Necessary reminders on democracy, coups and elections

Since 1950, elections, which have created a genuine channel of participation in governance for citizens through free and fair voting, have been a field of complete disappointment for those sections accustomed to ruling the people against the people. That is why the helpless and inadequate but equally ambitious elitists of democracy have resorted to other ways of realizing their own desire for power.

As democracy's ordinary paths seemed too tiring and hopeless to them, they scorned democracy together with all its consequences. Their rage at a democracy that pours their own immense, lofty, high-quality, elite votes and the votes of the shepherd and the villager into the same ballot box has never subsided. With this rage, the paths of the coup have always seemed more attractive, easier, than collecting the people's votes through elections.

In the days of February 28, we heard in abundance the speeches of jurists, professors and rectors recklessly explaining that even if 99 percent of the people elected these reactionaries, the remaining 1 percent elite stratum would not hesitate to step in to defend the Republic. In the period leading up to the April 27, 2007 e-memorandum process, the head of YÖK himself was saying things to the effect of "they somehow took the government through elections, but now they have set their eyes on the state, we will not leave the state to them." For this, the army was being invited to duty.

They were well aware that what they had done and would do was against the people. They knew they had no counterpart among the people. But they also thought the people had been deceived. They showed how much they had embraced democratic culture by saying, "these are the strange workings of democracy; if you ask the people, they will take this country and hand it over either to the drummer or to the zurna player."

At best, democracy was a system that needed an occasional "wheel balancing," that often broke down and veered off the road. But it was not, and could not be, a thing that could go on forever, this balancing carried out through a conventional coup. In the end, the level of awareness rose that a coup, under whatever pretext, whether in the name of protecting democracy or the republic, is a crime, an immoral crime and one hostile to democracy. That is why we also saw "postmodern" coups, those that came up as "wheel balancing," sometimes hidden behind mass street actions and rallies.

April 27 used the Republic rallies, rallies in the squares that are, in appearance, one of democracy's most important instruments, as an instrument leading to a coup. The Gezi events were a series of mass actions very easily seen as a democratic reaction all over the world. It was also exploiting a strong ground of legitimacy in the Arab Spring conjuncture. In the end it was perceived as a coup attempt advancing step by step through highly unusual ways.

But the most insidious and dangerous of coups was undoubtedly the one that comes through the judiciary, especially by accusing the government of corruption. In fact, the December 17-25 coup model is a form of coup frequently applied in many parts of the world, and when the coup takes place, no one even gets a feeling that it is a coup. There are still, in many parts of the world, administrations in office through many coups that took place without anyone's soul hearing of them.

Coups, in the end, cover all attempts to seize power by stepping outside purely democratic means. The consortia and alliances formed for a coup, have no doubt, see elections too as an opportunity on which they will spend all their efforts. They may succeed or fail, but let no one think they will leave this field empty.

Since the ballot box is always democratic politics' strongest argument, its strongest trump card, emphasizing the people's will, the opportunity that elections in Turkey provide for changing power, politics and the general political situation, while it makes the citizen strong, has never ceased to be a field that whets the appetite of anti-democratic forces. Even if they cannot count the votes that enter the ballot boxes as they wish and reflect the result as they wish, we can see all kinds of activity from them in managing the process up until the votes enter the ballot box.

In the June 7, 2015 elections, that is, one year before the July 15 coup attempt and a year and a half after December 17-25, what they tried was nothing other than a coup by way of an election. The perpetrators of December 17-25 and of the July 15 coup attempt did everything they could with all their power to influence the June 7 election results. At home and abroad, with conventional or social media machines, with international lobbies or with the incredible alliance networks they entered into in Turkey, they tried to influence the outcome, and to some extent they succeeded. Who can forget that in that election the HDP organized an election campaign far more intense and far more comprehensive than even the ruling AK Parti, one hard to believe? We know the state holds very important information about that campaign's sources of financing.

Of course no one can characterize elections as coups. After all, elections are occasions on which the democratic will manifests itself. But we have always seen, many times before elections, in coup attempts, the forced and organized mind that brings the alliances together on the road to those elections.

The HDP leg of this alliance, with the style of politics it represents, performs a function peculiar to itself as one of the most important obstacles to the development of Turkey's democracy for years. Even to ask by what coercive initiative this alliance, which has never held back from competing with them on equal terms through elections and which now loudly complains to all and sundry that Erdoğan and AK Parti, who have entered this race, are "dictators," came together tells us a great deal.

The force that brought together extreme Kurdish nationalism with extreme Turkish nationalism, and both with the CHP, with the Saadet Party, with figures who did politics in AK Parti for years, cannot of course be each one's own inner motivation.

We have seen this motivation, whose source is not very obscure, even more openly in the coup attempts. Are we now to ignore their ambition to obtain through elections what they tried again and again and failed to obtain there?