From İnce to ince, let there be talk and let the bag fill

I wonder what effect the words uttered during election campaigns have on the overall development of political discourse?

I ask this question sincerely. Above all, not in order to sit down and seriously discuss, or for me to emphasize as well, the nonsense of certain people whose words during this campaign put absurd comedy texts to shame.

For example, does it have a positive function, in that politicians care about being accountable to the people, about looking good to them, and therefore about understanding them and adjusting themselves to the level of their understanding?

The politician is dying to say everything he thinks the people will receive well. This, particularly in the presidential election, is in my view an extremely positive development that forces political discourses to enter an organic relationship with the people. It also shows how beneficial the arrangement for the people's electing the President actually is.

From the times when the head of the republic did not need to take into account any of the people's feelings, beliefs, traditions or language, and therefore looked down on his people, to these times…

Muharrem İnce, for example, is covering great distances in this process, subtly, to guess what the people want and to be able to adjust himself to it. That İnce, who filed complaints about teachers with a "reactionary" blacklisting because they took their students to pray, today presents himself as the guarantor of the Imam-Hatip schools, and has come to the point of saying that the headscarf issue is now over and closed and that no one would have the power to ban it, is a result of this democratization process. How sincere he is is of course another matter.

In my view, bringing out what they said in the past should be done not in order to expose the real faces of Muharrem İnce or the other candidates, but in order to show how much the presidential system has educated these politicians.

Thanks to the AK Parti, and long life to Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, how well you have put everyone, from Kılıçdaroğlu to Muharrem İnce, through a democracy course! Let those who wish continue to call him a dictator. Who knows, that too may be a part of this course…

Only, those who take this democracy course from our President do not always fully perceive or properly understand the voices coming from the people. Taking the people seriously and being one with the people does have to do with an advanced democratic consciousness and level, but there is also a fine line that separates this level from populism. If one has not passed through the democracy course sincerely, this fine line is not distinguished, and in trying to be close to the people, for the sake of three or five votes from the people, it reduces a person to the rank of a political peddler who has no backbone at all and nothing at all to say to the people, who says "we have whatever you want."

In all the candidates other than Erdoğan, in their rush to grab votes, a shabbiness peculiar to a political peddler is immediately noticeable. They have no stance of their own, no politics of their own left. Akşener, who comes from the Ülkücü tradition, winks at the HDP supporters. Karamollaoğlu, who comes from the Milli Görüş line, sends warm, very warm messages both to the CHP members who made this nation live through Turkish-language adhans, the May 27s, the February 28s, the headscarf bans, and to the murderers of Yasin Börü. Besides, there is no discourse left that İnce has not thinned out to the breaking point. In fact, the pose in which he held the Alif upside down while trying to show how much Quran he knew also completely broke his standing.

Now, in light of the question I asked at the beginning, should we be glad about this development or worried?

Was the state that the course they took while moving to the presidential system put them in going to be, in part, a nihilistic state in which everything loses its meaning, no one's word carries any value, and words are squandered just to fill the bag?

Of course, in this atmosphere, the likelihood is also very high that, in trying to keep pace with the people, by dangerously misunderstanding the people, and in trying to be populist, they will open the gates of fascism.

POPULIST INCITEMENT AGAINST THE SYRIANS

What Muharrem İnce and Meral Akşener say about the Syrians, for example. Both, proceeding from the impression that the people are actually disturbed by the Syrians, have fallen into a rush to rid the people of the Syrians. This is a path that must never, whatever happens, be taken in an election campaign. The populism ventured upon at this point throws you straight to the shores of fascism.

"I have neither a special hatred nor a special love for Assad. We must not move from Brother Assad to Bloody Assad," says İnce. As if we were the ones who moved from that point to this. When we were on good terms with Assad, at least there was no massacre in Bashar's record. Then there was. He killed 1 million of his own people. And 12 million have been displaced, inside or outside the country. How will İnce normalize relations with someone who has committed so many crimes? Without giving any explanation on this, he just speaks empty words that fill the bag.

İnce goes after the subject with an even more dangerous discourse: "4.5 million Syrians live in Turkey. During the Bayram 72 thousand people go, stay a week, ten days, then come back. If you can go and stay 10 days and come back, then stay there permanently. Why do you come, are you coming on holiday? So your conditions are suitable. After you go, I will shut the door and you will stay. Is this a soup kitchen? The people of my country are unemployed," he says.

This is precisely the language of inciting the people. From whatever side you look, it is racism, from whatever side you look, it is ignorant. Is it the people of Turkey who want from İnce these expressions that have no share in humanity? No. İnce engages in incitement by dropping a watermelon rind into the mind of a segment prone to xenophobia, with these words. What he is doing is, from whatever side you look, a crime against humanity.

Frankly, once the reality of being a refugee has emerged, such situations naturally occur. Conditions permit, and they go and come. The EU and UN refugee rights also have a very clear place for this under the heading of "family reunification," and, to tell the truth, after the agreement with the EU Turkey has deviated somewhat from these standards on this matter. That is, on family reunification we must cover much more ground, which would be the subject of İnce's incitements, and we must grant more opportunities to the refugees in our country.

Precisely today, in Paris, in the Migration Committee that I am attending at PACE, such a report on Syrian refugees is being discussed. The report says that more EU countries, but at the same time Turkey, should observe refugees' family reunification rights more.