‘Something is boiling’: Turkish football fans tackle Erdoğan
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was photographed in 2019 proudly grasping a jersey bearing his name in commemoration of 25 years as a member of Istanbul’s Fenerbahçe football club. Four years later, Fenerbahçe supporters are calling for the Turkish president’s ousting.
Chants of “Erdoğan resign” thundered across Istanbul’s Şükrü Saraçoğlu Stadium last Saturday as Fenerbahçe fans accused him of “lies, lies, lies” during two decades in power. At Beşiktaş, another big Istanbul team, fans filled the pitch with colourful stuffed bears for children in the earthquake zone before belting out anti-government chants.
“Something is boiling,” said Yağmur Nuhrat, a professor at Istanbul Bilgi University who studies the intersection of football and society, adding that the “devastating” earthquake came as Turkey was already grappling with a “major economic crisis”.
Even for a strongman leader such as Erdoğan, there is no doubting the significance of politics playing out through Turkey’s football obsession. Days after the chants, one local authority blocked Fenerbahçe supporters attending this Saturday’s match in the central city of Kayseri. Some fans duly pledged to “bury the one who wronged us in the ballot box”.
The vocal opposition among supporters of two of Turkey’s most prominent football clubs shows how Erdoğan is struggling with the fallout from an earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people in his country and Syria.
You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.
Erdoğan has asked for forgiveness for the government’s stuttering early response to the quake, which wrecked over 100,000 buildings in a huge area in southern Turkey. Critics have blamed Erdoğan for poorly enforced construction rules and a sweeping amnesty programme for building faults that worsened the death toll.
A video this week of Erdoğan handing out cash to children in the earthquake zone, mocked on social media, caught the mood of discontent across the country. It comes as Erdoğan is already waging his toughest re-election bid in 20 years in power, with the worst bout of inflation in decades sapping his popularity.
But Erdoğan has long been blessed by his opponents, who have repeatedly failed to capitalise on swings in the public mood. A long-running effort to bring together Turkey’s opposition was thrust into turmoil on Friday after its second-biggest coalition member, the Good party, rejected plans for a single candidate to challenge Erdoğan. Analysts said this could provide the incumbent with a boost.
The defiance on the terraces comes at some personal risk for fans. Nuhrat said “stadiums are always political” but outright government criticism has been rare in recent years, particularly after a system requiring fans to swipe biometric identification cards to enter matches came into effect in 2014.
The government has hit out at the protests. Youth and sports minister Mehmet Muharrem Kasapoğlu said this week that “sports fields are not political fields”, adding: “provocations will never be allowed”. Turkey’s Union of Clubs and several teams, including Kayserispor, have backed the government’s stance.
Fenerbahçe has already said some fans received bans from watching live sports for allegedly criticising the government at last Saturday’s game. Its lawyers are reviewing the matter.
Football forms a significant part of Turkey’s popular culture and the public backlash is particularly striking for a president who is a diehard fan. Erdoğan started playing football in his teens and later joined a semi-professional team. He took to the pitch in the run-up to the 2014 election, scoring a hat-trick in an Istanbul match with celebrities.
Özgehan Şenyuva, a professor at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University who has written about sport in Turkey, said Erdoğan’s clash with fans has echoes of the 2013 Gezi demonstrations Then a protest against plans to build in an Istanbul park morphed into a nationwide movement against Erdogan’s government.
Fans from Istanbul teams put aside their intense rivalries, banding together in opposition of the government during Gezi. Scenes of Fenerbahçe fans pouring over the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul along with other demonstrators “changed the protests”, said Şenyuva.
The subsequent Gezi crackdown marked a violent turning point towards a more authoritarian style of rule for Erdoğan. The protests in football stadiums have not grown into such a broad movement. But there are signs it has caught a sense of disquiet, and little cuts across Turkey’s class and regional divides like the sport.
Messages saying “match with no audience, university without students” have spread across social media, alluding to the Fenerbahçe ban and the government post-quake decision to move higher education to remote learning.
“I feel like . . . it’s not going to die down easily,” said Nuhrat.
