On my time in Gaziantep; Trump's misadventures; the latest Turkish journalist to be arrested; NYC's Democratic Primary

Notebook 25

This is a regular feature in which I write about the things I’ve been reading and watching. The first item is free, the rest is for paid subscribers.

I apologize for failing to send this out on Sunday. I was sick.

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Gaziantep chronicles #1

My wife has business in Gaziantep for three weeks, and I'm here to provide support with our seven-month old baby daughter. So if you're in Antep, and you see a tall, skinny, fanny-pack wearing man pushing a pram through the streets and parks, come say hi.

There’s quite a few of these all around Turkey, but Gaziantep’s saturation is especially impressive. “The armies [shall] march to Aqsa”; “Murderer ‘Israel’, Murderer America”; a Zafer Party logo with “We are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal”

I have very scattered thoughts about this place.

It feels a bit removed from the political tension in the rest of the country. I hadn’t really thought about that before coming here. The people I’ve talked to have been very pleasant and laid back.

We’re staying in the Şahinbey district, which is smack dab in the middle of the city. But there’s hardly any traffic. This is a city of 2-3 million people, depending on how you count, and it’s a pretty lively place, but it’s not crammed up and it’s not imposing itself on you the way places like İzmir and Bursa and certainly İstanbul do.

This is the 100th year Atatürk Park. It's pretty big, and I'll spend a couple of hours there on most days. We first thought that the AK Party built it, but were later told it was Celal Doğan, the SHP/CHP mayor 1989-2004. The AK Party stopped its expansion, but the person telling us was glad that they didn't eat into it.

Fatma Şahin, the Gaziantep’s longtime mayor, is also not the typical AK party politician. She’s been a minister before, and is so firmly entrenched in the party that she doesn’t really have to do the flashy, more performative stuff. As far as I’ve heard, she talks to everybody, conducts business quietly, and relatively efficiently. Even opposition supporters respect her. This is the seventh-largest in Turkey and it’s one of the only major cities where the CHP couldn’t run a very competitive race against the incumbent. Fatma Şahin lost a lot of votes (to the Islamist Yeniden Refah) but kept her job.

I guess there’s a lot to talk about the demographic makeup of the city (I hear a lot of Arabic on the streets) and all kinds of things like that, but I’m not running around conducting interviews, so I can only speak to my own experiences. I’ll wrote more about those soon.