Residents of the earthquake zone could swing the Turkish election. But even those with energy to vote will struggle to reach a polling station. e_h_obrien reports for 1843 magazine
: A poster of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cast aside in Antakya in the south of the country.: Remzi Dogru and his family spent a month living outside after the earthquake. Mountains of cleared rubble are building up in the countryside surrounding Antakya. Hide Donmez lost one of her daughters in the earthquake
Flights to Hatay are restricted to aid and rescue workers until May 17th, and the city has a single road leading to its centre. Oy ve Otesi, an election-monitoring, and both campaigns have organised buses that will, in theory, bring voters from faraway places to the polls. Oy ve Otesi has launched a website that matches people affected by the earthquake in need of bus tickets with donors willing to pay for them. So far, 22,000 people have registered, a tiny proportion of the 1.
Oy ve Otesi aims to have at least one volunteer at every polling station in Turkey on election day next Sunday – there are over 55,000 of them. “We are there at seven o’clock, we see the ballot box empty, and then we watch it until the end of the day,” Ertim Orkun, the organisation’s chairperson, said. “So we make sure that nothing happens during the day. We see every piece of paper delivered to the person, every envelope getting into the ballot box.
The opposition in Turkey has campaigned on hope. It promises voters a better future, after a steady erosion of democracy in the 21 years that Erdogan has been in power, and a collapse in living standards in recent years. In Antakya, people find it hard to imagine what such a future might look like. Surrounded by rubble and the stench of death, they keep returning to the terrors of the recent past.
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