The morning after the night before.

That was a disaster for the opposition. The CHP claimed a lot of votes were blocked but the final counts delivered no change.

The AKP have a majority in Parliament and it looks almost certain they take the Presidency in Round 2. I desperately want the opposition to win and that impacts what I write. Mea culpa.

But I was completely shocked by vote patterns in Inner Anatolia.

Opposition won almost every major city (except Bursa) and the South East but has lost everywhere else.

A quick guide for how to follow a Turkish election.

Voting is now underway and closes at 5pm Turkish time.

From 6pm to 9pm, only results from the Supreme Election Council can be shared.

From 9pm onwards, the media can start commentating on results and venture predictions. The first results tend to come from the East and from smaller ballot boxes which are easier to count.

The AKP will open up a massive lead.

Do not be depressed by this. I’ll be checking swings based on 2018 and it will be important to remain calm in that opening period.

Muharrem İnce often claims the opposition received zero votes in over 20,000 ballot boxes in the 2018 election. That's 1 in 9 boxes.

I've always thought that sounded unrealistic.

So I downloaded the entire election data and checked.

Result?

He's lying. It was 1,169 boxes. He also claims this affected 6 million votes and that this could have impacted the result.

This is also a massive lie. In reality, the boxes in question represent 147,282 votes, most in small places where almost no-one votes opposition anyway.

The claim is another red herring.

Turkey has a massive problem with hyper-centralization.

Effective systems work through devolved yet trusted local decision-making.

Turkey has the exact opposite. Everything has to go through a bottleneck at the top so decisions and execution are incredibly slow. This doesn’t relate just to crisis management, although this is where it becomes most visible. It’s a broad issue across governance that comes from almost zero delegation of authority.

It means the central authority has to coordinate everything, has to have all power, all funds.

Why did so many buildings collapse?

Turkey lies on major fault lines and will always have devastating earthquakes.

But we’ve never really cared about building safety standards. In fact, 5 years ago AKP gave an amnesty to any old illegal building as long as you declared it.

https://twitter.com/mehmetozhaseki/status/1009871720113672192

There have been attempts to renew housing stock according to new guidelines that take seismic durability into account but it is nowhere near complete.

And there is always a doubt that constructors get around the rules with a wink and a nod.

Anyway, everything has to change now.

Throughout this, the AKP have been moaning about misinformation.

What misinformation? Where is this flurry of lies that undermines the rescue effort? People have been sharing life-saving locations.

What the AKP feared was information.

And the criticism that naturally followed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Turkish Twitter as united and as useful as it has been these past few days.

It has finally found a purpose and that purpose was saving countless lives.

But of course, an open network also means a free flow of information and that frightened the AKP.

President Erdoğan just gave a furious speech, in which he announced a local state of emergency.

He also said he is keeping a note of all lies and distortions and will open his notebook when the time comes.

This vengeful motif is definitely a theme of the AKP response. It seems the AKP is far more concerned about what people say about the response than they are about the response itself.

That is problematic when there are so many impacted people. I don’t think this is a narrative they can control, even with all the aggressive threats.

If you are wondering whether the Tories can mess up the UK economy any more, the answer is yes.

The PM’s Chief Economic Adviser is Matthew Sinclair.

I know him.

The man is ideologically fanatical. As long as he has the keys to the economy, the UK is utterly screwed. When I say I know him, I mean we were both on the UK debating circuit when we were younger.

I’m not going to lie and claim he was an idiot but he certainly wasn’t the genius that some on the right claim he is.

He was perfectly average. Never won anything. Never came last.

“I am against the invisible flesh eating monsters that try to devour your children daily. These creatures try to suck your soul but I will not let that happen.

Vote for me and I will fight and slay these frightening beasts that definitely exist.”

I wonder what she could possibly mean when she says “financial speculators”. If only there was an analogous movement from the past which could enlighten us on this matter…

This is probably the most embarrassing piece of political communication I have ever seen.

The money spent on this could have been spent in a million more productive ways but no...

It’s a childish cartoon (as you can tell from the music and voices) which suggests the CHP has a “lie machine”. There’s also a “parrot elixir” and anti-blushing face cream which allows Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu to ask where the $128 billion is multiple times without turning red.

Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu under investigation for disrespecting the President by sitting with legs too far apart.

Probably... Who knows anymore? Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu under investigation for disrespecting the Rabia sign, holding up the wrong number of fingers.

One of Melih Bulu’s Deputy Rectors at Boğaziçi now has so many jobs because no-one will work for Bulu that his titles won’t fit in 4 tweets. Naci İnci as of today is:

Deputy Rector
Deputy Director of the Institute of Social Sciences
Head of Academic Rules Commission

(cont) Still Naci İnci:

Head of Course Evaluation Committee
Diploma & Certificate Editing Committee President
Head of Diploma Ceremony Award Commission
Chairman of Honorary Academic Title & Service Awards Commission
Head of Evening Education Graduate Program Coordination Board

(cont)

On the left, an ignorant, vainglorious old man, saying the young don’t work.

On the right, a young healthcare worker saying he has no money, no hope, and could be hit by a car on his way home from a 24 hour shift and he wouldn’t care anymore.

New Turkey. If you watch this video and don’t get a lump in your throat for the kid and raging anger at the sheer inhumanity of the old man, I question your ethics and your ability to drink from the milk of human kindness.

This, right here, is Turkey’s challenge. It is generational.

Ottoman Chess.

Like normal chess but the Sultan (King) can occasionally strangle his own pieces. Also, if you play for long enough, the game collapses, there’s a Republican interlude and then the Imams (bishops) are allowed to do whatever they like.

It’s a confusing game but it ends with your side owing the other side more money than reasonably exists

The AKP can’t reasonably claim moral superiority when it comes to sexual assault of women and abuse of the vulnerable more generally.

But the CHP has to be whiter than white on this.

Right now it clearly isn’t. The #MeToo  movement should replenish the opposition.

Seriously. It’s natural we hear more details of abuse from the opposition because the opposition should necessarily pull in people who don’t accept abuse.

Our problem is a society that allows powerful men to think that power allows them to exert abuse of authority on those around them.

Given we’re asking whether Turkish twitter celebrities are actual people, I’d love to ask who @drsinanerdil is.

His profile photo is from this group photo from a University of Toronto OISE graduation in 2011.

He doesn’t exist outside of twitter.

Yet followed by 62.3k people... The only other photo I can find of him is the one below. Old bios talked of ODTÜ and living in Canada. Those are gone now.

There are no publications by a Dr Sinan Erdil. In this world of everything being online, it feels impossible that there would be no trail.

Two things the Finance Minister said last night:

“A weak lira boosts tourism revenue.”
“Turkish citizens don’t care about traveling abroad.”

That tells you everything you need to know about how AKP views Turkey and voters. We should all know our place. A country with a weak currency will entice investment but only because it’s cheap. That is only one type of competition and it’s not the one you want to aim for.

It’s choosing to be the BIM or A101 of the global market. It limits the dreams of anyone living in that country.

Turkey’s President is about to give a national address about COVID-19 following two rapid acceleration days taking the case count past 5,000. I’ll be live translating here. A lot of rumors that he will be announcing a shutdown. Let’s see. In the meantime, I’m watching AHaber. It’s normally very difficult to watch, with deeply partisan and conspiracy-laden commentary.

Tonight there seem to be some really qualified medical experts talking a lot of sense. Surprising but welcome.

I think we’ve reached the point where we can say it is a statistical impossibility that Turkey does not have a single case of coronavirus.

We’ve all been privately talking/joking about it but it’s probably time to really discuss what is happening here. Early detection and treatment is vital when you’re dealing with any illness.

Public precautionary measures are even more vital in cases of epidemics. Whatever is happening in Turkey right now needs to be reconsidered fast. This can’t end well if the current approach continues.

Turkey is suffering today and anger is naturally a part of grief. Yet the overriding message from those representing power is that now is no time for criticism - it is time to unite.

The problem is that we have been divided, quite purposefully by those in power, for decades. This is a salutary lesson for all leaders around the world (the US and UK are prime examples) who seek to use division to create loyal bases and otherise all opposition.

When things are going well, you push away opponents but you can’t expect them to come back on bad days.

AKP-affiliated social media is heartily laughing at a video which mocks, demeans and belittles a woman who appeared in an earlier report from the BBC about Turkey’s economic downturn.

This is real “let them eat cake” territory - is the claim that there is no poverty in Turkey? Ostensibly, they make fun of this woman, a domestic cleaner, because there are photos on her social media where she went to a party, once, which was presumably on a rented boat. That’s it.

One assumes for the AKP, if you’re poor, you should never have fun or leave your home.