When choosing, to notice the difference…

We are on the last day of the campaigns run for the election of trustworthy people who will govern our cities for five years. During these campaigns the candidates explained at length their theses and claims and why they are more worthy of this job. Perhaps everyone listened to what they themselves wanted to hear in these explanations, or believed without listening. The other side either did not listen at all, did not even hear, or even if they heard, rejected without any thought. Generally there is no argument, no evidence, no discourse that will persuade those whose decision is already settled for one reason or another. That is why, in campaigns, being visible, making direct contact and touching people are far more important than what is said. These contacts can be more effective than many arguments, words and discourses.

All of Turkey's elections have always had an effect and meaning beyond Turkey. Whether general or local, Turkey's elections are not limited to Turkey alone in their effects and meanings. We can now add the note "at least until these elections." Because among all the elections held over many years, probably none has taken place so much within Turkey and exclusively within Turkey's borders as this one. It is worth recalling the news that appeared in the world media about the general elections held only 10 months ago. Everyone said the results of those elections would affect not only Turkey but the whole world, and that was indeed the case. But now we can say that we are quite far from such an atmosphere.

Perhaps this means that, after so many years, politics in Turkey has finally "normalized." At the panel "Turkey Toward 31 March" held three days ago at SETA's Ankara center, Didem Özel Tümer of the newspaper Milliyet, one of the speakers, began her talk with precisely such an observation: "Among the elections I have followed for years, this is the one taking place with the least tension, the most normal."

My memory also went to a panel held exactly 15 years ago, again before a local election and on the same theme, at SETA. The local election atmosphere of 2009 was an environment in which the atmosphere had not yet cooled in which the AK Parti, although it had come to power alone with around 47 percent of the vote in the general elections entered after the 27 April e-memorandum, was kept busy for a long time with a closure case opened against it. They were days when even at universities the headscarf was banned, when imam-hatip graduates could not enter universities because of the coefficient shackle and because of this the imam-hatip schools came close to having locks put on their doors. It was an environment in which, owing to a political status quo that had trouble digesting a President whose wife wore a headscarf, the main item of all elections, from the general to the local, was secularism. That is, even in the 10th year of the AK Parti government, they were still years of being "the opposition in power."

The AK Parti, which in that day was in the position of opposition in power, after a few elections and coup attempts really managed in many fields to become "the power in power." It is a long story; we lived through this process all together. But now we are experiencing an interesting manifestation of it: with its losing the Istanbul and Ankara metropolitan municipalities to the CHP in the 2019 local elections, a very different distribution of power and opposition came about in the country. With the addition of Izmir, the elections entered in an environment in which Turkey's largest cities have been governed locally by the opposition for 5 years present a really quite interesting picture:

This will be an election of sides in which everyone has in one way or another had a share in power. That is, an election entered with the Cumhur İttifakı, which holds the country's power, as the opposition against the CHP, which has been in power locally for five years. Could there be a better picture of normalization than this? Whatever the opposition promises, it is not far from having had the opportunity to do for 5 years in local power. As for the AK Parti, what it did in the field of local governments in Istanbul and Ankara before these 5 years is out in the open.

By nature, local governments are an election in which services or projects for the solution of local problems are evaluated. As long as it remained in this field, the AK Parti should never have lost these elections. But an election has never remained limited to a context in which only these services are evaluated. Even today, people will make their decisions with factors outside this election context rather than on those who will serve them better locally. However normalized the election environment may be, this diversity in the factors influencing voter behavior makes no difference.

But here, too, one must mention a clear difference, which has become a model so far, between the conservative voter and the secular-leftist voter. The conservative voter acts in local governments with a much more rational and much more transactional logic. Where he does not see service, he can readily change the direction of his vote. He does not forgive faults in service, and performs the act of local voting exactly as it should be in theory. That is why, evaluating the faults he sees, whether in candidate choices, in the service performance of the current mayor or in the government's general policies, he can shift votes at a tragic level in many places.

Yet we see the same less in the leftist-secular voter. Izmir, Diyarbakır, Tunceli and many similar centers are very good examples on this point. That the voter keeps supporting parties from which he receives no service at all, where, on the contrary, faults in service and corruption are never lacking, where candidate choices are made as if cursing at the will of the grassroots, and which therefore cause boundless anger and fury, is typical ideological voter behavior. Yet the legends say the opposite on this subject. Serious studies have still not been done on the fact that in the behavior of the leftist-secularist voter ideology and polar rancor are far more determinant than service. Yet this is a datum that would underline, demolish all the legends of social science and lead to the construction of new ones.

On the other hand, that Ekrem İmamoğlu, who has made Istanbul live almost "lost years" in terms of service, development and local government in general, appears today, according to the polls, not to have suffered any loss of votes and to be breasting the tape in the race is a subject on which one should dwell as an admonition. Without doubt there are those who must take these admonitions and especially evaluate them. Whatever the result of the elections, serious questioning must be done on the basis of this question.

But let us also remind, in our own way, of a subject regarding these elections that can never be separated from service and administrative performance.

One must go to the election seeing the difference between the side that believes that oppression began in 1453 and the side that revived Hagia Sophia, the symbol of the conquest.

The difference between the approach that sees Istanbul as a "blessing, a blessing!" for its own interests and colonial ambitions and the approach that sees Istanbul as a trust of the Prophet and, trembling over it, seeks to be its servant.

However normalized election processes may be, this difference does not disappear,