Consistency

Perhaps the most important problem of politics in Turkey is that it is conducted without being bound to a reference, a coherent set of values, a book. Extraordinary consistency is perhaps expected of politicians, but there is no yardstick by which reference this consistency is to be tested. The political communication between political parties and their voters takes place in a style and language of its own, but this language is full of ambiguities that allow every kind of evasion. Even so, there are occasions that decide whether this language is working properly.

Elections are the mechanisms through which this communication is institutionally established. Thanks to elections, political parties remember that they have to rely on the people. In this way the bookless course of politics is, even if temporarily, put down in a book.

Ali Bulaç has long said that voters in Turkey have no loyalty at all to their parties. The clearest sign of this is that in every election large numbers of voters change en masse whom they vote for. A party that came to power with 25 percent of the vote in one election falling below the threshold in the next because it could not reach even 2 percent is nearly routine in Turkish politics. Yet it is still very wrong to read this routine of politics as "the voter's disloyalty to the party." On the contrary, when the records of the parties that face disloyalty are examined, it is seen that the real great disloyalty is that displayed by the parties toward their own voters. When parties do not keep the promises they made during election campaigns, the voter punishes them very quickly and in the next election pretends not to know that party. This in the end produces an extremely unstable picture in terms of voter profile.

The instability stems largely from the parties' having no program to which they feel bound. To the extent that politics is seen as a field in which daily opportunities are exploited, it works as though it does not require values, promises or programs that can be referenced. That being so, even parties expected to be diametrically different from one another end up with programs and statutes identical to each other.

This makes it very difficult to track consistency in the lines of political parties.

True, party lines with rigid views that will agree to no compromise, concession or empathy on certain views are certainly no more beneficial. On the contrary, stubborn attitudes that block all political lanes, even though they hold such unchanging, inflexible lines on many issues, also have the effect of exhausting all the productivity of politics in terms of social opening. But it is still hard to say that even these stubborn attitudes rest on a certain reference. The stances taken merely eye the fields of day-to-day political profit rather than certain political-philosophical references.

These days, the images or messages that Deniz Baykal gives by pinning party badges in ceremonies on headscarved or chador-wearing women who register with the CHP, and the opening messages that Devlet Bahçeli has expressed regarding the demands of the Alevis, make the already sufficiently ambiguous lines of the parties even more indistinct. To be sure, these attempts, which both parties display in areas that considerably strain their own molds, would at first glance be expected to ease society and politics considerably, as a gesture from the very quarters that are the source of the problem.

Yet perhaps to say the same of the MHP's Alevi opening is unjust for now, but it is seen that the CHP's chador show in particular lacks even this much of a message or promise. Baykal gives these images, but he does not neglect to remind that he has not deviated a millimeter from his policy that constitutes the real problem concerning the headscarf. In that case all the message he can give goes no further than "headscarved women can vote for the CHP." As if headscarved women had a vote in hand and could not find a party to give it to.

Let us give him his due: Baykal actually has a consistent line on this. In earlier elections too, he did precisely the same thing. In one, together with a campaign he called Anatolian Left, he made the promise of "reconciling the Imam-Hatip graduates with those who go to discos," and in another he again said "headscarved women can vote for us."

In the words of the man from Erzurum, "a person should be a little less of a shopkeeper."

One can fall away from the rationality of politics, let alone its book, only this far. Asking for votes without promising anything, without giving anything in return, without sharing any of their troubles... Would calling it political freeloading be enough, I wonder?

Thank goodness there are elections. Through them the parties find the chance to see their real worth in the political marketplace. They also get to see how well the account they made at home fits this marketplace.