Will the AKP vehicle be taken for repairs?
Justice and Development Party (AKP) Deputy Chair Mehmet Ali Şahin recently attended a fast-breaking (iftar) dinner, where he evaluated last month’s election results.
“The voter has told us that the traction of our vehicle has dropped. They told us to get our car serviced, have its spark plug, breaker, etc., checked. Maybe the vehicle’s fan belt has come loose, or maybe its carburetor needs a thorough cleaning. The vehicle may be veering to the right or the left, so the voters told us to make a wheel alignment and rebalancing. They also said there were strange noises coming from our exhaust. ‘Repair that too,’ they told us,” Şahin said.
The metaphor he used for the election results is easily understandable. As he concluded by saying, “We have received these messages,” his next move must be to get the car serviced.
The critical question for the AKP is: Who will take the car to the service?
Normally, it would be members of the party and its councils at every level that should do this. But we know that internal democracy within the AKP is no different than other parties. We know that even district and provincial members of its congresses are selected by the headquarters, and that anyone who opposes these orders has a short political life.
The reason is that basically one person rules the party. The ambitions of this person, his concerns and his perception of events automatically become the party’s policies.
Şahin is an experienced politician and he must have known where his words were going.
In other words, the participants of the iftar dinner were not the addressees of these remarks. Rather, the addressee was none other than the president, who according to the construction should be neutral and not belong to any political party, but who cannot get his hands off the party.
This is the difficult part of the business. Will the AKP succeed in becoming a political party independent of individuals, or will it not?
I think we will have the answer to this question soon.
The president does not hide that he wants snap elections. He sees that he will be left alone in his palace if a functional coalition is formed.
If Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is able to resist this early election demand and is able to form a coalition, we will understand that the vehicle has been taken to the shop. But if he sets out to take Turkey to an early election in November, then we will understand that the AKP has mortgaged its future on one person and there is nobody left to take the car to the service.
Call for murder
A group calling itself the “Young Islamist Defense” has put up posters in the streets of Ankara. I saw photos of the poster at the website www.diken.com.tr.
The poster shows a photo taken at an LBGTI parade in Istanbul, showing a crowd with rainbow flags in their hands. The poster also cites a verse calling for the killing of any perpetrators “caught doing the dirty acts of the people of Lot.”
This is an open call for a massacre. The poster, in short, says “kill the homosexuals.”
I looked at the website of the association. It denies that they have any links to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), describing it as “cruel.”
We can draw from this that the “Young Islamist Defense” does not plan to kill gays by throwing them from high buildings. But we don’t know what method they will choose instead.
I wonder what kind of legal procedure that the Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office has started regarding this poster. Has an investigation been launched? I wonder whether the office has opted to “tolerate” this group?
