Unlawful intervention will be made from the ruling party side in many places where the opposition attains success. The opposition must have a strategy that also sees this reality.
Fatih Polat
The final article before the 31 March elections. Polling is not the full extent of politics, but is not to be dismissed, either. A good result from the ballot box can at least hold the door ajar to hope of change, even if only relative, in the political setting.
In the speech he made following the 3 November 2002 elections that were his conduit to unshared rule, President Tayyip Erdoğan claimed that they had an approach “that walked towards the future acting out of a philosophy of respect for all citizens’ lifestyles and of letting people live for the state to live.” And, while announcing his party’s manifesto for the 31 March general elections, he stressed, “Turkey needs politics of service, not threat.”
With days left until the elections, the discourse of hate that he, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu and his alliance partner MHP Leader Devlet Bahçeli are meting out to their political opponents has hit lows that none of the infrastructure initiatives they have promised in relation to the municipal elections is capable of rectifying. Throughout the election campaign we have witnessed promises of “smart cities” on the one hand going neck and neck with logic-challenging insults, threats and hate speech on the other. They are archived and known to those who care to do so; there is no need to list them separately here.
The following words in the speech AKP Deputy General Chair Prof. Dr. Numan Kurtulmuş made addressing the people in Çorum’s Cumhuriyet Square, his venue on 7 March while on the election stump, come as a striking example of where the ruling party stands in this electoral process: “Yesterday, they tried to get rid of our President Tayyip Erdoğan with Gezi Park, they tried with 17/25 December, they tried on 15 July, but it didn’t happen. They are now trying on 31 March and will come away empty handed.”
Even if there were those who replied on social media to these comments with a reminder that what is slated for 31 March are local and not presidential elections, these responses came as exceptionally naive given what Kurtulmuş was driving at.
Kurtulmuş is sending a coded message that, in the new political order based on Erdoğan’s leadership, never mind striving for Erdoğan’s replacement, just imagining it is a serious problem. Even if 31 March is a local election, we know that if the result desired by the ruling party emerges from this election which President Erdoğan sees as being an “existential” matter this will be presented by the ruling party and its media as further approval of Erdoğan’s leadership. If a result emerges pointing to a weakening of the People’s Alliance, this will also be cloaked in a meaning reaching beyond the local elections.
The Erdoğan-related rhetoric of various AKP administrators and its candidate for Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor, Binali Yıldırım, came as yet another proclamation that we are no longer dealing with a venerable old gentleman we can contemplate on the electoral plane. This exists out of systematic necessity for the time being while going through the motions of voting and getting elected, but the place he is meant to occupy is above elections. We are being dragged rapidly in the direction of a political hegemony in which naming a replacement for Erdoğan counts as blasphemy. We are actually on the cusp of this process.
Numan Kurtulmuş’s very words came as a bluntly worded articulation of this process.
It is not hard to guess that, if a result emerges on 31 March that feeds this lust for power, the furious bestowing of holiness on Erdoğan – of which we have in fact seen plenty of signs - will move onto an even more advanced plane.
So, then, what result will emerge from the polls on 31 March?
At the risk of being proved wrong, let me my set out my guess. A result to the pleasure of the ruling party to the extent it wishes looks unlikely to emerge from the polls on 31 March. But I predict this result will also not be a result that brings much comfort to the opposition. That is, a result looks more probable that will usher in new question marks and concerns going forward.
From the opposition’s point of view, it is worth especially stressing that, even if it is unable to secure the capture of absolutely any province or sub-province from the ruling party, a result that harbingers change cannot be considered a failure. Politics is a business of patience and calls for effort of a consistency that cannot be confined to electioneering. Moreover, Erdoğan, Bahçeli and Soylu’s comments also come as a proclamation that unlawful intervention will be made from the ruling party side in many places where the opposition attains success. The opposition must have a strategy that also sees this reality.
(Translated by Tim Drayton)
Bülent Falakaoğlu
Hakkı Özdal
