Ankara Little Enite was lucky in misfortune. The two-year-old girl from the southern Turkish city of Antakya was trapped in the rubble of a collapsed house in freezing temperatures. She was recovered alive from the ruins 50 hours after a series of devastating earthquakes. The child’s eyes widen as a helper pulls it from the ruins to freedom.
“You did a great job,” another helper tries to calm her down. Enite screams and stiffens her body as she looks from the man’s shoulder at the hole she was forced to stay in for over two days.
It’s moments like this that give hope. But it wasn’t a state disaster control team that rescued Enite from the rubble. But a unit of the Istanbul Fire Department, which reports to the city’s opposition mayor.
In the rescue work in the southeast of the country, it shouldn’t matter who rescues whom. But Turkey is currently in the election campaign. Head of state Erdogan announced in January that the elections would be brought forward to May 14.
It is already clear that earthquake prevention and disaster relief in the country are likely to become key campaign issues. This could be of particular use to the opposition.
“A catastrophe of the century”: 11,000 dead and 15 million affected
A series of devastating earthquakes with magnitudes of up to 7.8 devastated at least 300 kilometers of land in southeastern Turkey on Monday. The tremors had also caused severe destruction in neighboring northern Syria.
As of Wednesday, a total of 11,000 deaths were confirmed in both countries, with more than 8,500 in Turkey alone, according to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is the deadliest earthquake since 2011, when nearly 20,000 people died in Japan and Indian Ocean areas.
After the earthquake disaster, the Turkish ambassador Ahmet Basar Sen asked for further help from Germany. “This is a catastrophe for a century, maybe a catastrophe for a millennium,” emphasized the ambassador.
The extent of the destruction is so great that almost 15 million people are affected in ten provinces. “We need monetary donations and we need donations in kind.” 48 hours after the disaster, the German Caritas relief organization had already received donations of one million euros.
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In addition to the human suffering, the economic extent of the catastrophe is becoming increasingly obvious. On the one hand, the tremors hit one of the least industrially developed regions of the country. The tourist areas are also far away and undamaged.
Still, the damage is enormous. An area the size of a third of Germany shook violently for two minutes, followed by numerous other tremors. Thousands of buildings have collapsed, roads and airports destroyed.
People are looking for survivors.
(Photo: dpa)
The economic damage is estimated at 50 to 100 billion US dollars. Since the earthquake, the national stock index Bist100 has fallen by 16 percent, the sharpest fall since December 2021. On Wednesday, the authorities decided to temporarily suspend stock exchange trading.
The port in Iskenderun is currently not accessible for ships, also because a major fire has been raging there since Monday. The shipping company Cosco announced that it would not send any container ships there until further notice.
In addition to the direct damage, there are also secondary economic impairments because, for example, supply chains are interrupted and neither aid supplies nor other products can be shipped directly to the region.
Experts fear delayed payment by insurers
The earthquake will also be expensive for insurers. Some Turkish insurers had already had to pay out more money after an earthquake in 2020 than they had previously taken in.
The Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP), along with its key reinsurance partners including Munich Re and Swiss Re, is expected to absorb much of the damage from this earthquake. TCIP is a public entity established in 2000 with a provision to settle up to $2.5 billion in disaster insurance claims.
According to the analysis company Global Data, houses worth 2.9 billion US dollars are insured in Turkey. But high inflation in the country has messed up the calculations of many insurers. They have to spend more than they took in. What’s more, the survivors have to spend significantly more on new houses, furniture and cars than their insurance company is allowed to pay them.
Numerous people are still missing.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
“It will take years for Turkish insurers to pay the insured losses,” said Shabbir Ansari, insurance analyst at Global Data. And if the survivors have to wait too long for their money after the accident, then in a country like Turkey, politicians are quickly looking for the culprits.
It is therefore also the economic consequences that will make life difficult for Head of State Erdogan even after the earthquake shortly before the elections in May.
Erdogan himself won the 2002 elections after the previous government had poor disaster management after an earthquake. Now the Turkish president himself is being judged on how well he responds to the disaster.
Unlike the coalition government of 1999, which constantly tried to downplay the number of victims after the earthquake, Erdogan announced shortly after the quake that he did not know how high the number of victims would rise. Government officials predicted it would rise significantly.
The Turkish opposition leader has accused President Erdogan of failure after the severe earthquake. “If anyone is primarily responsible for this course of events, it’s Erdogan,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of the largest opposition party CHP, in a more than four-minute video that he shared on Twitter early Wednesday morning.
>> Read here: “Prepping” in the Far East – How Japan is planning civil protection
Kilicdaroglu criticized Erdogan for failing to prepare the country for such an earthquake during his 20-year reign. He also accused Erdogan of wasting the earthquake tax, which is intended for precautionary purposes.
Some of the allegations are exaggerated. After the introduction of an earthquake tax a good 20 years ago, the Turkish state has since taken in around 81 billion Turkish lira. Last year alone, according to the government budget, the budget for earthquake protection was around 100 billion lira.
After the severe earthquakes in the Turkish-Syrian border area, the situation is dramatic despite ongoing aid.
(Photo: dpa)
Immediately after the earthquake, the administration in Ankara also provided a further 100 billion lira as emergency aid on Monday. The state has probably spent the money on earthquake protection over the past two decades. However, one question is being asked more and more frequently: Was that enough?
Some experts agree with opposition politician Kilicdaroglu. The geologist Naci Görür, for example, claimed on Turkish television that state authorities had ignored his warnings about an imminent severe earthquake. When it came, he cried for a long time, said the 76-year-old, because nobody had listened to him before.
Disaster relief: President Erdogan admits problems
On Wednesday, the Turkish President then acknowledged problems with the aid measures. There were some difficulties with the initial crisis response, Erdogan said during a visit to the disaster area in Kahramanmaras province in the south of the country.
There have been problems with the roads and airports, but everything is getting better every day. Now the processes are back to normal, says Erdogan in the face of complaints from the population about a lack of aid resources and too slow a reaction from the authorities.
For the Turkish President, Monday’s earthquakes are not just a humanitarian challenge. Whether he likes it or not, he has to think about the elections in May. Things have been going well for him lately. After a stalemate in the polls against possible opponents, Erdogan had caught up. He was able to use his foreign policy successes well for himself.
>> Read here: Turkish Stock Exchange Suspends Trading After Earthquake
Election gifts like an amnesty on fines and a housing program made him popular with the increasingly important middle class. The fact that the opposition had still not agreed on a presidential candidate was something Erdogan was able to turn into a strategy in which he positioned himself as a doer.
“An effective emergency response can even strengthen the AKP leader and his party by triggering a sense of national solidarity among Erdogan’s leadership,” analyzes Wolfango Piccoli of the Teneo consultancy.
But now the criticism of Erdogan is getting louder. In return, opposition leader Kilicdaroglu, who has been wanting to overthrow Erdogan for over a decade, is creating a media-effective narrative according to which the government is not getting anything done in terms of disaster control. On social media, you can see how fire brigade units from the opposition cities of Istanbul or Ankara are rescuing children, repairing ports and straightening the runways of the destroyed airports.
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It is amazing what the state and political and private, domestic and foreign helpers have achieved in the first hours after the disaster. In an area that can be compared with the distance between Cologne and Nuremberg.
But the narrative about the rescue measures has long since swung to the side of the critics. Erdogan, who quickly senses such tensions in society and once knew how to win people over, now has his back to the wall.
He definitely wants to be re-elected in May, whatever the cost. At his appearance on Wednesday, he promised help for people who had become homeless and the construction of new houses within a year. At the same time, he called for people to only listen to instructions from the authorities and not to “provocateurs”. A clear dig at Kilicdaroglu and other critics – and a glimpse that the earthquake could become a decisive factor in the election campaign.
More: How the earthquake could help the Syrian ruler.