As you may or may not know - Turkish politics were shaking from the stem. Secular community had huge protests against the ruling party AKP. AKP judged these as a provocative movement for the elections and tried to cover up the events. No tv channel but just a pure secular one mentioned the first gathering and so the newspapers. This can give us a clue on how a complex planned ruling organization we are dealing with. Although this is done with a very professional manner... these guys are still turkish =) they underestimated the scale of the event and thought censoring would be enough. Guess what... people realized the movement showed their anger... and on the second event almost all the main Tv stations broad casted from the meeting.
Moving on, the general election period started, we watched the regular political lies - some soap opera like scenes between uniting parties and resulted in an absolute victory of AKP. The questions to be asked are; what lead to the tension in secular regions? what was AKP thinking? did the opposition enough? what should we expect from future?... In this article I'll try to answer these question from my perspective.
Why don't I support AKP? They had great improvements on social security, governmental services and economical situation. At least they gave that impression to the public. For example they had a so called health revolution. They started the project just before the elections (guess why?). It resulted on a total disaster. The university hospitals are currently in overload status and the schedules for control are 3-6 months due. Also the economy is currently standing on foreign investments, which makes it risky for another economical crisis. On the other hand under AKP ruling, religious acts are tremendously increased. Long story short, they try to remove secularity concept from the constitution while they say otherwise. This is the part that I really hate, being lied to - although I now that this is just politics. Maybe this is the main reason why opposing people don't like AKP - AKP politics is very neatly planned and organized almost perfect minus the human factor. Turkish way of politics is to face the problems directly, and if you have the power you can do any thing...you don't need to lie or do any politics. (or I'm just hallucinating)
Thanks god AKP is trying to enter EU. At least for the sake of Progress Reports we do see some real improvements. For example separating Transportation and Information ministries was a real need. Of course the main power behind these fast improvements are the fact that we don't have a coalition government. Could this be better if CHP won %66 of the seats? Even though they managed, I honestly don't believe they would do better but at least we won't have any threats against secularism.
The path to our future is little bit of threatening for me. For example allowing headscarf would result in enpowernment of the religious community causing more pressure on seculars. I won't want to grow my children in a country where the government acts like they are the hand of god.
I'm an engineer with a little managerial experience. I believe by methodically thinking you could solve almost anything. My solution for the situation is the reorganization of CHP. CHP should remove the old school father-to-son way of politicians, should add academic Prof.s as an advisory committee and leave the decision making to ambitious young business people. As you see this is an utopia for this reason the only thing we could do is to show our teeth and hope this would hold AKP for a while.
Note: This is a follow up to "Secim Meselesi: Ciddi Bir Yazi" by Levent Tuter.
