What is your event of the year?
It is possible you might also be fed up with journalists and columnists, who keep telling you about the person of the year and the event of the year on the last days of every year.
What would you think of as the event of 2017 in Turkey, as you are reading a Turkish paper in English? What about in the world and in your country, if you are not living in Turkey?
For example, would your choice for Turkey be the April 16 referendum, which enabled President Tayyip Erdoğan to gather all the executive power in the hands of the president, with more influence on the judiciary and the parliament and right afterwards, declared his re-election as the chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Parti)?
Or, would you vote for the “Justice March” by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the social democratic opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) between June 15 and July 9, which he started the day after a CHP member of parliament, Enis Berberoğlu, was sentenced to 25 years and put in jail?
I’m afraid the journalists and writers, as well as the politicians in prison or the continuous extension of the state of emergency declared after the military coup attempt of July 15, 2016 might lose their news value in your eyes, as in the case of many journalists.
Perhaps your pick for event of the year would be the declaration of the defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) both in Iraq and Syria with the re-take of their respective strongholds Mosul and Raqqa. The U.S. wanted to use the Syrian civil war as a means to increase its influence in the Middle East through its support to the Kurds but the story actually seems like it is heading toward a return of Russia to the Middle East, stronger than the Soviet times. This further moves Vladimir Putin up the ranks as person of the year.
If you are in business, perhaps the plunge of the Turkish Lira against the U.S. dollar and the euro would be the event of the year, with growth figures sharply increasing the economic difficulties for the ordinary man, surpassing terrorism as the biggest problem in Turkey. And perhaps China would be your pick for country of the year for its rising economic power.
Globally speaking, I assume you would vote for U.S. President Donald Trump as person of the year, like hundreds of millions around the world. But that is not necessarily because of Trump’s successes and his ability to curb global anti-Americanism. With his latest Jerusalem move for example, Trump managed to make 128 countries in the United Nations’ General Assembly, including a selection of the U.S.’s strongest allies, to vote against his decision to recognize the city as Israel’s capital, despite all warnings and threats.
No? None of those are your pick for event of the year, or person of the year? How about the huge wave of migration from Africa to Europe, which would make the wave of migration from the Middle East look minor?
Or do you find it depressing that all the suggestions I made were from bad news? Perhaps you might like to make your own choice from a collection of “good news” – if you can find any.
