"Those who cannot make a barleycorn's progress" in a half-baked drama

The CHP's and Ekrem İmamoğlu's eager taking on of the role of the wronged party in response to the YSK's decision to renew the Istanbul elections was something expected, prepared and worked out in advance. Just as every step he took in the election campaign had been worked out beforehand.

Let us admit that İmamoğlu is very good material for an election campaign. Heading into an election, he adopts every posture he needs to according to the psychology of the voters and the requirements of the setting, slips with ease into every guise he must enter, and can put on every facial expression to suit his surroundings.

Let us also admit that this time his party and its chairman, giving up a great deal of themselves, removed themselves from the frame even though they were themselves the obstacle that might stand in the way of İmamoğlu's advance toward the goal. Kılıçdaroğlu, whose standing among Istanbul voters had hit its limits, withdrew from the campaign; the provincial chairwoman, a figure negative in every respect because of her close ties with the militant left, Gezi and PKK circles, tried not to appear in any frame with İmamoğlu. Thus a portrait of İmamoğlu emerged in the foreground, one of a plastic innocence, free of the CHP's anti-democratic past and of its cozy relationship with the HDP and with extremist militant left groups.

Even so, this material, it turns out, could produce results only through an incredibly well-organized operation, through tricks played at the ballot boxes. A strange situation arose in which the AK Parti could not win even though its votes had increased by a point and a half over even the previous election results. When, in a situation where the margin initially appeared as 30 thousand votes, it was discovered, merely by counting the invalid votes in some districts, that 17 thousand votes had been stolen from the AK Parti, sufficiently strong evidence emerged for a fraud affecting all the ballot boxes of Istanbul.

With such evidence at hand, no one can describe objecting to the result as not accepting the election results. Even with no other presumption, such a situation in itself gives rise to the right to object to the entire election results.

To place the AK Parti in the camp of "those who do not accept the ballot box" for exercising the most natural right of objection is the greatest of injustices. In the places where it lost the election, Ankara and Antalya first of all, and in many others, the AK Parti accepted with great maturity and respect, as a right, the decision that came out of the ballot box. Yet in the situation that arose in Istanbul, had the AK Parti not exercised its right of objection, it would have wronged its own voters and would have encouraged the desires to manipulate the ballot box with petty games when needed. What the AK Parti has done is not to refuse to accept the ballot box's result, but to save the honor of the ballot box, to cleanse a taint that has attached to the ballot box, as the situation has shown in all its clarity.

No one is being wronged in this matter. For İmamoğlu, there is an election that has not yet been won. The certificate of election taken from him was in fact a certificate that should not have been given to him until the objections were concluded. Because it was a neck-and-neck election, and the likelihood that the results of the objections in any district would affect the outcome was already very high. Moreover, in the disputed situation that has arisen, his rights are not being taken from him; the election is merely being renewed, and in this election he has the right to compete again, once more playing his roles of the conciliatory CHP member who is not like a CHP member, arm in arm with the HDP yet indifferent.

In contrast, his trying to write a picture of victimhood on the basis of the certificate having been taken from him today is nothing but excessive Western cunning. He thinks that with the victimhood he will draw from this picture he will again imitate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's path to success. Yet Erdoğan's victimhood, his stand, his struggle and the dominant forces facing him were all utterly real. Erdoğan came by struggling against capital circles that exploited its people and ruined its surroundings in an Istanbul sunk up to its neck in great problems, and within a short time wrote his epic. What story does İmamoğlu have to tell Istanbul today? What İmamoğlu can produce here can only be a half-baked drama, to make others laugh at himself.

Even the 11th President, Mr. Abdullah Gül, likening the YSK decision to the 367 decision cannot turn this half-baked drama into a full drama; let him not hope in vain. But the parallel Mr. Gül has drawn between his own story and İmamoğlu's story will go on record as an instructive event in every respect. There is no conscience that can make amends for attributing the manifest oppression of 367 to those who are today seeking their own rights.

In making this identification by saying "we have not advanced a barleycorn's length," Mr. Gül is in fact merely making it quite plain with whom he now weeps, with whom he laughs and with whom he walks the road. What it makes a person feel to walk the road with the executioners of devilish ideas who produced a stroke of genius like 367, I truly cannot know. May God keep us far from their path. That path is the path of heedlessness and misguidance. Every day we pray many times to stay away from that path.

We understand Mr. Gül prays as well, but at what point did he reach the stage of equating the AK Parti's quest for its right in a very clear situation with this misguidance done to himself? It is truly astonishing.

Let us repeat: the objection the AK Parti has made is the fulfillment of a responsibility toward its own voters and the segments it represents; it is the very act of standing up for the ballot box and the will of the people.

During the process of Abdullah Gül's election as President, to the whisperings of the very segments for whom he weeps today, urging that the AK Parti withdraw its candidacy, merely in the name of social consensus, despite the strong social support the AK Parti had, I had said, "There is no humility in representation." You may be as humble as you like (indeed, of course you should be humble; who but the ignorant is arrogant, who but the foolish is haughty?), but you cannot renounce, on behalf of the people you represent, their rights.

Those who elected you, those who trusted you, expect an upright leadership that will defend your rights to the end. Everyone knows how humble our President is in his personal relations, but the most important thing that gives him the power of representation is that he stands upright on behalf of the people he represents, that he does not hand over or sacrifice the rights he represents to others because of his own personal complexes. It is this capacity of his for representation that keeps the popular support behind him constant and strong.