When he wins, the whole country always wins

Can a politics that says "When we win, no one will have lost" be the same as a politics that, after elections it has not yet won, promises its rivals nothing but revenge, and has no promise or goal other than toppling Erdoğan? In my view the key to the choice we face in this election lies hidden in this sentence. What do you promise those who will not vote for you, those who are not of you?

Setting aside the debate, contention and competition that are in the nature of the political process, what do you promise the "other," the other person, the opponent, should you win? In this environment where we hear from the opposition's tongue nothing but hatred, revenge, revanche and toppling Erdoğan, Erdoğan is able to say this word in the last lap of the election.

In fact, Erdoğan, in saying "When we win, no one will have lost," is not putting this forward as a new promise peculiar to the coming election. Everyone who puts his hand on his conscience will see that this word is the most concise expression of the political style of Erdoğan, who has governed the country as a continuously elected leader for 21 years.

Erdoğan has never, to this day, made his gain, together with those he has represented and whose votes he has received, be experienced as a loss by those who did not vote for him.

When he wins, the whole country wins. When he wins, it is not only conservative, religious, Sunni, male Turks, who are the bulk of his voters, who win. When he wins, Kurds win too, Alevis win too, the most pushed-around and downtrodden segments of the country win, the poor and the needy win too, workers win too, women win too, young people win too. Whether these winners vote for him or not, every time he wins he has continued to make them win as well. Far from punishing them for not voting for him, he has continued to make them win.

When he wins, it is true, there have been those who lose. But the losers were a very small minority, and what they lost was not basic human rights but only excessive privileges. When he wins, those who deny the identity of Kurds, who discriminate against them, who made them enemies of the rest of this country, and the dark war lobbies of the dark fight against terror that they kept going for years through this enmity, lose.

The perspectives, positions and comforts of people accustomed to looking down on the people and to living under tutelage have been disrupted. The coup-makers lost; they became unable to carry out coups as they used to. This of course increased their rage, and, as they always do, they shamelessly put forward nationalism, common values and Atatürk, with which they frighten people against imaginary dangers. The more they put these forward and wanted to seize their tutelage and privileges again, the more they continued to lose.

The interest lobbies, the rentiers accustomed to making money from usury and sucking the nation's blood, lost a great deal as Erdoğan kept winning. The more they lost, the more their cantankerousness grew, and they even undertook the marauding of Gezi. That today the most leftist votes come from the place where the country's richest and most prosperous people live is because of this.

The leftists who lose as Erdoğan wins are, in fact, people whose only political capital, with their discourse, is exploiting the feelings of the proletariat or the poor segments of society. Even they kept winning, kept living in their comfortable glass bubbles, as Erdoğan kept winning. From there they dreamed up dreams for the poor living in shacks, imagined people in need of onions, and took refuge behind cult illusions produced out of them.

By contrast, when Erdoğan won, he never for a single day went the way of punishing or avenging himself on his political rivals. On the contrary, throughout his time in power he continued to serve, without any distinction, not only those who supported him but also those who did not support him and who opposed him. One can look at the services given to the coastal regions and the peoples of the Southeast, which for the greater part of his time in power have always given most of their votes to the opposition. Let these services be compared with the services provided to the regions where the majority voted for him. No difference will be seen.

WHO WOULD GAIN FROM THE SYRIANS' LOSS?

Now, that everything the opposition promises should it win is negative, aimed at punishing, bringing down, toppling, sending away, prosecuting and making others lose, makes a real difference. It is enough to look at the most obvious one, the "sending the Syrians back" issue that things have come to.

The Syrian is in fact the name of an exam question in which all the positive values pertaining to humanity are to be displayed. What kind of gain can a miserly approach, which begrudges the Syrian who, with Erdoğan's winning, was able to find a place to take refuge and save his life, promise anyone by saying it will send the Syrians away? With the simplest, most childlike reaction it deserves: "does your strength reach the weak, the powerless, those who have taken refuge, guests?" With the anger and hatred they incite against them, they are not even aware that they have committed the lowest crime against humanity. To be aware, there must remain within them a consciousness, a reservoir of virtue pertaining to that level of humanity; evidently there is none.

Erdoğan, for his part, has already developed the formula that even if, in light of a host of considerations, the Syrians must go, they can be sent without abandoning them to death, again by making them gain as well. The construction of settlement areas in northern Syria, which has been under way for some time with funding from the Qatar Aid Fund, is already continuing. This is the most humane solution possible. Let those greedy misers, who begrudge what the Syrian eats and who take their pampered selfishness and avarice for conscious citizenship, not worry either: not a penny will go from their own taxes. May God, the Guarantor of provision, not make us dependent.

KURDS DO NOT DESERVE TO BE BELITTLED THIS MUCH

Ümit Özdağ's decision to support Kılıçdaroğlu is by no means a pleasant but rather a disgusting example of swallowing all the spittle that Özdağ had spat with such fanaticism and hatred.

We can say that Kılıçdaroğlu, who accepted Özdağ's support, moreover through bargaining and by making many concessions, and Özdağ suit one another very well. But this meeting also has the dimension of cheating on the HDP, which is already being pushed around within a forbidden-love affair.

If they can stomach this new ally, who does not even count them as human beings and who has almost dedicated his existence (we assume) to fighting them, it is not a matter on which we can say "none of our business." If there has been a Kurdish problem in Turkey, then the fact that the most radical representative of its most important cause, to the extent that it existed, was persuaded to join the alliance with the promise, on top of it all, of the interior ministry, leaving aside the problem of how far politics has been dragged down, is first of all an insult to the Kurds.

Kurds do not deserve to be belittled this much. But for the YSP, which sees their votes as partridges in its bag, there is no problem in partnering with someone who insults them day and night and has a problem with humanity. As long as Erdoğan falls. What can all these enemies, brought together by enmity toward Erdoğan, this motivation, this discourse whose political style is already always enmity, promise Turkey?

This is the question to which the Kurds and all of Turkey will give their answer tomorrow.