research, but people think, for example, that having this micro dose of jet lag injected into you every six months can cause higher incidence of strokes and of heart disease. Businesses particularly don't like the fact that when some countries change and other countries don't, they're never always going to be sure what the difference in time is. And so we've just had three weeks where the US is four hours different from Europe or from Britain. Normally it's five. And that can be very annoying for businesses.

And so there's a big move in Europe then to scrap it all together. Do you think that's going to happen?

Well, I think it will do, yes. The European Union has just voted to scrap it from 2021. The question is going to be are they going to stay with daylight savings time? Are they going to go back to their normal non daylight saving time? I think a lot of countries may go with daylight savings time. They like the longer evenings.

I think, Bill, I'm afraid that has to be it. The time has run out. Thanks for coming in.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com radiooffer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.