Systemic corruption in Istanbul’s driving-license process

Systemic corruption in Istanbul’s driving-license process makes the road test less a neutral measure of driving skill than a performance governed by arbitrary standards and an entrenched market in shortcuts. Through Füsun’s repeated failures and her refusal to pay for a license, the process exposes the gap between official rules and their everyday administration—and makes her eventual success a hard-won assertion of pride and honor.

An examination shaped by arbitrary rules

Füsun first passed the written examination with a perfect score, but her first road test ended almost as soon as it began. She had started the Chevrolet and put it into motion when an examiner accused her of failing to look in the mirrors. When she turned to ask what he meant, the committee ordered her to stop and get out. The regulations said drivers must not look behind them while driving, yet the examiners treated her attempt to clarify the criticism as grounds to terminate the test. They leapt from the car in a show of alarm that left Füsun humiliated.

The first failure was presented as routine: candidates, Kemal observed, were failed on their initial attempt to impress upon them the seriousness of driving. But the procedure’s supposed rigor quickly looked less like consistent assessment than a mechanism that applicants were expected to navigate through inside knowledge. Füsun was told to wait four weeks for another attempt, while people familiar with the licensing system explained how applicants could procure a license through a contact at a particular teahouse. A different route ran through expensive driving schools, where retired traffic policemen taught; enrollment practically guaranteed success because examination committee members and policemen were business partners in the schools.

The market in shortcuts

The paid course offered more than instruction. Candidates could take their tests in an old Ford modified with a large hole in the floor beside the driver’s seat, allowing them to see colored markings on the road while parking. A guide concealed behind the sun visor explained which marking called for turning the wheel fully left and when to reverse. The setup converted an ostensibly public examination into a purchasable script: the candidate could follow concealed directions to produce the appearance of flawless driving.

The system also demanded visible demonstrations of compliance beyond competent vehicle handling. A driver might check the rearview mirror correctly, but that action did not count unless the examiner could see it; gripping the mirror made awareness legible to the state. A veteran policeman explained the distinction to Füsun as the difference between driving for one’s own benefit and looking as though one was driving for the state. The exam thus tested not only control of a car but a candidate’s ability to perform obedience in the approved, observable form.

After Füsun’s second failure, people again advised Kemal and her to pay a bribe or use the established channels. The pressure was practical as well as humiliating: the licensing business linked instruction, police, and examination, while a candidate who rejected those arrangements had to face repeated tests under the same system. Kemal knew that paying a larger sum could sometimes bypass driving school altogether, but Füsun opposed even the smallest payment to the policemen who had failed her. She explicitly forbade him to pay behind her back or pull strings, insisting that he take her decision seriously. Her refusal made the process a test of principle as much as driving.

Repeated failure and persistence

Kemal continued giving Füsun lessons at Yıldız Park. In the evenings, the two sometimes went for coffee and soda near the Bosphorus or tea at a coffeehouse; those pauses softened the aggravation of the lessons without turning their relationship into carefree courtship. They could sit together in silence, watching tankers and ferries pass, while the prospect of other lives seemed to weigh on them. Their quiet companionship gives the licensing ordeal a private duration: each attempt belonged not only to an administrative procedure but to the life they were trying to imagine together.

Füsun’s second road test demanded a difficult maneuver: reversing uphill into an imaginary parking space. When the Chevrolet trembled and juddered, the examiners ordered her out as they had before. A crowd that included applicants, retired policemen, letter writers, and onlookers watched; some laughed when an examiner took over the wheel. The public setting intensified the humiliation. By then, however, Füsun had learned to drive well through practice, including trips to and from her lessons. She failed again in early August, but chose to set the disappointment aside and go to the seaside with Kemal rather than let the exam define the day.

The summer’s lessons then stopped, and the account resumes the struggle years later. After three further failures, Füsun finally passed her road test in early 1984. The examiners had tired of her, and by then they understood that she would not pay a bribe. Her success therefore does not show the system becoming fair; it shows that she endured its repetitions without accepting its corrupt bargain. Kemal celebrated by taking her, Nesibe, and Tarık Bey to Maksim Gazino to hear Müzeyyen Senar sing old Turkish songs.

A wider culture of permission and evasion

The licensing process belongs to a broader picture of public life in which formal approval and informal transactions coexist. In the film-censorship system, filmmakers sought approval in stages, while a complex bureaucracy of permits and bribery had grown around applications. Kemal remembered considering which agent might help Lemon Films secure approval for Blue Rain. That parallel does not make film censorship and driving tests identical; it shows how access to ordinary professional or personal goals could depend on intermediaries who knew how to manage the state’s procedures.

Other episodes likewise register the distance between official rules and practical arrangements. Foreign alcohol was tightly restricted by state quotas, yet rich-neighborhood delicatessens and fashionable hotel bars were well stocked with black-market champagne, whiskey, and cigarettes. Later, when arranging European visas for Füsun and her family, Kemal prepared documents describing them as highly paid specialists employed by Satsat. These are distinct settings, but together they show a society where formal restrictions did not eliminate unofficial routes; they made knowledge, connections, and money consequential in dealing with institutions.

Against that background, Füsun’s insistence on earning her license without a bribe stands out as more than stubbornness. The examiners’ requirement that competence be visibly performed, the concealed guide in the modified Ford, and the business ties between schools and officials all make the system’s claim to neutral merit uncertain. Füsun refuses to treat corruption as an unavoidable fee. Her eventual pass gives that refusal a concrete outcome, while the years of failed tests preserve the cost of insisting that the rules should mean what they say.