The leaders' meeting is not only the leaders' meeting

The abnormal interest the media showed in the meeting between Prime Minister Erdoğan and CHP leader Kılıçdaroğlu deserves to be compared with the interest shown in the meetings between the presidents of the USSR and the US in the Cold War years. What ultimately makes the meetings of two political leaders so interesting is without doubt related to the way both political leaders, indeed all political leaders in Turkey in general, do politics. They produce so much tension when speaking to each other in front of the media that even the possibility of their coming together can become news.

Our political leaders have long behaved not like leaders of two political parties but like two war commanders with no common values and no good account of each other other than destroying one another. This being so, it is hard for them to come together, and even if they do, there is no meaningful context or ground left for them to talk about.

The harsh speeches of political leaders can in fact sometimes even be considered quite useful in terms of expressing the feelings and sensitivities of the bases they represent and soothing them, thereby reducing tension. But generally leaders, going beyond representing and voicing these concerns, with appetite, are more inclined to provoke and incite those concerns, because this looks politically more profitable. In doing so, instead of reducing the tension at the base, they increase it further and cause insurmountable distances to form between segments of society.

While on the one hand shouting at the top of his voice and delivering speeches on "national unity and solidarity," he forgets that the people he accuses of being "divisive" are, like himself, a party to this politics, and severs every emotional bond with them. In saying "divisive," he is in fact himself dividing the nation.

Essentially, politics is a field in which different views are defended in the most assertive manner and dispute is the rule, and agreement the exception. That is why leaders' coming together is not something we should get too used to. But what we should equally not be accustomed to, and what unfortunately has today become almost the norm of politics, is that politics is seen not as a field of competition within legitimate limits but as a field of hostility in which every kind of trick, scheme and alliance against one another is deemed fitting. One promises that when he comes to power his opponents will have to flee Turkey, the other that he will send them to the High Tribunal. One calls the other a traitor to the homeland because of a policy he pursues, the other is no less, pointing to the mountains as their address.

An environment in which these words are uttered makes politics itself impossible. Fine, let us of course not expect those who pursue different politics to hold romantic conversations of reconciliation and brotherhood with one another; indeed, let everyone stand to the end behind the thesis they defend, insist on it, develop their thesis further, but we also have the right to expect political discourse to be kept a bit more within the bounds of responsibility.

In this respect, one should not expect the meeting between the prime minister and CHP leader Kılıçdaroğlu to produce a result in which views and attitudes in politics are abandoned and a common stance is substituted, but at least we can hope for an atmosphere in which views are truly discussed. One should not think in advance that no meeting is of any use. Human contacts always have an effect, because a human being is by definition a being who exists by interacting and cannot remain indifferent to any influence. Kılıçdaroğlu's approach to the problem after his meeting with Erdoğan, for example, does not appear different from his approaches before entering the meeting. He announced with an air of triumph that he had read to the Prime Minister's face his foresight that the essence of the problem is bread and jobs and that if employment opportunities are created the terror problem will be solved too. But even in this statement, it was counted that within 11 minutes he referred to Erdoğan as "Mr. Prime Minister" fully 27 times. This must be a natural consequence of face-to-face human contact itself. Moreover, I do not think at all that the effect is limited to this.

I wish that at this very stage the bridges with both the MHP and the BDP were not completely burned. One must know that the meetings of Bahçeli with Erdoğan, and of Demirtaş with him, will not remain limited to a meeting between leaders. It will surely have a reflection among the public, and the common gain of this reflection for all sides will be that politics is conducted on a more reasonable and higher ground of understanding. Let everyone again say what they know, but there is anyway no benefit to anyone from everyone listening only to what he himself says. Everyone needs someone else to listen in order to be able to tell their own troubles.

The clearest result revealed by the "otherness" research that I personally conducted for Eğitim Bir-Sen, the results of which will soon be announced by the union officials, is that almost everyone in Turkey is concerned only with his own troubles, and a strange similarity exists in ignoring the troubles of others. So much so that it would be fitting to declare "otherness" the "common identity" of everyone. Our ears are blocked to one another because we are badly stuffed into our own worlds. That is why nobody's struggle for rights yields results. Many things can begin by opening up to one another. That is why one should not take the meeting of leaders lightly.