The New Turkey Contract and politics as a responsibility

One important contribution the AK Parti has made to Turkish politics is undoubtedly its election manifestos, each of which has the force of a contract between the party and the people, the nation. Before every election it has entered so far, the AK Parti's election manifestos have been texts prepared with the utmost care, with work beginning in the party's kitchen months in advance, and which in the end function like a government program.

Undoubtedly, preparing an election manifesto, or a package of promises before elections, is not unique to the AK Parti. Many parties engage in similar work. But neither the content, nor the horizon, nor the credibility of any of them is even comparable with what the AK Parti prepares.

The extravagant promises that parties lavishly hand out to voters as they enter elections, promises whose makers reveal an intention not to keep them even as they make them, in fact greatly damage the politician's credibility in society. They turn the politician into a kind of peddler, using a thousand and one misleading and deceptive marketing techniques in order to seize what he must obtain.

We had earlier seen politicians who promised "two keys," or who stretched the imagination with the raises they would give civil servants and workers, or the loans and grants they would give farmers once in power; and truly, Süleyman Demirel's line, "Whatever they give, I give five more," had set the bar for discourses that made such promises the routine of politics at a point that could not be surpassed.

Yet when the AK Parti set out in 2001, it expressed many of the things it wished to accomplish on the political stage in its party program in a reasonable language, with the credibility of projects whose feasibility had been studied, and Erdoğan even voiced a message in the squares such as "do not expect miracles from us in a short time." The confirmation the voters gave the AK Parti was, in a way, a premium they paid for reasonableness, realism and, of course, loyalty in politics.

Since then, the AK Parti has done far more than it promised in its election manifestos, and in any case it never promised anything it could not do. This has in fact brought a distinct quality to politics. Whereas the profile of the politician who promises what he cannot do and does not do what he promises had been the routine of Turkish politics in earlier periods, the AK Parti in a sense broke this routine and showed that a different style and path of politics is quite possible.

At the candidates' introduction meeting, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, while presenting this election's manifesto, also read out the hundred-article New Turkey Contract that he had prepared alongside it. Had this contract been read not 13 years ago but even 7 years ago, many of its statements might have sounded extremely far-fetched, because Turkey was not a country in which such promises could be heard from a governing party.

We were far from a conception of the state that places human dignity at the center, "recognizes" all the ethnic and religious segments of society, regards their rights as part of "human dignity," and recognizes the protection of this dignity as the state's fundamental mission.

That is why the articles in the New Turkey Contract that we heard from Mr. Davutoğlu today, which might strike us as far-fetched, are no longer articles whose absence we feel or which we are far from in Turkey today. They are all goals toward whose realization we have long since set out. But it must also be appreciated that this road was set out upon with the will the AK Parti has displayed so far.

Today, looking in particular at the steps taken within the scope of the resolution process, we see that all of these steps were already written in the first party program back in 2001. These steps were taken not because someone forced them, but because of the high sensitivity the AK Parti cadres hold toward human dignity.

Some may be claiming a share for themselves on this account and may be trying to use that share to make the Kurdish people indebted to them. Yet the Kurds, who have been saved by these steps from assimilation and from operations of denial and annihilation, owe nothing to anyone. The AK Parti has never claimed any favor on account of the steps it has taken. But no one can deny that these steps were possible only through the AK Parti's political stance and will.

The credibility that a politics that cares so much about tracking the relationship between its own promises and its deeds has gained through the AK Parti in fact breaks all the stock assumptions we know about politics as a profession. Politics is not merely a profession; it is a responsibility. When it is understood this way, political offices are perceived not as lucky birds perched on a person's head, but as a responsibility that should only make a person's burden and worry heavier.

We are all seeing and experiencing together that people who regard politics as a responsibility, and who live it so, bring an entirely different quality to politics. The alternative is to regard politics as a way of establishing power over people, of satisfying the feeling of power, or of getting rich.

May that understanding, of course, be far from us.