Uzan, Cem (1960–)

Cem Cengiz Uzan is a Turkish businessman-turnedpolitician. He is best known for his launch of the first private Turkish television channel in 1990 and for his political campaign in the 2002 general elections. Uzan is also known worldwide for fraud and racketeering because his family's cell-phone provider business, Telsim, defaulted on a huge loan to Nokia and Motorola.

Uzan launched Turkey's first private television channel, Star, with ex–Prime Minister Turgut Özal's son, which violated the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation's constitutional monopoly. Even though this led to a severe controversy about a private channel's legality for a couple of years, in the long run it symbolized the initial step of de facto deregulation of broadcasting in Turkey.

In 2002 Uzan announced that he would put his own work as a businessman aside to pursue a historical task, that is, governing Turkey. He then founded the Youth Party. The party got 7.2% of general votes in the 2002 elections, or 2½ million votes, most of which came from young people and the Western regions of Turkey. This rapid rise in votes for a newly founded party directed attention to the political campaign, designed by “advertising genius” Ali Taran. Other political parties and the media simply ignored the Youth Party, which was exactly what was wanted by the campaign strategist: Instead of being forced to enter into public discussion, Uzan could appear in the rallies and could extensively use his own media outlets for his purposes.

In his campaign, Uzan did not talk about hot issues such as the European Union, economic policies, education, and health, but promised students free books and raged against the International Monetary Fund and other institutions and people within a nationalistic discourse. He used the “us and them” distinction extensively and repeated simple phrases. His use of such tactics even led him to be called “Young Führer.”

Uzan was also labeled as the “Turkish Berlusconi” because he owned a football team and several media outlets along with other assets in construction, energy, and finance, and for his fortune-fueled political ambitions. However, his career would be different. The Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government, from 2003 on, seized more than 200 Uzan-owned companies to collect the Uzan family's debt to financial authorities. Cem Uzan, in return, targeted his propaganda directly at Erdoğan, accusing him of being an “infidel,” “godless,” and “treacherous,” which caused another libel suit to be added to the Uzan family's scores of lawsuits, ranging from extortion to fraud.