LETTER FROM ISTANBUL
Anxious to leave his mark on Istanbul, the city of which he was mayor at the dawn of his political career and which he lost during the municipal elections in June 2019, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is burning to relaunch his infrastructure project favorite, the creation of the “Istanbul Canal”, a second Bosphorus.
Announced in 2011, this electoral promise was never carried out, due to the economic crisis. The exorbitant cost of the site, about 14 billion euros before the devaluation of the Turkish lira in 2018 – probably more today – seemed to condemn it to oblivion. It is not so.
The channel will be, has continued to repeat the number one Turkish in recent months. After completing the environmental impact study, the government is preparing to issue a tender, transport minister Cahit Turhan said recently.
For Erdogan, this pharaonic design is a question of survival. Weakened on the internal scene, undermined by the divisions which undermine his party of Justice and the development (AKP), that which poses like providential man has an urgent need to restore its coat of arms.
Giant infrastructures
He intends to achieve this by returning to the practice of "Big projects". Under his leadership, in seventeen years of power, Turkey has invested tens of billions of dollars in giant infrastructures, including a mega-airport in Istanbul, a new bridge spanning the Bosphorus, not to mention the monumental Camlica Mosque , 60,000 seats, the equivalent of the Stade de France, where families flock to the weekend to indulge in a frenzy of selfies.
"Canal Istanbul" is the most megalomaniac site. It involves drilling, west of the former Ottoman capital, an artificial waterway 50 kilometers long, 100 to 200 meters wide and 25 meters deep, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. In this way, the European part of Istanbul will be turned into an island.
The works have not yet started and already advertisements for the sale of land and properties abound. The plots are torn away at high prices. Promoters who are friends of Islamo-conservative power are rubbing their hands.
From Durusu on the Black Sea coast to Kücükçekmece on the Marmara Sea, posters tout the construction of luxury apartments with canal views. The royal family of Qatar, an unwavering ally of Erdogan, has been seduced. Cheikha Moza, the mother of the emir Tamim ben Hamad Al Thani, acquired land on the edge of the future Bosphorus.
