Turkey has fınally made it to the most crucial election in its history – which alone, considering the situation in Ukraine and Egypt, is a significant success. Ukraine has already lost the Crimea, and the fate of eastern Ukraine still hangs on Russian President Vladimir Putin waking up on the wrong side of the bed one morning. In Syria, at least 200,000 people perished under Bashar al-Assad's oppression and the death toll could have reached millions if as presidential candidate Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu was running the country and shut down Turkey's borders to prevent the influx of refugees. Iraq, following Syria's example, witnesses intense bloodshed, bloodshed that the government of Nouri al-Maliki could have avoided by promoting democracy in his country instead of seeking to become the Shiite community's answer to Saddam Hussein.
The above-mentioned countries and others will lose hundreds of thousands more and perhaps wait another five decades to get where Turkey is today. Several generations, including children and babies, will perish and leave aggrieved mothers behind. Governments will continue to disregard human dignity. I feel completely ashamed to make the argument but facts are facts. I just hope to be wrong.
Imagine that the mindset of the 1990s still prevailed in Turkey while all kinds of horrors went on in neighboring countries. As an individual with no interest in nationalism, I still believe that the nationalists, who are genuinely concerned about the country's territorial integrity, should ask themselves the following question: Had a strong leader and administration not come to power on November 3, 2002 to turn a crisis-ridden nation into the world's 17th largest economy and risked everything to launch the Kurdish peace process, where would we be today? If we lived the 1990s over again, would there be a way to keep the nation together?
We have to appreciate the opportunity to live on an island of stability amidst region-wide conflict, to not lose our children to violence, the predictability of our living standards, and to have concrete reasons for looking ahead with hope. Meanwhile, corrupt opposition forces go all-in on promoting civil war and economic turmoil just to realign the country to its old ways. The gradual loss of moral compass has reduced opposition parties to disgraced puppets of a shadow state. Turns out the late Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu's words about his Grand Union Party (BBP) – "they [the deep state] have plowed our fields" – applied to other political parties as well.
On August 10, the people will take all of the above into account before casting their votes. After all, delusions hardly correspond to the country's realities. We see neo-Kemalists turning to Selahattin Demirtaş, a Kurdish politician, in response to their party's candidate of choice. There is not enough hocus pocus in the world to prevent reality from kicking in and empowering the two representatives of the New Turkey, namely Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Kurds. Slowly but surely, the opposition base is shifting toward the Kurds, whose very existence the establishment long denied and whose unsolved murders the old elite applauded, and Erdoğan.
The opposition's own base can no longer stomach the sanctimonious show that their parties stage day in and day out. Insisting on the wrong game plan and unwilling to abide by the new rules of the game, the opposition parties empower their adversaries with each move along the way. And thus occurs the inevitable.
On Sunday, the nation will hold a historic election and, most probably, take the first step toward the new Turkey. Past reforms sought to clear and restore Turkey's path, but future steps will aim to institutionalize the changes. Various social groups that take reality over delusions yearn to turn what was once a semi-colony into an independent nation devoid of guardianship at home. On that note, I would like to express my sincere hope that the presidential election prove beneficial to Turkey and the region.
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