A guide to understanding the 42 per cent

The regional distribution of the referendum results puts the opposition through some taxing exercises on the map of Turkey. We are faced with a picture in which the whole Mediterranean and Aegean coastal strip is painted red while the rest of the country is painted green or blue. When we take this picture as a basis without going into detail, we get caught in a deluge of hasty assessments to the effect that there are no AK Parti supporters at all on the coastal strip, or that in the other regions there are no supporters of other parties at all.

Let us admit that the formation on the map has a side that gives an opportunity for allegorical associations. In one place it gives some people an opportunity for a discourse of pressure or victimhood, on the grounds of having been pushed toward the coasts, while in another context the coastal strips are presented as evidence of their modernity on the basis of their lifestyle... It was even presented by the CHP leader as the initial stage of a political conquest that would begin from the coasts and spread to Anatolia. A counter-reaction to this analogy was given, to the effect that, on the contrary, the CHP has been chased down to the coasts and is on the verge of leaving this country altogether. Of course, there is no error in a simile.

If this allegorism is to be continued, it is worth listening to Etyen Mahçupyan, who in my view draws the association between the "sea" and "foreigners" best: "Those who treat the people of this land as foreigners will themselves be driven by that very people, as 'native foreigners,' toward the margins of politics, and if they insist on resisting, let no one doubt it, they will be poured away into the darkness of our memory."

The fact that the whole coastal strip stood on the "no" front has set the Prime Minister in motion. Rather than the 58 percent who voted "yes," he has set his research units to work to understand the concerns of the 42 percent who did not. For a political party this is actually an ordinary job. Nothing could be more natural than their trying to understand why those who did not vote for them did not. That it is done only by the party that gets the most votes, and only by that party, is what is really strange. Perhaps it is a situation that explains why all the elections held since its founding have been won only by the AK Parti.

Yet the other parties, especially the CHP, have far more need to carry out this questioning. Because the time has come and gone for it to ask why it has been pushed all the way to the coastal strips and to produce new policies. Moreover, in the past, even when it did not win elections in some way, it could obtain an unjust gain from power thanks to its deep influence over the army or the judiciary. Yet on the legal ground formed after the referendum, this sphere of influence too has been narrowed considerably.

The CHP has an acute need, and an ever greater one, to conduct these studies. It needs strong perception management, true, but before perception management it would do well to set its own house in order. Nothing can improve the perception about you more than your sincerity and good performance. A perception management carried out only through promises and rhetoric, without making any fundamental change, will not succeed.

As for the matter of the 42 percent. There are a few very basic truths that need to be known on this too. First, democracy is not the name of a regime in which all votes are taken by one party alone. You need to know that there are segments whose votes you will never be able to get, even if you perform flawlessly. Above all, one must not turn the goal of "taking" all the votes, all the representative institutions, into an obsession. Second, we need to question the myth that the voting behavior of the segments that do not vote for the AK Parti stems from fear or anxiety about the AK Parti. If these people's voter attitudes were really determined by fear, it would be easy. Since in the eight-year process there has been no development that would justify any of their fears, it should now be understood from the continuation of these fears that the problem is not "fear" or "anxiety."

The truth is that it concerns the most basic nature of politics, and one should not dwell on it too much. The nature of politics is the irreducible existence, beyond a certain point, of different political positions. This requires focusing more on feelings such as love and hatred, friendship and enmity, than on fear and anxiety.

In İzmir, Thrace, or the places where the "no" vote was high in the referendum, there is no situation requiring people to fear conservatives. As can be understood from the distribution of votes anyway, those who ought to be afraid there are those who are in a minority position there. Yet those who express fear or anxiety in these places are rather expressing their antipathies and hatred by this means. On the coastal strip, the distribution of votes is determined to a great extent by anti-Kurdish sentiment or anti-conservative sentiment because of the migrations received. And the votes of the rest are cast to a great extent as the response of the population formed by migrations to this. This in fact reports not so much a fear of the different on the coastal strips as a frightening exclusionism displayed toward the different. This is the subject that really needs to be dwelt upon, and after a serious and comprehensive analysis, this situation requires a fundamental social and political communication campaign.