Double standard on the ballot box

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appointed Mahmut Ak the new rector of Istanbul University, although he came second in the elections.

Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the predecessor of Abdullah Gül and Erdoğan at the presidency, had done the same.

He likewise ignored the votes of the professors, did not appoint the rector that came out of the ballot box, appointed those who came second, third and fourth instead of the one at the top of the list and did not respect the will of the university. 

However, there was something different about Sezer. During his life he never talked about the importance of the ballot box, he never said the one who comes out of the ballot box should govern and he never lectured on the national will.

Yet, whenever Sezer came up with this injustice, I would not shy away from targeting him. I would say, “Why aren’t you appointing the one who won the election? Why aren’t you respecting the ballot box? If you won’t take this into consideration, why were these elections held?”

Not just I, but Gül, Erdoğan and Bülent Arınç would also shower Sezer with criticism. They would say, “Can there be such a democracy? How is that that the one who gets the most votes cannot be appointed rector? We can’t accept that.”

The year is 2015.

President Erdoğan preferred to appoint the person who came second in the election instead of the person who came first to be a rector to Turkey’s biggest university.

“Sezer had done the same,” those supporting Erdoğan say to those who criticized this situation.
I call upon those supporting Erdoğan: This means your real concern was not injustice. This means your real aim was to “let us be a bit unjust too.”

Watches as present to parliamentarians

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is a rookie in politics.

Otherwise, he would not have planned to give a 1000-Turkish Lira watch to Justice and Development Party (AKP) parliamentarians as a goodbye present, because a wrist-watch is a present which has meaning in our society but mostly because the “ultra-expensive wrist-watch” concept has done a lot of harm to the AKP. It is impossible for anyone not to think of how former minister Zafer Çağlayan (accused of taking a thousand-dollar wrist-watch as a bribe) felt when he was given this present.
Davutoğlu needs to mature in politics.

Lawyers should be searched too

If a murder is committed in a country’s court house, you cannot have a debate in that country on whether to search lawyers or not at the entrance of the court house, especially if the murderers benefited from the lack of a search procedure by showing fake identification and taking a lawyer’s cassock on their arms and get inside without being searched.
It is unavoidable for them to be searched.

Lawyers say, “We are part of judiciary. We are like judges and the prosecutors. We should not be searched if judges and prosecutors are not searched.”

If this is the problem, then the judges and prosecutors should be searched just like lawyers and the debate must be ended.