What is Turkey saying to whom now, and who understands what?

However we see ourselves, however intensely we live the tensions of democratic politics within ourselves, and however much we may at times look down on ourselves while living through them, Turkey today continues to play its destined, effective role for the world.

Turkey, in the Arab Spring process, which can be counted as the change of the century in the Middle East, inspired peoples essentially by doing nothing, merely by being itself, merely by advancing on its own path. What the peoples who poured into the streets in the Arab Spring were looking for was freedom, dignity and bread. The tales that their own rulers, who for a century had worked like colonial agents restricting their freedoms, told them collapsed all at once with the independent, dignified stance that Turkey, in the person of Erdoğan, displayed against the world system.

Erdoğan's "one minute" outburst at the Israeli President showed, in a way that could no longer be hidden, that the Israel-centered international order imposed on their countries was not a fate and that another way was possible. It also showed that if their own leaders bowed to this order, it was not out of necessity but only because their own leaders had no ties whatsoever with their own peoples.

The most obvious slogan of the Arab peoples who poured into the streets was "the people want" (ash-sha'b yurid). The people "wanted" the fall of the regime, the establishment of a new regime, freedom, dignity, independence, good, honest and transparent government. How strange it is for today's Arab states that a people should want something is perhaps not so easy to explain to certain people in Turkey or in the world. A people that wants something?! What is this?! Who are the people, that they should want something? What is this thing you call the people? Let them sit where they sat.

This is exactly the mindset of those who launched the Counter-revolution process that sought to turn into winter the spring of the Arab peoples, which lasted a total of about three years. This mindset is perhaps the crude but truest expression of the mindset standing against demands for democracy in the Islamic world today. Wherever there is a democratic development, it brings the dirtiest methods into play to strangle and destroy these developments and to bring to the heads of those peoples, once again, the dirtiest rulers loyal only to itself.

In Libya, for example, there is a reconciliation government and a national dialogue that are functioning, for better or worse. After a 40-year dictator, the people are experiencing for the first time the experience of governing themselves and the process of establishing state institutions. If it succeeds, it could be a very dangerous model that would set an example for others too. The BAE, together with the coup-maker Sisi, is trying to strangle this popular will by staging a coup there with the weapons it has given into the hands of a former general called Haftar. It is doing a far cruder, far more indecent version of what it did in Egypt. Imagining that it has handed itself a certificate called "war on terror," the only thing it is trying to do with Haftar, whom it has had commit the most egregious terror, is to slaughter democracy at the very start of its road.

Finding European backers like France, whose eyes see neither human rights nor democracy nor war crimes whenever oil and dollars are involved, is in any case not hard for them.

That neither Europe nor the ABD has any concern or aim such as the democratization of the Arab-Islamic world was clearly seen, especially in the Arab Spring process. All they think about is keeping the peoples and resources of these countries under control. In securing this control they can sometimes show their ugliest faces. In Libya, in a way that means nothing other than swooping down on Libya's resources, they can enter into complicity with someone like Haftar, who is destined to be tried in an international criminal court for the war crimes he has already committed.

Seen from this angle, the news and commentary in the European media, as well as in the Egyptian, BAE and SA media, after Turkey's 31 March local elections and the repeated Istanbul elections of 23 June, is truly a cause for celebration for them.

Because the Istanbul elections were won by the CHP, they will almost put on bells and dance. They greet the CHP's victory as "the end of Erdoğan" and regard it as good news. We are not surprised at all, of course.

The outcomes in Turkey's domestic politics that they see and accept as the manifestation of the people's will, whether in favor of the AK Parti or of Erdoğan, are perceived, especially by the Arab media, as glad tidings of deliverance from the Turkish model, and therefore from the possibility of democracy. But it is in itself tragicomic that in Turkey too they have pinned all their hopes on the functioning of a democratic process and have hung on an outcome reached precisely because democracy is functioning fully.

Of course they are not calling the CHP's victory or the AK Parti's loss of Istanbul "the end of democracy" and expressing their joy under that heading. But they know very well that for them the AK Parti is the name of democracy in the Islamic world, and what really excites them in its losing is nothing other than the prospect of "the end of democracy."

These joys, along with their Western allies, show nothing but their shamelessness, of course. Perhaps the AK Parti lost the administration of some cities in Turkey, but democracy did not lose; on the contrary, thanks to democracy winning, the AK Parti's gain was also great. Because what brought the AK Parti into being in Turkey was democracy, that is, the will of the people they try to strangle in their own countries. Today, because the same people's will decided for someone other than the AK Parti to run Istanbul, neither Turkey nor Istanbul nor the AK Parti loses. But those who continue to lose are, again, themselves, because they have not drawn the real lesson they should draw from this beautiful Turkish model.

In these countries that trust the people's will, democracy and elections for the AK Parti to lose in Turkey, when was the last time a real election actually took place? An Arab youth asks the BAE and SA media, which greeted with great enthusiasm the development of the elections in Turkey against the AK Parti: "Really, when was the last time you held an election? Ah, as far as I remember, a delegation of yours with representatives from all your tribes chose a man, and they chose him to kill the prophet who had come to revive them."

With the model that inspires the Arab peoples and motivates them to claim their own will, Turkey on 23 June arrived not at the end of this road but at its most striking point.

That a party in opposition to the AK Parti, which has been in power alone for 17 years, has been able to win Istanbul and Ankara has proven that democracy in Turkey is functioning in a real sense and with great maturity.

So, there is now more reason for some to be worried.