During an election rally June 7, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged a new public service that astounded voters and journalists alike. Erdogan’s promise, which has earned him much ridicule from political opponents, was to open free coffeehouses across the country. “In the many elections I have followed over a quarter of a century, I have never heard such a pledge,” Hurriyet columnist Deniz Zeyrek wrote after the rally.

Unlike the trendy coffee shops in urban areas, cheap, traditional coffeehouses — a fixture in every neighborhood in Turkey — are frequented almost exclusively by men who spend time chatting, playing cards or watching television. They are usually associated with idleness and are often places jobless men go to kill time for cheap. And at a time when Turkey has more than 3 million jobless and is grappling with serious economic woes, Erdogan’s “nation’s coffeehouses” project gave the opposition easy ammunition to argue that the president has no viable solution to economic problems and is instead offering free tea and muffins to the jobless.

Yet Erdogan sought to explain that his coffeehouses would be equipped with libraries, stressing that the word for the traditional coffeehouses — "kiraathane" — meant “reading house” in its original sense, which has become obsolete today. And while the opposition may be eager to portray Erdogan as an exhausted leader with no real vision for the future, some observers say there is more to the project than meets the eye. Erdogan, they believe, might be planning another step to impose his conservative worldview on society.

Funda Cantek, a published scholar specializing in urban sociology, is among those who see ideological undertones in the project. In an interview with Al-Monitor, she stressed that coffeehouses were an important part of urban culture in Ottoman times, emerging as “an alternative space” to mosques in the 16th century.