On the road to the New Turkey

With Prime Minister Erdoğan's announcement of his Presidential Election Vision document, it has become inevitable that the real debate that will determine the presidential election will be about the "new" and the "old" Turkey. That the people will elect the president is in itself the clearest sign, the most structural parameter, of the fact that we are on our way to the New Turkey.

At the very start of the road, an actor who is ready for this new Turkey and has shouldered its conditions until now, and an outlook that precisely represents the old one, have already taken their places in the race. Both the content of the vision documents and the style of presentation lay bare in all clarity the difference between the old and the new Turkey.

The fact that the office will be determined by the people's vote makes it inevitable that the presidency be opened to politics. Politics is a situation that emerges where people can have different options, that is, the moment when different ideas and options can be debated and compete. In politics people need not agree with one another; it is enough for them to agree on the rules of the game.

So that disputes do not create conditions of "undecidability" that would make governance impossible, an institution of arbitration is developed among competing ideas. In democracies the most valid institution of arbitration is the ballot box. Even where the presidency is determined by members of parliament the road of politics is not entirely closed, but it is both indirect and relatively more open to the intervention of the institutions of tutelage.

That opening the presidency to the people, that is, to politics, that is, to debate, has made certain people uneasy from the start is a matter of the mentality and reflexes of the old Turkey. That the parties in opposition today have taken up this mentality is the great paradox of Turkish politics. That the opposition parties hold no hope of the ballot box is both their own problem and a problem in which they go to any lengths to make the people pay the price.

The opposition, which wants the people to come to it without ever changing its own position, has in the end tried all the formulas of a democracy without the people in their most creative forms.

The tutelage established and maintained with the army and the institutions of tutelage has gradually become inoperative under the conditions of the New Turkey that make themselves felt. The AK Parti's sociological conditions and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's organic leadership have frustrated all the recent attempts at tutelage.

The umbrella-candidate attempt is a flailing of the tutelary mentality peculiar to the old Turkey. In this way a route is being sought to save the appearances of democracy by circumventing politics once again. But facing them is a real leader who speaks the language of the new Turkey well and meets its conditions in the most fitting manner.

The performance they are putting on with all their media power to rescue the position their own umbrella candidate has fallen into from the very start against this leader is moving to tears, but even this performance is not enough to fit the spear into the sack. They themselves see that it is not enough, and this time they have begun complaining about "asymmetric race conditions."

It is quite clear that there is an asymmetric, unequal situation between Tayyip Erdoğan and Mr. Ekmel. As ways of remedying this inequality, what is expected is that Erdoğan not run at all, or that the AK Parti field someone of Mr. Ekmel's caliber, or, since this is no longer possible, that Erdoğan renounce some of his advantages.

So which of his advantages would he have to give up for equal race conditions between the candidates to be achieved?

Should Erdoğan set aside his 40 years of political experience for this? Should he temporarily close those very special bonds of the heart, those roads, that he has built with his people within that political experience?

Or should he be stripped of the leadership quality he acquired by scratching with his fingernails through all the levels of politics? Is such a thing possible?

What should Erdoğan do to be able to compete on equal terms with Mr. Ekmel?

Should he not hold rallies, should he not appear on television? If he does none of these, will equal conditions really have been achieved?

Are not all these complaints a prior disbelief in the abilities of a candidate put forward by proxy by those who themselves dared not stand against Erdoğan?

There could in fact be no better occasion than this for the CHP to understand that its style of politics peculiar to the old Turkey no longer works.

Who knows, perhaps this event may be the beginning of the CHP's joining the New Turkey as well. One does not despair of God.