The opposition doing what is hard

As headway is made in the resolution process, a noticeable increase is observed in public support for the process. These observations are also reflected in statistics in opinion polls. The latest polls show that popular support for the resolution has reached the seventies in percentage terms. In Genar's latest poll, this rate appears to exceed seventy percent.

In fact, one should not find it strange that popular support for such a process is this strong. The spirit of the age generally expresses itself in the common orientations of the masses. After all, it is not strange in any way that the cause of stopping the flowing blood finds this level of support in an environment where the counter-campaign consists of nothing but some archaic feelings of revenge and blood feuds. On the contrary, it is very hard to lag behind a common reason that is taking shape increasingly irreversibly.

The upper leadership of the CHP and the MHP are doing this hard thing. They are written off as absent from the place where common reason, common sense and conscience gather. They manage to fall quite far from where the spirit of the age is emerging. The "the homeland is being divided" reaction with which they answer the call to stop the flowing blood only shows how alienated they are from what the society they live in is, how it manages or can manage to stay together, and in which direction this country is heading in the world we live in.

That is truly the problem. The MHP is very alien to this society on whose behalf it practises nationalism. As it becomes alienated from society, the definition of the nation that it tries to establish in reference to this society corresponds to no reality either. More plainly, the nation that the MHP envisions does not come out of the society we live in, which is why MHP nationalism falls into a complete void.

Granted, this problem is a chronic one for the MHP, not one that has emerged today. What is problematic is that, even though the plain realities lived through up to today have produced incredibly inspiring and instructive opportunities for this nationalism to develop itself, to know society better and to develop a nationalist discourse and politics suited to the spirit of this society, the MHP has wasted these opportunities. As Mümtazer Türköne's very apt expression has it, the fact that probably no one in the MHP who is in a position to produce and carry out this reasoning can enter through the MHP's door plays a large part.

In essence, in terms of nationalist policies or performance, there is no basis for any criticism the MHP could direct at the AK Parti today, and the AK Parti has also taken on all the updated policies that take more nationalist sensitivities into account. The resolution process is a formula for turning the country into a more tightly knit nation, and even further, into a strong country whose word carries more weight in the world. For example, the value and status Turkey has gained all over the world in the last ten years are targets that should normally be the MHP's concern, and moreover ones that have been realised not as rhetoric but by the AK Parti itself.

The other party that has managed to fall this far from the reality of Turkey in such an environment is the CHP. Deputy Chairperson Gülseren Onanç, who proceeded from the idea that support for the resolution process is quite high even in the party's own base, was forced to resign because of this finding and her efforts to actually rescue her party. Gülseren Onanç is someone with entrepreneurial and business-world experience. This is a trait that puts her at a considerable advantage in seeing what goes on around her. She does not watch and do politics from an ivory tower, and she sees very well the existence of strong support for the resolution process even in the CHP base, and what resisting it could cost her party. In fact, her approach having an influence in her party could rescue the CHP from the anachronism and ideologism it has been caught in and turn it into a political party in the true sense. But that was as far as it went.

By putting the resolution initiative into play, the AK Parti succeeds, with moves that best suit the nature of politics, in forming an alliance far beyond its own electorate. Thanks to this style of politics, which it first tried in its most effective form in the referendum, by gathering for its positive initiatives far more segments than its own electorate, it has broken politics' barren cycle that could not get beyond the team-supporter dimension. By doing so, it not only solves this great problem in which we have been floundering for years, but also softens and lowers the rigid and high walls of the political camps. We can say today that this will establish a lasting, new, but certainly positive style in Turkish politics.

In essence, as we have said before, the process we are going through is one that forces all parties to decide whether they will exist in the new era. In the future, no party will be able to sustain its survival as it is today, with its style of politics, and a significant part of the irritability is probably connected with this.