The mild-mannered economist who could end Erdogan’s rule

In modern Turkey, as in ancient Byzantium, the factions and passions of the stadium crowds are a key bellwether of the people’s true mood. Last month the terraces of Istanbul’s Sukru Saracoglu stadium – home to the Fenerbahce team of which Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a proud member for 25 years – echoed with chants of ‘Erdogan, resign’ and ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’.

The same weekend, the home crowd of another major Istanbul club, Besiktas, had filled the pitch with a heartbreaking, minutes-long hail of soft toys thrown from the stands in memory of the thousands of children who lost their lives in the devastating earthquake of 6 February. ‘The Sultan is hollow, he is a thief,’ said Muslim Aydin, an Istanbul restaurant owner who is a lifelong Fenerbahce fan and erstwhile Erdogan supporter. ‘We don’t believe his lies any more.’

Over his two-decade rule, Erdogan’s electoral superpower has been to repeatedly reinvent and renew his image as a man of the people. Despite years of well-documented charges of graft not just by his ruling AK party but by close members of his family, he has maintained his appeal as a working-class kid from the Black Sea town of Rize made good as a champion of the common man.

So far, he has been the most successful populist of his generation. But a fatal combination of economic mismanagement and gross corruption in the construction sector, which played a major role in the estimated 50,000 deaths in the Kahramanmaras earthquake, means that in the presidential elections in May Erdogan faces the most serious threat to his reign yet. In the aftermath of the quake he seemed to have lost his touch by dismissing the tragedy as ‘part of destiny’s plan’.