Reflections on the Election Results

Dear friends, we have left behind another election process that was a source of great tension in society.  In 2014, we experienced the first election after the 2007 constitutional amendment to elect the president by popular vote. However, for the first time, a second round of elections took its place in the history of Turkish political life. We experienced an election process in which the political sides became extremely sharp and political discourse sometimes ignored all moral values and the law. The government did not hesitate in the slightest to use the power of the state by mobilizing all means, which led to an extremely unfair political race. The post-election assessments, which expected social unrest, fortunately did not materialize. However, the post-election assessments described a different political picture. The scarcity of comments made independently of political views indicated that the polarization created in society would not easily end. In this article, I will try to interpret what the post-election picture suggests. As a person who supported the Millet Alliance in my writings throughout the election process, I cannot claim that my comments here will be impartial, but I can say that I will base my views on sociological evaluation as much as possible.

It should be seen that the foundations of the perception-based strategy used by the People's Alliance throughout the election process date back much earlier than the election. In my article titled "The Construction of Virtual Reality in Politics" (1), I stated about a year ago that Erdoğan had created a world of virtual reality for his own masses and that he had the media power to support this. I evaluated that until the election process, his main goal was to prevent the disintegration and drift in his masses, and that during the election process, he could make moves that could affect the political preference of the society with security policies. Erdoğan, who used the patriarchal basis in his administrative system very successfully, managed to finish the election ahead of his rival. In fact, reality did not matter at all. The economy, the refugee problem, the aftermath of the earthquake and the situation in the region were big problems for all segments of society. But the issue was the opposition's failure to understand how strong the perception among the electorate was that "Erdoğan will solve these problems if he can". The masses, who saw themselves as helpless and powerless in the face of problems, preferred their "father". 

The perception of the "father" was so strong that even the inconsistency in his rhetoric and his political views that were far from solving the problems did not lead to major ruptures in the masses' loyalty to him. To support this, the controlled media, broadcasting in accordance with virtual reality, functioned as an important determinant. Because without "alternative information", which is one of the most important conditions for the existence of democracy, the likelihood of society's preferences being based on rational grounds was diminishing. In order to form rational preferences, the public had to be able to receive information from a wide variety of sources. However, this was something the government did not want at all, and its audience mostly only watched TRT and ATV. 

When we look at the opposition, we can talk about an opposition that failed to take a good picture of the current situation. The opposition, which pursued a propaganda strategy for the first round of the elections that focused entirely on facts and proposed solutions, failed because it did not read the picture well. In fact, this strategy could have been very successful in a society that was free of fanaticism and able to make more rational choices. But despite knowing the foundations on which the media and the AKP strategy was based, it was the wrong strategy. The opposition turned away from this mistake for the second round and returned to the correct strategy, which included messages about the problems created by the AKP during its long rule and how these problems would worsen if the AKP continued in power. Kılıçdaroğlu's vote share, which increased by about 3 percent compared to the first round, can be read from this perspective. Unfortunately, however, it would be too optimistic to expect major changes in the next two weeks. Perhaps the following question should be on the minds of opposition decision-makers: "What would have happened if the same strategy had been applied from the beginning of the election process?". 

Another important result of the election was that the preferences in big cities clearly favored the opposition. Increasing the rural-urban tension and getting rural votes through this antagonism in electoral processes had been the main argument of right-wing politics in Turkey for many years. With urbanization rates reaching over eighty percent, it was observed that the same antagonism continued to be perpetuated between metropolises and small towns. On the one hand, as a result of unplanned urbanization, a phenomenon of ghettoization was developing that would prevent people living in urban spaces from completing their urbanization process. 

In other words, the countryside was now continuing its existence in the cities. The AKP was reaping the results of its marginalization policy against meritorious and educated cadres by maintaining its political superiority in the countryside despite everything. But on the other side of the issue, the deterioration caused by the lack of meritocratic cadres was spreading to all institutions of society. The danger of turning into a country whose academia, judiciary, arts, sports and health were deteriorating at the same rate was not seen as one of the priority problems to be solved in politics. 

One of the most important results of the election, and perhaps the most important one, was the rejection of the nation-state characteristic, which was the foundation of the founding philosophy of the Republic of Turkey, as the hidden choice of the election. We need to explain this a bit. Nation-states emerged on the stage of history in 17th century Europe with the disappearance of feudal structures. The most important effect of this process was the shift in the source of sovereignty from monarchies to the people. Such an outcome inevitably depends on the end of feudal structures. Atatürk was a leader who knew very well that the Turkish nation had to catch up with this process, albeit late. Therefore, he initiated the process of nation-statization, in which the source of sovereignty is the people, with a conscious choice and an accurate decision. However, the fact that rural development in Turkey could not be realized at the desired speed and level ensured that feudal structures continued to exist by transforming them, let alone eliminating them. 

Although the Republican cadres took important steps in this regard from time to time, these steps always had a political counterpart. We can say that one of the most concrete examples of this in our history is the "Village Institutes". In the following period, the reasons for the failure of the steps taken for land reform and the reasons for the abolition of the village institutes are not very different. Perhaps it is also possible to evaluate the issue from this point of view; after Atatürk, the Republic of Turkey could not protect its independence, which is its most important characteristic. As a result, feudal structures continued to exist as structures defined by religious patterns, which transformed and controlled their spatial existence. Not only did they continue to exist, they have always been in a struggle against the nation-state in order to guarantee their future.  

When evaluated together with the election results, a political choice has emerged that guarantees the preservation of the power of transformed feudal structures. This political choice is perhaps the greatest and historical defeat of the idea of the nation-state, the founding philosophy of the Republic of Turkey. Perhaps at this point, all those who define themselves as "intellectuals", all citizens who are proud of their Kemalist identity, all institutions and administrators who vow to protect the unitary structure of the state should take their heads in their hands and think. The question "Where did we go wrong?" needs to be discussed at length. But I can give a hint. The unconditional sovereignty of the nation requires the unconditional implementation of the laws that result from this sovereignty. Our political history is full of political leaders who saw the laws as an obstacle, who saw no harm in violating the Constitution once, who could ignore the laws when it suited them or when they had enough power. Unfortunately, we have not been able to become a nation, we have not been able to protect the process of nation-statehood. We, those of us who adhere to the philosophy on which Atatürk founded the Republic, have not lost recently. We lost when we started to tolerate lawlessness, when we started to settle for discourses that legitimize them, when we started to stay away from informing those who do not recognize the laws that represent our sovereignty of their limits. If you still see this process as a simple political choice, I wish you all success and happiness in your future lives. It turns out that "Sovereignty is not unconditionally belonging to the Nation", it turns out that revolution does not happen in five to ten years....  

(1) https://strasam.org/stratejisiyaset/siyaset-bilimi/siyasette-sanal-gercekligin-insasi-756