Can TV soaps get Erdoğan re-elected?

A well-turned-out man with a pointy beard stands in the centre of a luxurious living room, looking fierce. He waves away two flunkies — one of whom is a fat man with a large moustache, wearing a pristine white shirt, through which you can see his vest. “Baba…” says a young man to the fierce-looking man, who holds up his hand to indicate silence, before (confusingly) also shouting: “Baba!” The camera pans to an older man on a sofa, who slips on what seems to be a dressing gown as suspenseful music plays. The women look on nervously. Then everyone starts bellowing.

Watching at home, transfixed to the television is my stepmother. One of Greece’s leading lawyers, she is not a woman who has much free time, or who indulges in frivolities. She is captivated.

It’s a Turkish soap — a dizi. If there is one country that has little time for Turkey and its exports, it’s Greece. But these shows, for all their absurdity and melodrama — or perhaps because of it — are a big draw. And Greece is not alone.

From the Mediterranean to the eastern bloc to Central Asia, Turkish soap operas are huge. In a 2011 survey, 78% of respondents across the Arab world reported having watched one. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve turned on a hotel TV, anywhere in the world, only to be assaulted by a barrage of emoting Turks with big hair.

Dizis (the Turkish hate calling them “soaps”) are unique: epic plotlines with seven minutes of adverts per 20 minutes of screentime, characterised by natural settings, a slow narrative pace, portentous music, and scripts dashed off week after week.

They are also big business. Between 2020 and 2022, global demand grew by 44%. Loved across Central and Eastern Europe, including Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and Hungary, they also have huge followings in Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and Vietnam. Turkey is now the world’s second largest exporter of TV, after the United States, with more than 650 million viewers in more than 140 countries.

And if you want impact, how’s this: in 2008, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia issued a Fatwa against channels that broadcast Noor, a dizi that centres on the lives of a husband and wife seeking to “reconcile the conflicting pressures of traditional and modern worlds”. As part of a wider attack on “depraved” TV moguls, he declared, instructively, that these sorts of programmes were a “deliberate attempt to impose an imported culture on Arab societies”.

Here is where these soaps get (for me, at any rate) interesting. They aren’t Citizen Kane, but they might well be Forrest Gump — that sweet rendering of the American Dream — which is vastly preferable if you’re interested in promulgating an idealised idea of your own society…

David Patrikarakos, in Unherd.