If you are looking for a reason for "No"…

As the presidential system is put to a referendum, the parties have begun to conduct their campaigns at full speed. At the outset we had observed that, beyond a certain point, people focus more on who stands on which side during this campaign and who wants this package more than on the content of the proposed constitutional amendment package. It is not possible to say that anything has changed, particularly on the "no" side, in these advancing hours of the campaign either.

The answers given by those who say "no" among the people handed a microphone in street interviews on social media reveal typical cases. "I am a very secular person, that's why I say no," says one, without feeling any need to connect this to the content of the package. Another says,

"I am Mustafa Kemal's soldier,

that's why I can never accept the country being bound to one-man authority."

Unaware that the discourse that exalts the Mustafa Kemal whose soldier he claims to be, and that draws his official portrait, is titled "one man."

Another, practically spewing his anger at a headscarved woman who had expressed her stance as "yes" before him, expresses his "no" stance as nothing but a feeling of hatred.

At first these images were shared as propaganda material by the "no" camp, but when the effect they created began to provide more grounds for "yes," those conducting the "no" campaign began to give a little help to those who want to say "no" so that they could express their stance better. A prompter service is being offered from beside the camera to those speaking to the camera in street interviews, and what they should say is being read to them thoroughly. This too is an interesting scene entered into the record during the campaign.

But this scene is the most meaningful expression of the fact that those who say "no" cannot offer any reasonable ground. They say "one man," "dictatorship," "national sovereignty," and nothing else. No technical information is circulated about how all this relates to the 18-article amendment package.

By contrast, on the "Yes" side there are of course those who want this package only because President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants it, and a large number of people who probably aren't much interested in the content.

In any case, no one else could have brought this package to the agenda or carried this process this far. This is an indisputable fact.

However, I can say that serious motivation for "Yes" has formed in the field, that the people I went to talk to, met and had the chance to debate with are not at all unfamiliar with the subject, and that an interest of ever-increasing intensity is forming day by day.

Especially what I witnessed at the "New Presidential System and New Constitution Symposium through the Eyes of Youth" organized by the Metropolitan Municipality in Malatya was the kind of thing that would make me study sociology again.

The symposium brought together 500 young people from 81 provinces, and with their participation continuing with the same excitement and vitality for two days, it opened the issues related to the Constitutional Amendment to discussion in all their dimensions.

At the meeting, in which Minister of Justice Bekir Bozdağ, Minister of Customs and Trade Bülent Tüfekçi, AK Parti Deputy Chairs Öznur Çalık and Abdülhamit Gül, AK Parti MPs Markar Esayan, Orhan Miroğlu and Mustafa Şentop, as well as Chief Advisors to the President Mehmet Uçum, Özlem Zengin and Can Paker, Maarif Foundation President Birol Akgün, and many people whose names I cannot mention took part as speakers, what was more important than what each speaker said, and more noteworthy to me, was the young people's intense interest and participation.

Let me put it this way: in response to my 15-20 minute talk alone, more than fifty questions came, each more incisive than the last, well versed in the substance, not at all indifferently submissive, but probing. Roughly that many questions came to every speaker, and all the speakers tried to answer these questions.

Of course, we were able to answer only as many of the questions as our time allowed, but I personally stated that I would keep the rest as a meaningful document of this process and that these questions would give direction to my talks in other settings.

It was a scene that explained to me in the most striking way exactly why we should not fear the young. I later realized that this was a scene that somehow repeated everywhere we went. At panels on the same subject held the next day in Siirt and the day after in Adıyaman, the questions from the young again showed me the reality that we are now facing an entirely new generation of youth.

I don't know whether the letters Y, X, Z are enough to describe this youth, but I understand that Kılıçdaroğlu is badly afraid of this youth.

He shows his fear by making merciless distortions about the package. Like whistling while passing a graveyard, he tries to suppress his fear and says,

"They (the AK Parti members) want 18 for their own children, to keep them out of the military and make them MPs. Or are they going to make the grocer's, the worker's, the teacher's children MPs? Noooo!"

Thus he displays the lowest-level stance toward this change, which has a thoroughly solid sociological ground.

Thank God it was again the AK Parti that had earlier lowered the age of eligibility to be elected MP from 30 to 25, and all the names under 30 who were elected MPs right after that change are there for all to see. None of them is the son of an MP, a minister or a prime minister. All of them are sons of workers, grocers or teachers. Here are Mustafa Akış, Mehmet Muş, Fatih Şahin, Abdurrahim Boynukalın, Mehmet Algan, and others.

While campaigning against the provision lowering the age of eligibility to 18, Kılıçdaroğlu is also straying onto a dangerous path of incitement.

He is trying to sow sedition among, to divide and fragment, this nation that in the July 15 process, MP and politician and ordinary citizen, young and old, Turk, Kurd and Arab, united in putting their lives on the line for this country.

In doing so he overlooks, of course, this: the MPs of this country too showed, under the Assembly that was bombed that day, that they were ready to give their lives. Kılıçdaroğlu needs to understand this by now.