The language of delivery against the populism of "I promise you"

In a democracy, elections are the citizen's greatest power, his greatest opportunity to take part in governance and to be a partner in it. And Turkey is perhaps the country in the whole world where citizens can show the most advanced level of participation in claiming this power, this opportunity, this right.

I do not know whether there is another country where election turnout reaches the 90 percents. Even in countries considered advanced democracies, turnout falls below the fifty percents. In some Middle Eastern societies where elections are for show, it is far lower still.

In the first, the lowness of the level at which people take part in elections comes from the thought that not much will change with the election results, that since the system is already settled, politics will not affect people's lives much. This makes people somewhat indifferent to governance. Those who point to this dimension present it not as a negative for advanced democratic countries but as a level of democracy. Is it really so? In fact we cannot quite tell.

But in the second, that is, in the Middle Eastern regimes where participation is very low, we know that what keeps people from taking part in elections is the helpless despair that elections will change nothing. Whomever they vote for, since the counting of votes is not transparent, there is of course no point in taking part in the vote charade. Anyway, the existing ruling regime has prepared the result it wants long in advance and is only waiting for the election date to pass in order to announce it. That is why in such countries we can come across examples where turnout rates fall even below ten percent.

In Turkey, free and fair elections have been very well established since at least 1950. There is no chance of anyone tampering with the election results. Even in times of coups, when the ballot boxes set up produced results the coup-makers did not want, the coup-makers were forced to accept these results as legitimate data, even if at times they obstructed by other means the politics those legitimate data gave rise to.

But in the end, through elections, those who govern can change, policies can change, the circulation of certain social strata can find different channels, and new fields of opportunity can emerge. This reality makes even the most ordinary citizen very strong in Turkey. It makes him a partner, an owner and an actor of the state. Even politics of a metaphysical fixity thought to be inflexible can be made flexible, in time, in the atmospheres of negotiation that election campaigns open up.

Of course this possibility that elections provide to the citizen has always created a tempting situation for those who could find no chance to come to power in Turkey by any way other than coups. Elections require being in dialogue and mutual understanding with the people. They do not tolerate the stubbornness of pursuing politics against the people, even if supposedly for the people, in a Jacobin spirit. But Jacobinism is not the only problem. That is, when you realize you cannot get from the people the votes you want for a world you have designed in your mind, the concessions you must make can drag you into the vise of populism.

Once the "whatever anyone gives, five more" auction mentality begins, it starts to become very hard to restore politics' balance.

Looking at the promises of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Meral Akşener, it is seen that they recognize no limits in this regard. They are not in power anyway and their hands are not under the stone. Saying "sana söz," they promise that they will give everyone who asks whatever they ask for, right now. They see nothing to lose in giving unlimited empty promises. For if people do not believe and do not vote, there will be no environment in which they would be called to account, since they were never able to carry out these empty promises anyway. And if people believe these wild words and vote, so what, they are under no obligation to keep their word anyway. Who will come after the election and ask them to account for anything? He who has bought the horse has passed Üsküdar.

They will not be the first populist politician to forget the next day after the election what they promised this people anyway. The aim is, anyway, by wheeling and dealing, to seize this power for a single day. What is targeted is to demolish Erdoğan and what he has done over twenty years. It is not even to build something new or to add something new on top of what has been done. To build the Süleymaniye you need a Sinan and, behind him, an accumulation of knowledge, craft and skill that took decades even to raise. But to demolish, two laborers and two pickaxes would be enough.

Populism is in fact one of democratic politics' greatest disadvantages, and to some extent its handicaps. Because it is very hard to compete with populist political language. It sells people, for free, dreams too ideal and utopian to be real. It snatches the ideals from there and sets them against today's realities. It puts forward a claim to represent those illusory utopian ideals through, again, a self-proclaimed miracle-working. This is a claim no one can object to, already illusory, already self-proclaimed, yet with the power of a satanic whisper able to hunt and seduce crowds living in a world of delusions.

Worse still is the irresponsibly immoral pressure that populist promises and the "sana söz" politics, with its hands not under the stone, exert on those in power.

Yet when the most absurd sides of the populism Kılıçdaroğlu displays in this process are set aside, it is instructive enough to see that even his promises fall far behind what the 21-year AK Parti government has actually done. A significant portion of what he promises is already government achievements that have been realized. On one side, an absurd "sana söz" populism based on unlimited, immoderate, irresponsible and immoral promises; on the other, a horizon of future promise falling far behind the current government's achievements.

By contrast, each of the services Erdoğan inaugurates every day now, each of the projects he announces as completed, is, by old standards, of a power and magnitude that could run a normal government for five or ten years. Each is a project and an opening that will actually build the world of the future, and that speaks for itself. These projects, the accumulation of 21 years, speak for themselves and say what they have to say. They show the world that is coming, and make promising by word unnecessary. Deeds showing that the construction of the future has long since begun.

And they are also running into an imperceptiveness that tries to dilute or cover these up with empty talk and eye-dazzling, with social media and watery humor illusions, even though its greatest difficulty displays itself like a miracle.