Istanbul Notebook

‘It’s official. Turkey is a banana republic!’ My friend Mustapha, a serial entrepreneur, sends me a flurry of doom-laden WhatsApp messages on hearing the news that Istanbul’s mayoral election is being re-run. One of them is a cartoon of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan standing in front of the national flag, crescent turned into a banana. In March, his ruling AKP lost Istanbul, the engine of what remains of the Turkish economy, together with Izmir and Ankara. It was a historic breakthrough for the opposition CHP and its victorious mayoral candidate Ekrem Imamoglu. But it was also a massive threat to Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, who hasn’t lost an election since 1994. He alleged dirty tricks and leant on the election authority to order a re-run. Will the rest be history? Bulent Gultekin, a former Central Bank governor, tweets of a ‘coup’ against the will of the people: ‘The AKP has brought my fine country to the brink of political and economic collapse.’ Others reckon Turkey is drifting towards dictatorship. That evening I dine with Turkish friends on the Bosphorus. Ferries ply the waters, greedy gulls hover overhead and simit sellers do a brisk business with waterborne commuters. We digest the momentous news over lamb chops and a bottle of raki. ‘Remember this day,’ says Ali, a poet. ‘It’s the day Turkish democracy died.’

The economy is tanking, the lira is plummeting and unemployment is at a ten-year high of 15 per cent. So what does the president do? The answer is visible in the skyline above Uskudar on the Asian side. If any city could be said to have enough mosques it is surely Istanbul, but Erdogan has decided it needs another. While I am in town he inaugurates the Camlica Mosque, Turkey’s largest, with a capacity of 63,000.