Cabinet reshuffle

There is a truth that remaining in power alone for a long time should have taught us in the course of the process. However successful they may be, long-lasting governments produce a certain weariness among the people. In democracies, because alternatives are known to exist, this weariness very easily leads to mass shifts of votes, and it constantly reminds us how decisive it is in the people’s search for options.

Over the last 50 years, apart from the AKP, Turkey has experienced a long period of rule only in the ANAP era. Although he is remembered fondly today in many respects and pioneered policies in many areas of Turkish politics, Turgut Özal continued to lose votes regularly for as long as he remained in power. Undoubtedly, in this, the weariness caused by the routinisation of the initial energy (charisma) had a large share, as did the discontent produced by the segments of the population whose order and peace were somehow disrupted by Özal’s policy of transition to a free-market economy.

In truth, the AKP government has not yet caused a weariness large enough to give rise to its alternatives. Although the latest elections showed a serious loss of votes, they did not open the way for its rivals. The AKP again received alone as many votes as the opposition parties combined. However, it can also be said that a significant part of the vote loss experienced stems from the stagnation the party has fallen into in arousing a new excitement.

The cabinet change alone can be expected to reawaken this excitement, and to recharge the energy that the AKP, whose alternative is not yet visible on the horizon, had begun to lose within itself.

It seems quite clear that each of the choices made in the cabinet change has a separate effect and importance.

Bülent Arınç’s entry into the cabinet can be understood as a sign of the government’s ideological core entering the cabinet, but it is odd to find this strange and criticise it. If something has been identified as the “core” that brings a party into being, nothing could be more natural than that ideology being represented in the cabinet. On the contrary, although democracy recognises this right and authority, for parties themselves to restrict themselves by acknowledging unwritten pressures upon themselves is a subtle betrayal of democracy.

In this respect, Arınç’s entry into the cabinet is very important, even if only as a demonstration that the sphere of authority and right produced by democratic principles and rules cannot be renounced. This recalls the stance taken against the unwritten, tyrannical rule that people tried to make accepted, that someone whose wife wears a headscarf cannot be elected president. In that example, the exercise of the political will in claiming its own domain opened Turkey’s way in every respect.

The appointment of Prof. Ahmet Davutoğlu to the cabinet from outside was also a very important step, showing that a performance-based concept is being followed rather than the clientelist balances we are used to in cabinet conventions. Prof. Davutoğlu, who with his theory and practice has opened a new vision in foreign policy, one of the areas in which the government has been most successful for seven years, can be expected, by joining the Council of Ministers, to have a positive effect not only on foreign policy but also on the government’s general policies.

The diplomacy of dialogue, communication and exchange, resorted to in response to the traditional foreign policy perspective that constantly views foreign policy as a minefield strewn with enmities, cannot be said to be needed any less in domestic politics.

Undoubtedly, the most important issue that will challenge the government in the coming elections will be the management of the economy. And the management of the economy, though to some extent a matter of money, is to a large extent a matter of psychology. While people grapple with the economic problems they face, instead of an approach that mocks their situation, which may seem likeable to some, we can also expect a great deal to fall to Ali Babacan’s confidence-inspiring face.

Apart from that, it seems that most of the names newly entering the cabinet were also chosen for their technical performance rather than for clientelist balances. These choices were probably made by passing over expectations within the party. But it was already a lesson produced by the latest elections that the government should care less, from now on, about observing intra-party balances.

The latest elections had clearly shown that intra-party balances were becoming increasingly alienated from the more real and decisive balances formed by the people’s tendencies.

In this case, let us say that the cabinet change has been quite well designed toward overcoming this alienation, and wish that it be auspicious.