Turkish PM hires top PR firm in EU capital

Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu has hired a top PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, to improve his overseas image following Turkish elections.

Karen Massin, the CEO of its Brussels office, told EUobserver i on Friday (6 November) the contract began on Tuesday, just two days after Turkish people gave his AKP party an absolute majority.

“The company is providing communication support to highlight the prime minister’s leading role in international efforts to address the refugee crisis and his commitment to open dialogue and consensus, which is crucial to ensuring the stability and future prosperity of Turkey,” she noted.

The client, as newly listed in Burson-Marsteller’s entry in the European Commission’s transparency register, is the “Office of Prime Minister of Turkey.”

The listing says the work is worth less than €9,999.

High-level government contracts in the EU capital are usally worth in the region of €60,000 a month. But the low figure might reflect the early nature of the relationship.

Burson-Marsteller, which had a turnover of almost €10 million in Brussels last year, is one of the city’s biggest lobby firms.

But EUobserver understands the US-based firm’s Berlin, London, Paris, and Washington offices are also working on the Davutoglu file.

Its activities in the past few days include setting up background briefings with the PM’s press team, with a view to lining up interviews in Ankara.

Own style

European and US media, over the past 18 months, have highlighted Turkey’s slide toward authoritarianism under the AKP’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan i.

His riot police have beaten and killed pro-democracy protesters.

He has tried to hush up corruption scandals by sacking prosecutors and by rigging the judiciary.

He has also launched a crackdown on government-critical media, prompting election monitors, last week, to warn the AKP’s victory was “unfair”, and due, in part, to the “rapidly diminishing choice of media outlets and restrictions on freedom of expression.”

Burson-Marsteller’s line is that Davutoglu is more moderate than Erdogan and free to act independently of the president.

It is keen for journalists to note that, during the election campaign, he held meetings with Kurdish groups, as well as AKP-critical artists, journalists, and intellectuals, in order to mend fences.

For his part, Marc Pierini, the EU’s former ambassador in Turkey, who now works with the Carnegie Europe think thank, agreed, up to a point.

“He [Davutoglu] has his own style and his own ideas, which are very different from the president’s [Erdogan], and he can voice these differences. But after the elections, more power than ever has shifted to the president,” he told this website.

“He [Davutoglu] has, on occasion, voiced differences on freedom of the press,” he added.

“But the problem is, it doesn’t change anything.”

Sinan Ulgen, who chairs the Istanbul-based Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, and who also works with Carnegie, noted that it is “standard practice” for the Turkish state and Turkish politicians to hire PR firms in the EU and US.

He said: “After the elections, Davutoglu might try to carve out more political space for himself in the system. He has the constitution to back him, because it gives more power to the PM than to the president, but this will be an uphill struggle given how influential and effective Erdogan is.”