Does the opposition know what it wants?

The way the ongoing arrangement to extend compulsory education to 12 years has been debated (in fact, not debated) has once again brought out all the ailments of society and politics, but especially of the so-called left. For the Kemalist left, if the matter at hand is education, everything else is a detail, because in the Republican era its whole reason for being has been education.

While, with "education is a must," squeezing the whole society into the narrowest worldview and disciplining it, what kind of shallowness it has condemned society to with this is well known. What kind of philosophy, what kind of architecture, what kind of politics, what kind of technique has come out of an education system made utterly uniform under the name of Tevhid-i Tedrisat, what kind of democratic personality and what type of person with what kind of work ethic? Not even a proper accounting of this has been made, because that area still cannot be touched; the situation is a complete disaster.

The attempt to extend compulsory education to 12 years is, in the end, a technical matter. It needs to be debated by education scientists, pedagogues, psychologists, sociologists. Taken at that level, it looks like a subject that does not require great storms to be raised over it. Yet, as in many debates, and perhaps more than all of them, this subject suddenly becomes completely detached from its content and turns into a full-blown field of symbolic struggle.

But still, when one looks at the heart of the matter, at the moment when the parties' demands or objections crystallize, an interesting situation emerges. On one side there is a conservative government that wants compulsory education extended to 12 years and thereby, in fact, takes a step toward the contemporary world, and to some extent a Turkish-nationalist, conservative opposition that supports it; on the other side there is a left and a Kurdish-nationalist opposition that vehemently opposes tampering with this length of education but in the end favors state education all the more.

What else is there?

On one side there is a government proposal that, by making the 12 years of education gradual from the first 4 years on, proposes to give people more freedom of choice. In doing so, this government actually wants to take education out of being a field in which it alone has a say and to broaden the field of choice of parents or students. And the opposition objects to this. Thus it rejects the freedom of choice that the government offers to bind itself as well. In the end it objects to the diversification of the education system under the government's control and to its offering of choice.

How strange is this? If it were even slightly likely that it would come to power tomorrow, it might be understandable that the CHP is objecting to the pruning by the AK Parti today of a governing prerogative that it might be thinking of using in its own term in power. Yet in the foreseeable future there is no such possibility either.

That is, to put the strangeness a bit more clearly, the system being introduced does not impose a particular education on anyone by force; on the contrary, it abolishes the existing imposing system. The CHP people, the KESK people, even the BDP people, on the other hand, end up asking for an imposition on themselves as well. The eight-year uninterrupted, inflexible education is a complete system of imposition, and they want it to continue even if it is through the AKP. Does the opposition really know what it wants?

And what do the trade-unionist masses pouring into the streets in the name of the left or of democratic demonstration want? On what occasion are they showing, probably, a harsher and more furious opposition than they have shown since the 27 April process? That in all this time they ask nothing for themselves or for their own members is a sufficiently instructive situation. They ask for no right, no freedom for themselves, but they want the restriction, and the continued restriction, of others' rights and freedom.

Let this situation into which the trade-union struggle has fallen be a lid on the left politics of Turkey.

The furiousness they display in doing this is very frightening. For this furiousness is not the furiousness of someone claiming a right for himself, which could be met with understanding, but an expression of indigestion at the freedom of another. A destructive, fascistic furiousness. The same fascistic furiousness was present at the Republic rallies.

The masses at the Republic rallies, too, did not want anything for themselves, but wanted something against the existence of others. They wanted others' freedom to be restricted, others to be deprived of certain rights. They did not want someone whose wife wears a headscarf to be president. This discrimination was expressed within a democratic form, as a rally, as a demonstration. The expression of this wish in such an insistent and furious form shows that a real threat to the level of democratization and human rights is still alive.

This wretchedness displayed in the name of the left in Turkey shows that nothing has changed in the CHP either, and that, unfortunately, it will not be easy for it to change. The more the CHP displays this indigestion, the more the AK Parti raises its votes. Then it has to turn around and read all these events in reverse:

What would it be?

That the AK Parti plotted 27 April together with the military in order to raise its own votes.

Once it comes to that point, everything really does look reversed. For example, there will surely be people who read today thus from the results of the next election: "Kılıçdaroğlu and KESK worked very hard for the AK Parti."