Vote counting November 1, Istanbul. Demotix/Ozcan Soysal. All rights reserved. On a Sunday morning the trendy district of Cihangir rarely gets going before noon. Today, though, at 6am everyone seems to be up. They’re on their way to polling stations, many to act as tellers or as monitors for Oy ve Ötesi (Vote and Beyond), an NGO determined to see fair play. A minibus takes us up to Taksim and then down the hill to Dolapdere, a run down and impoverished part of Beyoğlu, on the edge of the Kasimpaşa district. Erdoğan country. Will his gamble to start a war with the PKK pay off? Will the pro-Kurdish HDP, who had given up campaigning weeks ago after almost 200 of their offices and bookshops were attacked on September 8 by the AKP youth wing (no arrests), get over the 10% threshold again?
A 1970s primary school, 19 classrooms, each containing two polling booths, a transparent plastic urn, enough ballot papers and envelopes for 400 people, two devices with which to stamp the word ‘Yes’, a list of those down to vote in that classroom, and a long table at the front at which sit 5 officials. Or rather, one or two civil servants nominally in charge, and others – all activists - drawn from the main parties, an arrangement introduced in 2002 to ensure probity but in practice a recipe for bickering, points scoring and intimidation.
Outside in the car park, groups of AKP and HDP youth hang about. Inside the foyer of the school a single desk is manned exclusively by AKP activists ready to help the infirm or the illiterate get to where they need to be and to remind them who to vote for (they can at least read the AKP’s logo, an electric light bulb). On the opposite wall a floor-to-ceiling silhouette in red of Ataturk, on either side of him his dates with the 8 from 1938, the year of his death, tipped on its side to suggest infinity.
