Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held a mammoth meeting in Istanbul which was attended by over 2 million people. I had the privilege to attend the meeting and closely watch the immense crowd listening to him. Local elections on March 30, 2014, have turned into a vote of confidence for Prime Minister Erdoğan rather than a municipal electoral test. The crowds attending AK Party meetings have already shown that this confidence will be renewed. But, more than this, such huge mobilizations send a strong message to international mass media that dynamics in Turkey might be very different from what they expect. The issue is not whether Erdoğan and his team receive great support from voters. The issue is that the execrable approach - the examples of which are unfortunately numerous in Turkish politics - to "get rid of the government by non-democratic means" still survives and thrives. Those who ended the Adnan Menderes era on May 27, 1960, through a coup are still thirsty. As the Armed Forces plainly refuse to get involved in daily politics, those trying to attain the same objective have to use other means. Prime Minister Erdoğan, very much like Prime Minister Menderes in his time, is always capable of mobilizing very large crowds and getting a majority to support him. Therefore, his opponents are always tempted to use utterly anti-democratic means to dethrone him from the government. In that sense, there is a blatant parallel between the two prime ministers. That remains the main objective, but their families and close collaborators are also targeted, like late ministers Hasan Polatkan, Fatin Rüştü Zorlu and Namık Gedik. In the same vein, Erdoğan's ministers are also seen as primary targets, and one of them is Egemen Bağış. Formerly the Minister in charge of EU affairs and Chief Negotiator for Turkey, Bağış has been the victim of a full-fledged setup. No plausible embezzlement scenario could be fabricated, so an illusionary Erasmus program scandal has been leaked. The European Commission took the necessary steps to clarify the situation immediately, preparing a report showing how shallow the accusations are. Still, this report will not be available before March 30. Therefore, the objective has been attained: "Slander will always leave scars." Why choose Bağış as a potential victim and target? Mainly for his very close stance to the prime minister's positions, his loyalty to the latter, his brilliant performance in domestic and international political arenas, as one of the leaders of AK party politics. Bağış's troubles did not stop at the Erasmus affair. A large slander campaign has been waged in the aftermath of the first accusations, taking into consideration a largely truncated and falsified phone conversation with a journalist. Their taped conversation, after being thoroughly modified, has been leaked to the social media, as usual, and turned into a genuine campaign of social lynching. No one believing in democracy can afford the luxury of disregarding basic principles because the victim is Bağış. We know now through what happened to Minister Bağış that all the conversations we have with family, with friends, with colleagues, in close circles and in private and personal talk can one fine day be falsified and used, without any principles, to defame and vilify our career, our family and our colleagues. If we think that it is acceptable to live in such a nightmare, there is no real problem: We can condemn and even execute Bağış as well as Erdoğan through fabricated, falsified, dubious data leaked through the social media. Such information may not contain any crime or felony, but there is no real problem there either. Menderes and his two ministers were executed in spite of the fact that none of the accusations made against them could have been proven true. Obviously, some circles are still thirsty. Their nostalgia for the "ancien régime" - in which the winner of the ballots did not really matter - is breath-taking. Let us wait and see what message the Turkish people will send them on March 30. Let us see the shrinking limits of their definition of democracy. Let us see who will advocate that the rule of the ballot is not "democratic.