Hope is the bread of the bewildered politician

We are holding the first second-round election in our history in a presidential election. In fact, in the election we first tried in 2018, Erdoğan did not leave the race to a second round, with nearly 52 percent of the vote. The margin was admittedly very small, and despite all the wearing effect of being in power over the intervening 5 years, he was again the one to breast the tape, and the total loss of votes appears to be only about 2 percent compared with 5 years ago.

This is by no means a failure; on the contrary, from whichever angle you look at the results, they show the opposition's great failure all the more clearly.

The intensity of the disappointment the opposition has experienced seems greater than the intensity of the 6 February earthquake. That is why, not by chance, with this shock, minds flash among the consequences of the 6 February earthquake, and fantasies come and go. With that disappointment the CHP supporters direct their rebellion at the earthquake survivors.

They had evidently pinned great hope on the earthquake survivors who had been rescued from under the rubble. A strange hope with no counterpart. Hope is the bread of the poor, the imagined vote reservoir of the bewildered politician. Why should being an earthquake survivor require people to vote for them? What kind of place in parsing could this question have? What kind of place in logic? What kind of place could this expectation have in the sociology of politics or in social psychology?

So on the way to the second round, instead of pulling itself together and looking for the answer to "where did we go wrong?" with more calm, analysis and self-criticism, it is trying to prepare by lashing out left and right in utter bewilderment, scraping up answers in the wrong places and hopes from places they will not come from.

Their state is like a student who sits around lazily for 5 years and tries to gather all his lessons a day or two before the exam. Like a student who, because the knowledge to be acquired over 5 years cannot be gathered in a day or two, cannot actually absorb or understand what he reads and hears, and whose silliness only grows a bit more from what he has read in haste.

For example, it tries to look for its losses not where it dropped them but where it can see. It goes and fastens on the refugee question. The CHP's discourse had no shortage of hostility toward Syrians or asylum seekers to begin with; it had a surplus. How many more votes of Sinan Oğan's might it grab if it raised the dose of anti-refugee hostility further? It seems ready to do whatever is necessary for this.

Let it do so. Yet its loss lies precisely there. In its showing, as a social democratic party, that for the sake of the most pragmatic politics possible it left no concession it would not make. No political actor with no principle on the road to power can ever inspire trust in the voter.

The analysis that the votes it lost less than a week before the election are in the field of nationalism is like a rote formula quickly seized on. Yet it is not the right answer to the question it is looking for. It lost its votes not because it neglected the field of nationalism too much, but because it did not put distance between itself and terror, because it did not shrink from forming an alliance on the march to power with a party intertwined with terror. Most important of all, the relationship between it and the mass of voters it addresses as its target audience is, instead of a sincere comradeship, an extremely cheap trade relationship.

A relationship resembling the meeting of the greedy and the fraudster has of course a limited possibility of leading to a political result. Indeed, it became clear on the very day after the first round how Kılıçdaroğlu was knocked flat on this road. In fact, looking at the form of trading he had undertaken before the election, we, from outside, were seeing and saying this much more clearly. This political trading is a very cheap trade. To grab the presidency there was an unlimited use of resources, to give whoever asked whatever he asked for. Of course no one could have such a resource. All of that resource was imaginary. Kılıçdaroğlu himself was not even dreaming up the dream; he was wandering within the limits of the imagination of those who demanded from him.

We said that the attitudes toward refugees and earthquake survivors are like two sides of the same coin in this respect. The way earthquake survivors were treated and the way refugees are approached are in fact reflections of the same political style. That the accounting of aid said to have been given to earthquake survivors is being questioned according to election results is in fact, from whichever angle you look at it, a political and humanitarian scandal.

Right after the earthquake we saw CHP municipalities begin immediately to evict from the accommodation places where they were sheltering earthquake survivors who had not voted for them. Meanwhile we saw plenty of CHP supporters who declared unlawful the rights of those who had voted for the AK Parti, who insulted them, accused them of ignorance and ingratitude. From their discourse you would think they had been the ones who gave people their provision. It is of course not surprising that this mindset, which demands such a great price for the tiny aid it has given its own citizens, issues bigger bills to asylum seekers who are no burden on them at all, but it is an attitude equally immoral and an indicator of baseness.

Yet neither the daily lives nor the budgets of the people who hate asylum seekers are affected in any way by asylum seekers. But they hate them, because they are racists, because they have no love of human beings, because they are ignorant enough to suppose that provision comes from themselves.

In contrast to the CHP supporters who displayed this attitude toward earthquake survivors who did not vote for them, yesterday Erdoğan, to the earthquake survivor Defne, which gave the entire Cumhur İttifakı only 8.5 percent and the Millet İttifakı 57.5 percent, opened a fully equipped hospital completed within three months, giving the message "whoever you vote for, you are our citizens to us, and all the services we have done are lawful and blessed for you regardless of your vote preferences."

As we said before, and as Erdoğan constantly repeats, this attitude is in fact the AK Parti's typical political style since its founding.

If the CHP wants to understand what it has lost, or what it has never been able to find, it can begin by studying this political style.