“The wiretap tapes were vile fabrications. I can ban Twitter. The Gezi Park protesters are all just vandals and marauders.”
The statements above, which PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made, are lies, of course.
But when do lies stop mattering? It seems that PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has blurred the lines between lying and truth telling.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter for most of the Turkish populace. By campaigning all over the country in a blitzkrieg unrivaled by anyone else on hte national stage, the AKP has confirmed that it is still in power and is likely to win most of the key races in the March 30 local election.
Ever since bombs were dropped in the form of leaked wiretapped phone conversations between Erdoğan and his son surfaced, and since the blue bird “bombs” being dropped by Twitter users since the Twitter “ban” began a few days ago, Erdogan has seemed to stumble at the most inopportune time. Rumors are that he has cancer. A guy I played basketball with in Kadikoy today said “we will slap him right out of power, don’t worry.” But what tangible effect it will have on the outcome of the elections remains to be seen.
Are the Turkish local elections important?
With all this, it’s sometimes hard to forget that Tayyip isn’t even running for office. It’s just the local elections.
This begs the question: are the local elections important? While it is true that they are a barometer of national sentiment heading into national elections in 2015, they are more than that:
“Nowadays local governments are also a significant laboratory of political life and a genuine springboard into national politics for successful leaders. Many current ministers and parliamentarians have served as mayors or held local government positions in the past, including the Prime Minister Erdogan, who was the former metropolitan mayor of Istanbul. —Al Jazeera Center for StudiesThe study also highlights that local governments have taken a larger role in the social welfare of society, account for more than 30 percent of all infrastructure projects, and employ nearly 300,000 civil servants.
CHP (Republican People’s Party) election banners strung up all around Kadıköy’s Altıyol area. Kadıköy is considered a CHP safe zone.
Is the silent majority still the majority? On the local level, it is for now. The government runs about 1,400 local municipalities, while the CHP and MHP combined control less than a 1,000. The mayoral elections in Istanbul and Ankara might be tight, but those in the smaller provinces around Anatolia still will go to the AKP.
Distracting ads and an international incident
Crafty marketing, a ruler ripe for the take down be damned, it seems that because of the dynamics of most voters here, there won’t be too much in the way of real change following the local elections — bluntly, the majority of the voting population is uneducated to just how much Erdogan and his cronies have gone off the deep end to suppress opposition.
On top of that, the time seemed to be ripe for a tangible distraction. Today, Turkish military has struck down a Syrian F-16 fighter jet on the border. Turkey says the plane crossed into Turkish airspace, Syria says it remained in Syrian airspace and that the event was a provocation.
This seems to be a last ditch distraction for a party that is nervous, despite its heady previous returns. The party has already stated that anything above its 38.8 percent it took in the 2009 local elections would be considered a victory. And, emotion aside, it would be a victory indeed for a party that has caught so much negative publicity to get anything more than 36 percent.
Another shrewd distraction was a recent AKP ad, a 3-minute patriotic tear jerker which shows Turks literally running from all corners of society to save a massive Turkish flag from falling off an impossibly high flagpole (the flag was cut down by a shadowy, faceless man). Using some CGI, the people are depicted literally piled on top of each other to reach high enough to save the flag.
AKP knows full well that the national flag and images of Ataturk cannot be used in political advertisements, but the government seems to want to start a national discussion — using their trademarked hubris — so as to get people to say “why not use the Flag in local elections! Those crying foul are unpatriotic! Let’s change this law! Good for Tayyip for having the will (irade) to change things!”
At the end of this illegal ad is a slogan that reads “The people will not be bent, Turkey will not be defeated” alongside a picture of Erdoğan.
The slogan isn’t a lie, but it’s going to take someone else in power to make it the truth.
Watch the controversial ad below: